It began as a joke. There were grumbles of conservative discontent about the lack of ceremony at the coronation of Queen Victoria in June 1838. Where was the ceremonial banquet? Where was the Royal Champion? They called it the ‘Penny Crowning’, a tawdry, cheap shadow of the real thing.
A few weeks later a friend suggested to the young, vastly wealthy Archibald Montgomerie, 13th earl of Eglinton, that he should host some medieval games at his next private race meeting at Eglinton Park, the family estate in Ayrshire. If there could be a Gothic Revival in architecture and literature, why not sport?
Eglinton was nothing if not a racing man, but the idea raced ahead of him. Young bloods up and down the country were ‘seized with an extraordinary desire to be one of those who entered the lists’, one of them later remembered. In the end only 13 knights, Eglinton included, went forward. They all adopted personae: Knight of the Burning Tower, Knight of the White Swan and so on.
The day of the tournament, 28 August 1839, dawned fair. Entry was free; perhaps 100,000 attended. They came by rail and by steamer: engines of the very modernity the event was designed to refute.
The opening procession was scheduled for noon. It was nearly three hours late. The skies opened with a peal of thunder just as it began. The rain was torrential, the driving winds relentless. Many of the knights had brought large retinues; a jester, used to playing the funny parts from Walter Scott, rode around on a donkey. Opinions differ on when exactly it became a fiasco, but when knights began opening umbrellas all chivalric glamour had vanished.
In the end, many events had to be cancelled, among them the Champion’s challenge and the ceremonial banquet – the very absence of which from the coronation had so irked Eglinton to begin with. Onlookers mocked as they made their sodden way home: a London coalman was dubbed ‘the King of Beauty’, a red-nosed man the ‘Rouge Dragon’.
‘The age of chivalry, has, for the present, certainly departed’, The Times reported. It was, if anything, an understatement.