Umbrellas in the mist: the sorry story of the Eglinton Tournament of 1839

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? they asked. Where was the Royal Champion? They called it the ‘Penny Crowning’, a cheap and tawdry shadow of the real thing.

A few weeks later a friend suggested to the young, wilful, 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 sports? Sir Walter Scott may have been to blame too: as Mark Girouard notes in The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman, Scott’s Ivanhoe was a huge hit when it was published in 1819 and one of its set-pieces, a tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, caught the public imagination. There were no fewer than five adaptations of the book on the London stage by the following year. One of them, at Astley’s Amphitheatre on Westminster Bridge Road across the river from the Houses of Parliament, featured a full-blown re-enactment of the tournament in its arena. The venue was more usually used for circuses. Perhaps that was a warning.

In any event, Eglinton was nothing if not a racing man; the idea raced ahead of him. Unwisely, however, as it turned out, he outsourced most of the detail – pavilions, swords, armour – to Samuel Pratt. Pratt had just opened a showroom for armour on Lower Grosvenor Street in Mayfair. Where else were people of fashion to furnish all their new Gothic Revival mansions? Visitors to his establishment were greeted by the sight of a table at which six lowering figures sat in full armour, seemingly in the middle of intense debate. The prose in his catalogues was just as lavish: “To gaze on the plumed casque of the Mailed Knight… and to grasp the ponderous mace, yet encrusted with the accumulated rust of centuries, cannot fail to inspire admiration for the chivalrous deeds of our ancestors,” one ran.

Now read on…