Admirals were not the only officeholders to experience change to their responsibilities. Although the senior admiralty remained an important component of the state by securing the affiliation of the navy to the nobility and, in turn, to the crown, a team of statesmen and administrators were also required to support it. As fleets expanded with greater numbers of warships, it was important that the admiral, as head of the navy, had a skilled and experienced team of mariners and officers to facilitate the fleet's rise and maintenance. This chapter considers the enhanced, and in some cases wholly new, administrative devices designed in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to ensure the navy's survival. These new apparatuses provided the means for the crown and its agents to expand and consolidate their grip on military resources, creating a politically and militarily strengthened state.

With the crown supporting the development of new administrative structures designed to control its expanding resources, historians have referred to this period as one that witnessed the centralising of early modern state infrastructure. Yet, states did not always have shared goals and models for achieving centralisation because their processes could be led and shaped by dissimilar things. For this reason, it is important to avoid a direct comparison between England and France that relies on a single definition of the term, although it does need to be taken into account that differences in both aims and infrastructure existed.

Accounts of state formation often implicitly seek to assess developments with an understanding that the concentration of a kingdom's resources around something or someone was always the intended and natural outcome – a teleological approach. The term implies that, in seeking to advance, a state's political framework required a geographically central body. The hearts of these organisations were located in the capital cities of the realms, which was where the main seats of government were based. As a logical outcome of the state-building process, when transforming or reinforcing the connections of the wider political network (the peripheries of the realm) to the centre of state, the core of the domain would also be strengthened. Yet, because of differences in the size, diversity and history of their terrains, England and France controlled disparate political infrastructures.