From the early years of the eighteenth century the sea played an important part in how Britons’ defined themselves. ‘Fenced in with a wall which knows no master but God only’, the diverse peoples of the British Isles, with all their differences, clearly perceived themselves as separate from their European neighbours. The Civil Wars (1642–1648, 1649–1651) and the Anglo- Dutch Wars (1652–1654, 1665–1667, 1672–1674), established a confident Protestantism and a notion of political liberty that provided the ideological underpinning that supported the development of the British state into the eighteenth century. The navy was an essential part of this ideological construct. Under the Cromwellian Protectorate (1653–1660) the English gentry had experienced the oppressive power of armies, which they were determined never again to endure. Navies could not impose such domestic oppression and the navy of the short-lived English republic also demonstrated that properly supported English ships could preserve the sea as a natural defence, protect the growing wealth of English maritime commerce and even project power far enough to damage enemies in the Baltic, Mediterranean and the Americas. After 1660 the restored Stuart monarchs maintained the navy, and preserved the political notion that a strong navy was the basis of national defence, mercantile prosperity and political liberty.

By 1688 the English navy was not as large as that of France, but it had shown itself to be extremely formidable. Unlike either France or the United Provinces (modern Netherlands), England did not have exposed land borders and this seemed to put England with an unusually happy position. The navalist idea that England could invest in powerful naval forces, which would not pose a threat to domestic political liberties, but at the same time could effectively defend her borders at sea and project its power to enemy coasts and trade throughout the western hemisphere, was extremely attractive.

While Charles II (1660–1685) and James II (1685–1688) had been on the throne, they had not been directly threatened by growing power of Louis XIV of France. However, when William of Orange came to the throne, as William III in 1688, his concern for the borders of his Dutch territories forced the English to accept that the war which formally broke out in 1689 (Nine Years War, 1689–1698), would be a continental as well as a naval war.