The main commander for the Armada died in February 1588 so the King had to pick a new leader. He chose the Duke of Medina Sidonia. He was chosen because he was the greatest noble in Spain at that time. He had no experience and not much support. And he is seasick! The Duke led the Armada to the port at Calais without much of a problem. When the English sent in their fireships the problems started, the Armada's formation had broken up and the English were coming in for the attack. Luckily he managed to keep himself out of a fight. The Armada was sailing in the wind and was going to be run aground, they couldn't turn round because they were being followed by the English. The wind changed and they thought they were saved. During this time the Duke’s advisors all persuaded Medina to surrender to the English instead of running aground. Medina Sidonia decided to wait and when the wind changed direction he decided that his first priority was to the safe keeping of the Armada. The wind would have made it difficult to sail in the Channel, on the other hand the way that he went he lost about 18 ships overnight, because of the storms. By the time the last ship got back to Spain there were only 63 ships left.
The English attack at Calais did cause the Spanish to fail one of their orders, to keep in the crescent formation and it caused them to fail there main objective... pick up Parma’s Army. The army were nearly ready but the English managed to get the Spanish out of the port and into sea using fireships that made the Spanish think that we had hell burners, from here they started to start a huge battle and the army was unable to get picked up because of this.
Many sources say many different things about the English ships. So in most cases the sources that are Catholic or Spanish say that the English ships were great and unbeatable and in others they say that they were very quick and small and that they were able to move around the Armada with ease. It wasn't just the ships that could have been superior it was the tactics. The Spanish were planning to have a Mediterranean battle, where you go along side your enemy shoot your cannons and board their ships and have a huge fight. The English were sensible... fire as many cannons as possible and back out. The Spanish shot their cannons about two to three times a day. The English shot loads and ran out. The Spanish only shot when an English ship came along side, because of their tactics. The English had better cannons, they would reload quicker and they had longer range, because of this they would sail so that the Spanish ships were in range and quickly get away before the Spanish shot back.
You could say that fortune favoured the English. The English made a defence system in South England to inform London of when they could see the Armada. It wasn't by chance that the fleet was all in the south of England. It wasn't by chance that there were storms near the north of Scotland; there are nearly always storms in the North Sea in that area. The Spanish were fooled by the English into thinking that the English had cannons left, if they had known that they probably would have gone back through the channel and all of them (probably) would have got back safely. You could say that the English was very lucky.
The defeat of the Armada may not have been due to the superiority of the English. Examination of cannonballs found on the bottom of the North Sea has shown that Spanish cannonballs were not all the same size. Different sizes of gun required different sizes of cannonballs. It has been suggested that the Spanish ships were not equipped with the right cannonballs for the guns on board their ships and were therefore unable to fire on the English ships that attacked them. They therefore chose to retreat, possibly to the Netherlands. The high winds prevented them from reaching port and dashed the ships against the rocks of northern Scotland.