But Strada was, after all, Roman born and bred, and Spanish eloquence at its best is less ornate and has a deeper more iron-throated clang. Perhaps that is why, from the later seventeenth century on, Spanish historians preferred a variant version. The build-up, the frightened Secretaries, the serenely toiling King, the courier’s grim news, all these are the same, but before he takes up his pen again the King says only: ‘I sent my ships to fight against men, and not against the winds and waves of God.’

Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish A…, loc. 874