It is by no means to be supposed that the Armada in its conception was the foolhardy enterprise that on the face of things it looks to have been. The idea of it was first mooted by the Duke of Alva so long ago as 1569. In 1583 it became a settled project in the able hands of the Marquis of Santa Cruz, who alone among the Spaniards was not more or less afraid of the English. In the battle of Tercera in 1583, certain ships, which if not English were at any rate supposed to be, had shown the white feather. Santa Cruz assumed therefrom that the English were easily to be overwhelmed by a sufficiently superior force, and he designed a scheme whereby he would use 556 ships and an army of 94,222 men. Philip of Spain had other ideas. Having a large army under the Duke of Parma in the Netherlands, he proposed that this force should be transported thence to England in flat-bottomed boats, while Santa Cruz should take with him merely enough ships to hold the Channel, and prevent any interference by the English ships with the invasion. Before the delayed Armada could sail Santa Cruz died; and despite his own protestations Medina Sidonia was appointed in Santa Cruz’s place to carry out an expedition in which he had little faith or confidence. His total force at the outset consisted of 130 ships and 30,493 men. Of these ships not more than sixty-two at the outside were warships, and some of these did not carry more than half-a-dozen guns. The main English fighting force consisted of forty-nine warships, some of which were little inferior to the Spanish in tonnage, though all were much smaller to the eye, as they were built with a lower freeboard and without the vast superstructures with which the Spaniards were encumbered. As auxiliaries, the English had a very considerable force of small ships; also the Dutch fleet in alliance with them. The guns of the English ships were, generally speaking, heavier, all their gunners were well trained, and their portholes especially designed to give a considerable arc of fire, whereas the Spanish had very indifferent gunners and narrow portholes. The Spaniards themselves thoroughly recognised their inferiority in the matter of gunnery, and the specific instructions of their admiral were that he was to negative this inferiority by engaging at close quarters, and trust to destroying the enemy by small-arm fire from his lofty superstructures.