On the afternoon of Wednesday 28 August 1839, at Eglinton Castle in Ayrshire, a procession of knights in full plate armour, on horses draped in heraldic silk, rode out through the park towards a tournament ground where a grandstand had been built for two thousand guests. Behind them came the Queen of Beauty, Lady Seymour, in a litter, and her ladies, and heralds, and men-at-arms, and a jester. In front of them, on every road for ten miles, were a hundred thousand people who had come from Glasgow, Edinburgh, London and Paris to watch the Middle Ages come back.
Then it began to rain. It rained as it rains in Ayrshire in August, sideways and without end. The procession was an hour late setting out and took another hour to reach the lists. The grandstand roof, which was silk, leaked onto the aristocracy. The knights, who could not see through their visors in the wet, jousted badly and briefly. The banquet was cancelled. The great ball was postponed. By evening the field was a bog, the guests were soaked, and the London newspapers, which had been sneering for weeks, were delighted. The man who paid for it all was a Montgomerie, and his family’s green and blue Montgomery tartan would be published three years later.
The whole thing had been paid for by one man, the thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, Archibald Montgomerie, who was twenty-six years old and had spent, by the most careful estimate, something between thirty and forty thousand pounds on it. It was the most famous party of the century.
The romance of the age
It was not quite as absurd as it sounds. Britain in 1839 was in love with the Middle Ages. Sir Walter Scott had made knights fashionable, the Gothic revival was rebuilding churches and railway stations in the style of the fourteenth century, and Queen Victoria’s coronation the year before had been cut down by a reforming government, who dropped the medieval banquet and the champion on horseback on grounds of expense. The young Tory bloods were outraged. Lord Eglinton, whose family had held Ayrshire since the twelfth century and had the money and the park, decided to show the government how it should be done.
He and his friends trained for months. Armour was bought and made. The knights included the young Louis Napoleon, later Emperor of the French, who took part in the fighting on the third day. On the third day the weather cleared and the tournament went ahead in something like the intended style, with a mêlée, a proper joust, and the Earl himself crowned as the victor. The ball was held. Most of the guests remembered it kindly. History has remembered the rain, and the cartoons: the knight in full armour under an umbrella, which was drawn within the week and has never been allowed to go away.
The tournament ground is still there, in what is now Eglinton Country Park, outside Kilwinning. The castle is a shell, unroofed in the twentieth century. But the ornamental bridge the knights rode across on their way to the lists survives, and people have their photographs taken on it.
Hotspur’s ransom
The Montgomeries had been paying for grand gestures for a long time. They came from Normandy in the eleventh century, held Eaglesham in Renfrewshire from the twelfth, and made their fortune, in the family’s telling, at the Battle of Otterburn in 1388. There, in a night fight on the Border, Sir Hugh Montgomerie captured Harry Hotspur, the Percy heir, and with the ransom built his castle at Polnoon. The ballad of Chevy Chase, which is the same battle in another dress, has him kill Hotspur outright, which is poetry.
They were made Earls of Eglinton in 1508 and held Ayrshire for four centuries afterwards, through feuds with the Cunninghams, a murdered earl in 1586, another shot dead in a quarrel over poaching in 1769, and the tournament. Their crest is a lady holding an anchor and a savage’s head. Their motto is Garde bien, guard well. The name is spelt Montgomerie by the earls and Montgomery by almost everyone else, including the Field Marshal, whose family were Ulster Scots of the same stock.
Their tartan came, like most Lowland tartans, from the Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842, three years after the tournament, and there is an older sample of a related design in the collection of the Highland Society of London, begun in 1815. It is a simple and elegant one: a ground of green crossed by broad bands of blue, with fine lines of green through the blue, and no other colour at all. The archives note that the sett is a large one, and that a sample at the weaver’s cottage at Kilbarchan shows it larger still. Retailers offer Montgomery tartan made to order as kilts, skirts, sashes, scarves and ties, or by the yard, in Modern and Ancient colours, under both spellings. At a modern wedding it is usually worn with matching kilt wear, from the jacket down to the brogues.
Eglinton Country Park, a Saturday in June
Craig Montgomery is thirty-one, a quantity surveyor from Irvine, and he is getting married beside the tournament bridge at two o’clock, in a marquee, with a wet-weather plan that he has thought about more than most grooms think about anything. He is a Montgomery. He knows what happened here in 1839.
He also knew, from the first, that he would wear the family tartan, and that beyond the tartan he knew nothing. He had never owned a kilt. He had hired one for a school prom fifteen years ago and remembered mainly that the jacket did not fit and the sporran was on a chain that clanked. What he wanted this time was everything, and everything right, from one place.
He went to Scottish Kilt, on the advice of a colleague, because the whole of its kilt wear is made to the customer’s measurements, the kilt cut by hand in any of more than five thousand tartans and the rest of the outfit sold alongside so that nothing has to be matched by guesswork. He sent his measurements: waist at the navel, hips, waist to mid-kneecap for the kilt; chest, shoulders, sleeve and back length for the jacket. He was told, and had not known, that a kilt jacket is cut
shorter in the body than a suit jacket, so that it finishes at the waistband and shows the whole line of the pleats, and that this is why a suit jacket over a kilt never looks right however good the suit. He ordered eight yards of Montgomery in Modern colours, pleated to the sett so the green and blue ran unbroken across the back. Then he went through the rest with the patience of a man who measures buildings for a living.
An Argyll jacket and five-button waistcoat in charcoal, because a two o’clock wedding is a daytime wedding and a Prince Charlie at that hour is a mistake he had seen made. A white wing-collar shirt and a plain dark green tie. A black leather semi-dress sporran with an antique cantle. A kilt pin, a belt buckle and a sgian-dubh cap in the same antique finish, because bright and antique metal together is the mark of a hired outfit. Bottle-green hose, plain green flashes, black ghillie brogues. And, in the sporran, a spare pair of flashes, because his best man had once lost one at a ceilidh and never heard the end of it.
At half past one the sky over Kilwinning is the colour of slate, and his mother, who is also a Montgomery and also knows the story, looks at it and then at him.
“It’s 1839 all over again.”
“We’ve a marquee. They had a silk roof.”
“They had a hundred thousand people.”
“We’ve eighty, and a bar.” He straightens the sporran. “And I’m not in armour. I can see where I’m going.”
It rains at ten to two, for exactly eight minutes, hard, and stops. The sun comes out on the wet grass. He walks out to the bridge in the green and blue, with everything matched, and marries her, and the photographs on the tournament bridge, taken at four o’clock in full sunshine, are the ones everyone keeps.
Garde bien
The thirteenth Earl of Eglinton spent a fortune to bring the Middle Ages back to Ayrshire for three days, and the weather made a fool of him for two of them. He was cheered on the third, which nobody remembers. The park is still there, the bridge is still there, and the family’s motto, guard well, has a certain irony beside a silk grandstand roof.
The Montgomery tartan is green and blue, with nothing else in it, and it looks very well on a groom beside that bridge, with every piece of his kilt wear chosen to match and a marquee behind him, on the day the rain stopped in time.