The Elizabethan regime aged badly under the strains of war and James had the pleasure of discovering the wood beetle in his inheritance: ‘xenophobia, war-weariness and the turmoil created by rising prices, bad harvests and outbreaks of plague and influenza, fomented particularism and resistance to the crown's fiscal and military demands’. The view from Edinburgh was somewhat different. Scotland was untouched by war and James's ambitions focused on consolidating his accession and effecting a union of England and Scotland. This contrasts with the beleaguered fin de siècle regime which governed in London. Beyond the accession itself, Elizabeth's governors were decidedly anglocentric in outlook, focused on ending the Spanish war and reinvigorating the realm. The fledging Jacobean regime faced an inevitable period of transition while standing divided against itself on union and reconstruction. Crown finance was a central point of conflict. As early as 1594, Robert Cecil had wrung his hands and lectured Gloriana that it was ‘hygh tyme to abate’ charges associated with matters as simple as dispatching agents abroad. To such concerns were added the financial realities of the accession and James's own conceptions of kingship and finance. Between 1603 and 1607 James and his governors struggled to hammer out an agreed agenda for governance. The collapse of union in 1607 finally established finance as the king's great matter, but it did so without clarifying the shape of any financial settlement.