In The English Armada, Luis Gorrochategui Santos makes it very clear that he is bent upon challenging what he believes to be a series of historiographical wrongs. In his view, there has been “unequal treatment” by historians of Spain's Gran Armada of 1588 and the fleet and army England sent to Spain and Portugal in the following year—what he calls the “English Armada” (293). According to Gorrochategui Santos, English triumphalism about 1588 has created “a delusional view of history, in which too much has to be concealed, and indeed has been” (294). At the same time, Spain's own “past greatness has been buried by foreign historiography of the last two centuries” (294).

Gorrochategui Santos seeks to redress these alleged wrongs both by trying to put the best possible face on Spain's defeat in 1588 and by arguing that the failure of the “English Armada” in 1589 was even more costly in terms of lives and treasure than was Spain's loss in 1588. Neither of these claims is new. In trying to make his case, Gorrochategui Santos is often tendentious in both his argumentation and his use of evidence.

In setting out the background to the disastrous expedition to Spain and Portugal in 1589, Gorrochategui Santos cites an alleged secret agreement between Elizabeth I and Dom Antonio, who aspired to claim the Portuguese throne from Philip II (37–38). Unfortunately, this document was a fake, an example of Spanish “black propaganda” designed to undermine the reputation of both Dom Antonio and Elizabeth's government. What is extraordinary is that Gorrochategui Santos treats this document as genuine, even though R. B. Wernham described its contents as “pretended articles” that were deliberately produced by the Spanish and publicized in Portugal (The Expedition of Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake to Spain and Portugal, 1988, xxviiin1). Gorrochategui Santos draws extensively upon this book—did he fail to see this note? It is all the more ironic that a major theme of The English Armada is that English sources about the Portugal expedition were deliberately “fabricated” because they consistently sought to play down the magnitude of the disaster. Gorrochategui Santos claims, for example, that the main English apologia for the expedition entirely “invented” actions between 5 and 9 June to conceal the true magnitude of the English defeat at Lisbon (182–83). However, inadequate referencing makes this claim difficult to verify.

Gorrochategui Santos also consistently seeks to maximize the extent of English losses in 1589 by citing unrealistically large totals for the number of soldiers and sailors who ultimately sailed on the voyage. He ignores the impact of desertions in the weeks before its delayed departure, inflated numbers for musters, and dead-pays. English losses were indeed very heavy, but Gorrochategui Santos's obvious aim seems to be making Spanish losses in 1588 seem less shocking. As suggested by the example of Anthony Wingfield's alleged “remarkable inventiveness” in creating “a fictitious journal of military operations to replace what had actually occurred” during the retreat from Lisbon, the veracity of English sources is repeatedly challenged and belittled in this book (183). There is certainly ample reason for skepticism about many of the claims made by English commentators. Nevertheless, Spanish sources are consistently treated as being straightforwardly accurate statements of what happened. This seems improbable. Local Spanish reporters had just as much reason as the English to cast their own actions in the most positive light possible. What is required here is a much more careful weighing of the relative merits of the evidence, with a recognition that most reporters of these events had strong reasons to tailor their accounts to their own benefit.

Gorrochategui Santos also makes many dubious claims. The claim that Spain lost 18,000 dead in the siege of Ostend, but “the besieged suffered some 77,000” casualties (284) conflates casualties and deaths and seems considerably out of step with most other estimates and reinforces concerns about the numbers cited in this book. Equally perplexing is the statement that “unlike Philip II, Elizabeth did not have to bear the burden of a large-scale naval policy” (291). This would certainly come as surprising news to Elizabeth and her government, who consistently spent a hefty amount of money on the royal fleet and dockyards from at least the early 1570s, as Geoffrey Parker has shown (“The Dreadnought Revolution of Tudor England,” The Mariner's Mirror, 182, no. 3 [1996]: 269–300).

While one might be sympathetic to Gorrochategui Santos's desire to offer a revisionist account of the Anglo-Spanish naval war of the 1580s and 1590s, and while the current imbalance between English and Spanish sources in the telling of this history obviously needs rectifying, this is not the book to answer either of these needs. His crude use of evidence means that the value of its many intriguing Spanish sources cannot be properly judged. Although some allowance must be made for the fact that the book was originally published in Spanish in 2011, its failure to use numerous obviously relevant English-language publications from the 1990s and 2000s is also glaring. Moreover, Gorrochategui Santos often seems to be openly hostile to the English subjects of his research. He sees the hasty application of “spin” to news of what had occurred in Spain and Portugal after the fleet's return as revealing “the real nature of the English spirit” (244). He also describes the emergence of Dutch sea power in the late 1590s as surpassing that of the English, “thereby achieving something that had seemed impossible: to become their equal, and often to surpass them, in the startling cruelty of their actions” (278). Intentional or not, such judgments seem like unnecessarily crude nationalism. All in all, it is hard not to see The English Armada as a missed opportunity, just like the calamitous English expedition of 1589. Readers would be well advised to use this book with considerable caution.