The Tournament
The intended day was August 29, but steady rain caused a postponement.
The opening parade comprised forty knights, each with his own entourage who were to ride to the castle, picked up a lady, officer or knight, and returned to the lists, the pictureseque estate drive being lined with thousands of spectators.
Elaborate rehearsals and training in St John’s Wood had not prepared participants for the crowded and already sodden conditions on the day and the opening parade took three hours longer than planned to marshal.
Although the day had dawned clear and fine, as the knights and their entourages struggled to organise the parade the sky began to darken. Just at the moment when the parade was finally arranged — just as Lady Seymour, the Queen of Beauty, was heralded by trumpets — there was a flash of lightning, a great crash of thunder, and the black clouds of Ayrshire let loose with a sudden and violent rainstorm.
Lord Eglinton immediately ordered the ladies into carriages, but the knights and their entourages, soon soaked in the squall and covered in mud, marched into the lists down a parade route lined by the umbrella bearing audience.
The tiltyard was designed by Samuel Luke Pratt, with stands to hold 2,000. Pratt's grandstand roof, was a work of art in splendid scarlet, but, after days of rain and now in a new rainstorm of freek severity, it started to leak badly.
Unsurprisingly, the unmanageably large crowds did not return on the second day.
Read more about this topic: Eglinton Tournament Of 1839