Early in the morning of 24 March 1603 Queen Elizabeth breathed her last. The new king, James I, was proclaimed, and Sir Robert Carey galloped north with the news, making a staggeringly good time, arriving in the evening of 26 March. Had the succession passed to any other foreign monarch Carey could not have stayed in the saddle the whole way; he would have had to take a ship, unless his horse was a very good swimmer. The uniqueness of the Anglo-Scottish relationship was in sharing an island. Given that an island is defined by the surrounding sea it might seem obvious that the development of the two nations thus enclosed would also to some extent be defined by that sea, which served both as bridge and bulwark. Surprisingly, the relationship between England and Scotland from the union of the crowns in 1603 to parliamentary union in 1707 has received no study of the maritime influences upon it. Such blindness to a whole aspect of the environment would seem to be like attempting to explain the process of boiling an egg without mentioning water. A similar observation was made recently by the leading historian of the Restoration navy of its marginal place in English historiography despite it being, as he observed, by far the largest spending department of state. Even at its lowest ebb, Stuart England was always a significant naval power, marred by incompetence perhaps, but with potential, and from the 1650s England sustained a naval force of the first rank.

Scots perceived this, and this study is largely structured around the attraction that such a sizeable royal navy in the hands of the Stuart dynasty exercised on members of Scottish administrations and maritime communities, hopeful of receiving the benefits of the monarchy's naval power without bearing the costs. The first part, ‘Aspiration’, charts the development of that attraction up until 1652, in competition with the rather ephemeral possibility of a Scottish naval force. The attraction of English naval power was heightened rather than dulled by Charles I's failed attempt at naval coercion in 1639–40, and the covenanted regime sought to pin down their aspiration to benefit from the English navy by treaty. Conquest by the English republic led to integration into their burgeoning naval machine.