In the summer of 1588, the Spanish Armada — a fleet of 130 ships sent by Philip II of Spain from Lisbon, Portugal, to invade Protestant England — was driven off by the English fleet under Lord Howard and Francis Drake in the English Channel, then devastated by a series of violent Atlantic storms as it attempted to return to Spain by sailing around the north of Scotland and west of Ireland. Approximately 44 of the 130 ships were lost to storms, with thousands of men drowned or slaughtered when they landed on Irish shores. Protestant England interpreted the storms as providential wind — Flavit Deus et dissipati sunt ('God blew and they were scattered') — a phrase embossed on commemorative medals.

The Armada's defeat by storm was immediately seized upon by English poets and writers as divine confirmation of Protestant England's elect status, inspiring a wave of patriotic literature from ballads and broadsheets to Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, which allegorises Protestant England's triumph over Catholic tyranny. The providential wind — God as cosmic wind-sender protecting his chosen nation — became a powerful theme in Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry and sermon literature. The Armada's storm destruction also entered the mythology of English sea-power that would sustain naval poetry from Drayton and Raleigh to Tennyson.