All that winter Philip’s pen probed at the mistakes he had allowed himself to make: the heterogeneous fleet – next time the ships must be better, and up to some uniform standard; the lack of long-range guns – more culverins and demi-culverins, next time; the divided command, the bad co-ordination, the lack of a deep-water port, even the question of how to dominate Dutch coastal waters, the crucial question which somehow Parma had neglected and allowed everyone else to neglect.

Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish A…, loc. 883