In 1461 a terrified army saw three suns in the sky. An eighteen-year-old talked them into believing it was God. He became Edward IV.
On the morning of the battle at Mortimer’s Cross, in February 1461, the Yorkist army looked up and saw three suns rising.
The men were terrified. It was the middle of a civil war, it was freezing, they were outnumbered, and the sky had just done something that the sky does not do.
Edward, Earl of March, was eighteen years old. His father had been killed five weeks earlier. He looked at the three suns, and at his army, and he told them it was the Holy Trinity – the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost – and that God had come to watch them win.
They won. He took the three suns as his badge. Six weeks later he was King Edward IV.
There is now a pub named after it, on Portobello Road, with a 4.6 from three thousand people.
What they actually saw
A parhelion. A sun dog. Light refracting through ice crystals in extremely cold air, producing two bright false suns flanking the real one.
It is a known meteorological phenomenon. It happens. It is happening somewhere in the world today and nobody is being crowned.
But in 1461, to five thousand freezing men with edged weapons, it was the sky opening, and the entire subsequent history of England turned on the ability of an eighteen-year-old to look at a weather event and produce, on the spot, a better story than the one his army had already told itself.
Shakespeare was there, more or less
He put it in Henry VI Part 3 – the three suns, the men’s fear, the young Edward’s interpretation – and then he used it again, and better, in the opening line of Richard III.
Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York. It is the most famous first line in English drama and almost nobody who quotes it knows that the sun in it is a pun: the sun of the badge, and the son of the Duke of York, and the parhelion, all at once.
The Prat’s literary desk regards it as the finest pun in the language and notes that it is currently hanging over a pub in Notting Hill.
The pub
Twenty to thirty pounds, a 4.6, and one of the better-rated large pubs in this file. A corner site at the top of Portobello Road, wooden floors, good beer, and a room that fills on market days and stays full.
Nobody in it is thinking about the Wars of the Roses. Three thousand people have reviewed it and not one has mentioned Edward IV, and we have checked, and the closest anybody comes is a man who describes the atmosphere as sunny.
Verdict
Excellent pub, magnificent name, and a sign above the door commemorating the moment an eighteen-year-old boy looked at the weather and lied his way to the throne of England.
Go. Order something. Look up.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
My gran asked why I was laughing at councils. I explained and she said “are they still useless?” with complete certainty.