The Royal Navy was active in the Mediterranean for almost three and a half centuries, from the first expedition to combat the activities of the Algerian corsairs to the final humiliation of the Suez crisis. In fact, of course, it continued with occasional forays into the Mediterranean after 1956, including intervening in Libya in 2012 in order to assist the overthrow of a particularly unsavoury dictator and rescuing desperate refugees from Africa afterwards; and if one counts the Levant Company's ships as representative of the English kingdom from 1580, it had also been present in the sea for forty years before the Algerian expedition of 1620.

For much of that time the British naval presence in the Mediterranean was only occasional in strength, and otherwise minimal. Only in major wars, and not always then, did the Royal Navy arrive in the Mediterranean in real strength. The earliest cases were the contrasted presence of the armed ships of the Levant Company and the English privateers/pirates who infested the sea and bothered the Venetians. Both of these were a mix of private and public enterprise: privateers were licensed by the English government until the peace of 1604, but they slipped into piracy when out of the government's view, and became openly piratical once the Spanish war ended; the Levant Company operated as a near independent arm of the English state, and its ships were deliberately sizeable and well-armed because of the threat posed by corsairs, privateers, and pirates. Both of these groups were privately financed; it is difficult to separate public and private participation.

This may be considered the earliest phase of the English naval presence, one of essentially private naval actions, but with significant input by the English state. The increased threat of the corsairs (whose capabilities were enhanced by English and other European skills), after about 1600 coalesced into their widespread activity, throughout the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic. The suppression of this threat was the object of successive naval expeditions from 1620 to the 1680s. These anti-corsair campaigns constitute the second phase of British naval involvement, a series of intermittent campaigns directed at the corsairs, with only limited success, lasting until the 1680s.