But when his contemporaries laid its failure to the incompetence of its commander, and said that if only Santa Cruz or Recalde or Oquendo or that odd hero, Pedro de Valdés, had been in command everything would have turned out differently, Medina Sidonia agreed with them. Perhaps that is why the judgment has so seldom been questioned since.

Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish A…, loc. 831