When the Sun of York goes out:
How eclipses seemed to follow the
Yorkists around
As most if not all Ricardians are aware,on the 16th of March,1485,towards the end of Richard's brief reign,his beloved Queen,Anne Nevill,passed out of this world.This tragedy was witnessed,so we are told,by a "great eclipse of the sun",then of course regarded as an ill omen and a portent of disaster.
But it might rekindle a shivering awareness of the occult in even the most rational of us, to discover that this was not the first eclipse spectacle to attend a Yorkist event nor the last:here is a sobering rundown of all the others;a truly staggering sequence of eclipse portents which appears to defy all rational explanation.
It begins with the birth of Richard,Duke of York (father of Edward IV and Richard III) on 21 September 1411.This had been heralded,that very same lunation,by a Total Lunar Eclipse which had occurred on the 2nd.Incredibly,his death,together with his son Edmund at the Battle of Wakefield on 30 December 1460,was again heralded by a Total Lunar Eclipse only 48 hours before.
When Edward IV married Elizabeth Wydevill on 1 May 1464,a Solar Eclipse happened at the very next astronomical opportunity five days later on the 6th.When his brother Clarence married Isabel Nevill on 11 July 1469,that event was heralded by a Total Solar eclipse only 48 hours earlier on the 9th-- again the closest astronomical opportunity.
The Duke of Buckingham's plot against Richard III in October 1483 was attended at both its beginning and at its height by a Solar and a Lunar eclipse on the 1st and 16th October respectively.
The death of Richard III's son Edward Prince of Wales on the 9th April 1484 was closely attended by a Lunar Eclipse only 48 hours later,yet again at the earliest astronomical opportunity,and Richard III's own death at the Battle of Redmore (Bosworth) on 22 August 1485 was attended by a Lunar eclipse only 72 hours later on the 25th,yet again at the earliest astronomical opportunity.
But worse was to follow: all of the foregoing is nothing in comparison with what was to attend the fate of Elizabeth of York.She was born on the 11th of February 1466,at which a Total Solar eclipse quickly occurred 5 days later on the 16th.Now contrary to popular belief,an eclipse is not just a one-off event.A particular eclipse,be it solar or lunar,will come back again,repeat itself,every 18 years 10 days for centuries or even millenia.
These strange cycles are called Saros Cycles,and this "coming back" of an old eclipse was greatly feared by the ancients,especially if the eclipse had a bad habit of attending historical disasters.
Upon Elizabeth of York's premature death,on her 37th birthday,11 February 1503,the very same Solar eclipse as had attended the premature death of Queen Anne Nevill -Saros 121- came back,after nearly 20 years,upon the very next lunation on the 27th March.This particular eclipse has a most ominous reputation:it appeared during the English Civil War; it came again in the summer of 1665 to oversee the Great Dying (Plague of London);it appeared during the American Civil War and in the First World War.This Saros,121,is still with us.The Solar eclipse of Anne Nevill and Elizabeth of York will come back again, on the 7th February 2008.
--- Michael Marshall