The Organisation and Financing of Naval Forces for the Scottish Crown in Charles I's War against Spain and France

Abstract

The nature and capacity of the pre-Covenanter Scottish state has been the subject of some debate. Some descriptions of James VI’s government after 1603 suggest it was bureaucratic and centralised, but it was also fiscally weak. Attempts to run naval forces, that were modest in scale but capital-intensive, are used to examine the tensions between that weakness, also evident in the reign of Charles I, and the need for government control. The government’s failure in 1625 to get new taxation to support enlarged naval forces to fight Charles I’s wars against Spain and France and its turn instead to individual nobles to finance the ships that the government put to sea can be shown to have affected the role the ships played in operations. A narrow support base for the navy, consisting of a few individual nobles and merchants, limited the state’s capacity to wage war effectively and contrasts with the broader support Covenanted regimes used later to raise military forces. The difficulty of supporting this squadron, though, also provides context for the minimal Scottish naval efforts of those regimes in the 1640s.