The three suns

The three suns are a celestial omen in Thomas Wolsey’s account of Edward IV’s rise: three pale discs appearing above a frozen battlefield are read as a promise of kingship and, later, as a sign of claims to three thrones. The image turns uncertain history into political argument. Its force lies not in proof, but in the way Wolsey connects a visible wonder to dynastic succession, royal ambition, and Henry VIII’s marriage plans.

The omen at Mortimer’s Cross

Wolsey tells the story while explaining why Anne Boleyn, a merchant’s daughter, might seem an implausible match for a king. He reaches back through Britain’s legendary past and the succession of English kings to Edward Plantagenet, son of the Duke of York. At eighteen, Edward had received news that his father and youngest brother had been captured, mocked, and killed by Lancastrian forces. His exhausted troops were demoralized and unpaid; on Candlemas he prayed with his generals for the slaughtered souls.

On St Blaise’s Day, 3 February, three suns appeared at ten in the morning. Their blurred silver discs shone through frost over the Welsh borderlands. Edward’s men knelt on the frozen ground, and his knights genuflected toward the sky. Wolsey presents the spectacle as a moment of recognition: Edward saw a future that no one else could see, and the light seemed to lift his life into it. At the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross he captured Owen Tudor, whom he had beheaded in Hereford marketplace. An unknown woman then washed the severed head and combed its bloody hair. The scene places the omen beside violence and mourning, binding the promise of a crown to the human cost of dynastic conflict.

From sign to royal destiny

Three months after the battle, Edward was in London and king. Yet Wolsey’s story does not portray the vision as a permanent gift. Edward never saw the future so clearly again; dazzled by the first revelation, he stumbled through his reign amid astrologers, holy men, and fantasists. Instead of marrying for foreign advantage, he became entangled in broken or unfinished promises to several women.

Wolsey then connects Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, a Lancastrian knight’s widow, with a claim to the throne of Castile through her descent from Melusine, the serpent woman. In the legend, Melusine had disguised herself as an ordinary princess, but her husband glimpsed her serpent’s tail; she escaped and foretold that her children would establish a dynasty that would reign forever, its unlimited power guaranteed by the devil. The story gives the three suns a retrospective interpretation: England, France, and Castile. The omen thus expands from a sign of Edward’s own kingship into a sign of the kingdoms his marriage could bring within dynastic reach.

Wolsey’s political use of the story

The tale is not detached antiquarian lore. Wolsey tells it as he considers Henry VIII’s proposed marriage to Anne Boleyn, asking how a match without treaty, land, or money could be presented as creditable. His answer is to widen the frame of judgment: if royal marriages have long been entangled with strange origin stories, supernatural ancestry, and disputed inheritance, Anne’s comparatively ordinary birth need not end the argument. The old story makes the present seem less unprecedented.

Wolsey also draws a pointed parallel between Edward’s intended foreign marriage and the outcome of his actual choice. Edward’s advisers had planned to marry him to a French princess, as Wolsey had planned for Henry; instead, Edward chose Elizabeth Woodville. Wolsey insists that such choices can alter the direction of kingdoms. He further argues that Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon brought him closer to ancient rights, and that Henry could be described as ruler of three kingdoms, even if that claim was not stated openly to Ferdinand and Isabella. The suns serve as political symbols whose meanings can be adjusted to suit a claim: first Edward’s kingship, then the reach of his marriage, then Henry’s own dynastic stature.

A sign shaped by competing histories

The episode sets the apparent clarity of the sky against the instability of the histories built from it. The three discs are visible, but their political meaning depends on stories about ancestry, marriage, conquest, and inheritance. Wolsey treats the omen as a pattern that links generations; Cromwell, listening, probes the uncomfortable consequences, including the fact that Edward’s Plantagenet grandson beheaded his Tudor great-grandfather. The cardinal’s reply is that this is something to know, but not to mention. The past may support royal claims, but it can also expose the violence and contradictions beneath them.

As an expression, the three suns therefore gather together supernatural belief and practical statecraft. Their meaning is not fixed by the phenomenon alone: Wolsey makes the celestial image persuasive by placing it within a chain of royal choices and dynastic claims. The omen offers no secure forecast—Edward himself never recovered the same clear vision—but it gives political actors a memorable language for presenting succession as destiny.