Candlemas

Candlemas is the feast day immediately preceding the St Blaise’s Day omen that helps shape Cardinal Wolsey’s account of England’s dynastic past. In that story, the appearance of three suns gives the young Edward of York a vision of kingship, binding the liturgical calendar to political ambition and the uncertain meaning of providence.

Place in the Calendar

Wolsey places the event within a precise sequence of winter feast days. At Candlemas, Edward, eighteen years old and campaigning amid the Wars of the Roses, prays with his generals after hearing that his father and youngest brother have been captured and killed. The next day is St Blaise’s Day, 3 February, when three suns appear above his exhausted troops.

The Omen and Edward’s Kingship

Wolsey describes the three discs of light as a sign Edward alone can interpret. His men kneel and his knights genuflect; Edward sees his future in the spectacle, and the moment becomes the beginning of a conviction that he can act decisively where others cannot see what lies ahead. At the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross he captures Owen Tudor, and three months later he enters London as king.

Retelling and Significance

The story is told during a conversation about Anne Boleyn’s prospective marriage to Henry VIII. Wolsey reaches back through Britain’s legendary origins and the history of its kings to argue that England’s dynastic past is already full of extraordinary unions and claims. Candlemas therefore belongs not only to a historical sequence but also to a political argument: the remembered portent shows how a king’s authority can be narrated as providential, even though Edward never again sees the future as clearly and later kingship gives way to uncertainty.