Lady Violet Manners Wore the Rutland Family Tiara to Marry Viscount William Garnock at Belvoir Castle
Lady Violet Manners and Viscount William Garnock met on December 30, 2023, at William’s family home of Kirkcaldy in Scotland. Violet didn’t know him, but she did know William’s sister Charlotte and brother-in-law Jamie. The married couple, known as the Duke and Duchess of Noto, extended her an invitation to a New Year’s party at Garnock’s Fife estate. Unbeknownst to Violet, they had a secret agenda: to set her up with William, an eligible yet perennial bachelor. (William, well, was in on it: “I have to admit I knew exactly who she was,” he tells Vogue.)
Their master plan worked. Violet and William sat next to each other at dinner, where they discovered a litany of things in common: They’d both lived in Los Angeles and India, for example, and had founded their own companies. (Violet is the founder of HeritageXplore, an online platform that allows users to book tours of some of Britain’s most historic homes, whereas William founded Feragaia, a nonalcoholic spirits company.) “It did—as cheesy as it sounds—feel like we’d met, spoken, and known each other for a long time,” Violet says. “Lots of teasing and jibbing, which I secretly always enjoy. William made me laugh pretty instantly.” Throughout the night, she tried to repress the same thought: I’m going to marry this man. Little did she know William was having the exact feeling. “I fell in love with her that first night,” he says.
What followed can only be described as a whirlwind romance. After six months of long-distance dating—William, at the time, lived in Texas—he asked Violet’s father for her hand in marriage. “I never, in my wildest dreams, thought I would meet the man I was going to marry and be engaged to him within six months,” Violet says of their fast-moving timeline. “I thought that was just for the movies—and to some degree, I still do. But from the moment I met William, I knew.” He proposed over the July 4 holiday amid the Rockies while the couple was off-roading near Jefferson, Colorado.
On June 21, 2025, the couple wed at Violet’s family home of Belvoir Castle in Bottesford, England. Event planner Peter Laird, along with the staff at Belvoir, orchestrated the grand event.
On the Friday before, the couple held a family dinner in the state dining room. Violet wore a thrifted The Vampire’s Wife dress for the occasion.
Intimacy soon gave way to pomp, circumstance, and tradition. On Saturday the wedding began with a morning ceremony at Bottesford village church. Town residents gathered in the street to see the wedding party drive past. “The Bottesford crowd gave my father and me a tremendous cheer—exactly the lift I needed,” Violet says.
The bride walked down the aisle in a custom high-neck Phillipa Lepley gown made of ivory satin and tulle. It featured intricate celestial and floral embroidery, including moons, stars, and climbing flowers like jasmine and her namesake violets. The dress took cues from that of Violet’s great-grandmother Margaret, the Duchess of Argyll, whom she describes as a style icon. “In the 1920s, she designed her gown with [Norman] Hartnell and included star embroidery—something strikingly unusual for her time,” she says. The motif also held a deeply personal meaning: Not only did their wedding date fall on the summer solstice, but she and William also shared their first kiss under a clear December night sky. (“Knowing the stars were at their best with a cold north wind and no moon, the moment the clock struck midnight, I started working towards getting her alone out under those stars, Champagne in hand,” William says of the moment.) Her veil, meanwhile, was embroidered with the Manners family crest of fleur-de-lis and heraldic lions.
Both fashion items also boasted the significant symbol of a myrtle—the very bloom, associated with love and commitment, that is depicted in diamonds on the Rutland family tiara. The bride admits that she was speechless when she saw her family’s heirloom diadem for the first time on her wedding day. “The earliest known appearance of the tiara was in an 1897 portrait of [my ancestor] Janetta, the seventh Duchess of Rutland,” she says. “She was also painted wearing the tiara during the 1880s and 1890s. Since then, it has adorned many of my ancestors, including my Granny Belvoir, Diana Cooper, and a great many more. It’s a surreal thing to have it placed on your head knowing all that history—and it’s much lighter than it looks.” She paired it with Tiffany pearl-and-diamond drop earrings.
