Naval power for both England and France increased in potency and priority during the early modern period. Due in no small part to the expansion of the global maritime theatre, state navies became essential to national defence as an arms race at sea escalated. Yet, as this study has shown, there was no single method or design for naval growth and, consequently, the size, strength, structural organisation and general appearance of the English and French fleets differed. Expansion and advances to the navies were influenced by a number of factors, and through combining them, it is possible to account for how and why one state navy was dif-ferent from another. Geography and its related administrative framework, as well as the influence of other competitive European powers, were central to how navies were shaped. Along with these two factors, one further feature was at the centre of naval strength: the political stability and patronage of the crown. With the exception of some of the noble galleys that served the Mediterranean, the core component of the standing navy was the property of the ruling monarch. Warships constructed for the kingdom were not declared in documentation as the property of England or France, or assigned to the state, but instead, were identified as the personal possessions of the reigning monarch. This distinction is fundamental to understanding the navy at the time, for its strength was dependent on the political power and will of the monarch. As a consequence, the standing navy, up until the mid seventeenth century, has to be understood as a private military body owned by the sovereign, which was bolstered by private ships for campaigns.

The standing navy (often referred to in records as the ‘Navy Royal’ and ‘La Royale’) was a resource that the state and its merchants relied on for protection, but it was ultimately owned by the monarch. The crown safeguarded national shipping through coastal patrols to frighten off belligerent forces, and in turn, the merchants aided the funding of the fleet through customs duties. In this sense, F. C. Lane's work on the controlling of violence at sea, for which he coined the phrase protection rent, remains a useful descriptor for the relationship between naval and merchant shipping. The crown's personal sea forces were employed to protect and defend the nation.