Those lines could probably have been written by any Jacobean poet; their Scottish author, William Alexander, picked up on themes King James had highlighted when he spoke to his first English parliament in 1604 of an island with ‘but one common limit or rather Gard of the Ocean Sea, making the whole a little world within itself’. That speech introduced James's efforts to achieve a real, legislative union, which, in addition to poetic efforts, led to a brief flowering of writing about the nature of unions between kingdoms and possible future directions. Those discourses show that union and naval defence were intimately connected, but they did not engage with naval policy, leaving the matter of how union policy intersected with it vague.

Historians draw somewhat divergent conclusions about the Jacobean navy in Scotland. It can be said that, like foreign policy, naval policy for Britain became that of England, but if there was a ‘remarkable absence’ of royal navy ships in Scottish waters then that would imply the lack of any British naval policy. However, Hebridean expeditions were some of the most significant naval endeavours of the reign, so policy might even be considered ‘Scoto-centric’ in the years 1608 to 1616, the peak of efforts to ensure the king's pen governed Scotland's western seaboard. The royal navy did not react to every Scottish disorder and its presence in the Western Isles was inconsistent, like James's broader Highland policy which has been described as ad hoc. A pragmatic two-tier policy emerges: the use of the royal navy for major expeditions, with Scottish shipping for more localised policing actions. This only describes the form of naval activity in Scottish waters; the nature of naval union, if it can be called that, remained undefined. The relationship of the English navy to Scotland and the question of under what authority an English ship in Scotland was operating remained nebulous.