Oh yeah I'm familiar with the black legend.

To be sure, nationalism tends to ignore inconvenient truths for the sake of a good story, but common appreciation of history will also ignore the more convoluted or less significant data - so it sometimes becomes hard to distinguish one from the other. Certainly at the time, the propagandists would have been in full swing - after all this was the time of the Wars of Religion. If we think social media today to be reductivist, that has nothing on the early printing press.

English policy in this period swung a bit wildly and without landing any significant blows. They were participants in the French Wars of Religion (for instance the disastrous campaign to try and help La Rochelle under Charles I) and bizarrely with the Netherlands iirc (despite backing the Netherlands in the wars of religion). I think in the Spanish-French War they didn't know which to back, and their involvement wouldn't have been too important anyway. I think James was criticised for not getting more involved in helping the Palatinate, but England was quite poor after Elizabeth so that was probably prudent.

All of that is fairly messy and doesn't produce an interesting narrative - and certainly not one to be championed by nationalists.