King Edward IV died on 9 April 1483, a man still in his prime, which came as a surprise to everyone except his astrologers.
Lewis of Caerleon, the renown Welsh mathematician and astrologer who predicted the solar eclipses of 7 April and 3 September 1483, also served as a physician in King Edward IV’s court. He would have almost certainly warned the royal family things were about to get really weird in 1483, considering that solar eclipses were thought to portend great change within the next solar year, especially the death of a king and ascendance of a new one. Moreover, multiple eclipses all taking place during a single eclipse season, with the solar eclipse in Aries (a sign of a bold king) and the luner eclipse in Taurus, King Edward IV’s natal sun sign, would have been seen as a foretelling of doom for the king.
As fate (or coincidence!) would have it, King Edward IV was indeed doomed. Although he was in robust health, and planning a military campaign in France, the king went fishing on the Thames and caught a cold on or around 30 March 1483, which quickly spiraled into a lethal illness. On the day of the partial eclipse, believing his death to be imminent, Edward “summoned Queen Elizabeth Woodville, his [nearby] children, and his magnates to his bedside. He urged the Queen, her oldest son [Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset], and his best friend William Hastings [who was the Lord Chamberlain] to make peace with one another, a request with which they tearfully complied.” The king also made his beloved and trusted brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the Lord Protector of the realm, so he could help and guide young King Edward V as he learned to govern.
None of this worked out the way King Edward IV would have hoped. Hastings immediately sent to Richard to undermine the Woodvilles, whom they both despised as greedy upstarts. Richard quickly killed Hastings, deposed his nephew, executed Rivers and Grey, and then had himself crowned as King Richard III on 26 July 1483.
By the second solar eclipse of that year, on 7 September, the rumor that the princes had been murdered was spreading like wildfire, and the new king was the chief suspect. Richard refused to provide ‘proof of life’ and the continued absence of the usurped king and his little brother started to turn most of the British populace (excluding the Northern loyalists) against the last Yorkist/Plantagenet monarch. There was an outright rebellion in October, which was joined even by one of Richard’s hitherto most loyal allies, the 2nd Duke of Buckingham.
Richard defeated the rebels, but his crown was wobbling on his head and even formerly ardent Yorkists who adored King Edward IV were throwing their allegiance to a long-shot potential rival for the throne, Henry Tudor. Things got worse for Richard in 1484, when he lost his only child, Edward of Middleham, Prince of Wales, on the one year anniversary of King Edward IV’s death. Unless Richard was completely immune to the superstitions and omen-reading mindset of the rest of medieval Europe, this would have seemed like divine judgment for taking his nephew’s throne. Adding to Richard’s woes, the next eclipse Lewis of Caerleon predicted, that of 16 March 1485, was the Richard’s beloved wife, Queen Anne Neville, died at Westminster.
King Richard grimly soldiered on, doing his best to rule England wisely and consolidate his fragmenting power. However, the final tide turned against him at Bosworth on 22 August 1485. Richard was killed in battle and his foe, the nebbish and unwarriorlike Henry Tudor, gained the throne. Thus less than two and half years after King Edward IV’s death the line of the Plantagenet kings had ended and the reign of the Tudor kings had begun.
That was a hell of an eclipse.