[1] The story is set in the late 16th century and covers the English response to the threat of the 1588 Spanish Armada; it is a thinly veiled analogy to the international situation facing Britain in 1936, a point explicitly made by Mason in his Preface to the first edition.

The story begins in 1581 when the hero Robin Aubrey is at Eton; a few years previously, his father George was arrested for the possession of 'heretical literature' while travelling in Spain and supposedly executed.

Just before departure, he attends a house party at the home of the Bannets, his scheming Catholic neighbours where he meets the beautiful Cynthia Norris and they fall in love.

In another parallel with the political divisions of the 1930s, the treacherous Bannets are portrayed as a tiny minority, with the vast majority of Englishmen putting aside their religious differences to unite against a common foe.

The novel's subject matter was so current that in 1937, less than a year after publication, it was adapted as a film Fire Over England starring Vivien Leigh, Flora Robson and Laurence Olivier.