In 1839, an estimated crowd of one hundred thousand people assembled at Eglinton Castle in Scotland. Converging on the tents and pavilions pitched in the park of the castle were to be found the aristocracy in droves, foreigners drawn to the great spectacle to be held there, gentlemen and burghers, farmers, shepherds and peasants, to say nothing of thugs and pickpockets, along with the policemen whose duty it was to control them. They were there to witness a piece of pageantry planned by Archibald Montgomery, the Earl of Eglinton –a great tournament in imitation of the tournaments of the Middle Ages, complete with jousting and even jesters. Thirteen carefully selected members of the aristocracy were to compete under titles that reflected the origins of the entertainment in a taste for chivalric romance: The Knight of the Red Lion, the Knight of the Burning Tower, the Knight of the White Rose. It was also, perhaps, a testament to the influence of Walter Scott, whose fiction did so much to encourage the nineteenth-century fascination with medieval culture.

Exhaustively planned and staged at great expense, the event was, none the less, a fiasco. Delayed by some three hours, the procession of all the knights and officers of the tournament, whose duty it was to escort the Queen of Beauty to the lists, finally set out from the castle –to the sound of a clap of thunder. It began to rain. Umbrellas went up. The ground of the lists was churned into mud, through which the knights bravely struggled, mostly missing each other.