Lady Anne Glenconner Knows Many Royal Secrets. Now She’s Telling All

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Lady Anne Glenconner’s first book, Lady in Waiting, was an extraordinary chronicle of an extraordinary life.

While the beating heart of the book was her relationship with her best friend Princess Margaret, to whom she acted as lady-in-waiting for many decades, there were also astonishing jewels, incredible art, a smashing series of country estates, and many stories about the Caribbean island of Mustique—which her husband Colin Tennant bought in 1958 for peanuts, transforming it into the most exclusive of royal and celebrity holiday destinations.

But Lady Anne’s life was also marked by equally unbelievable tragedy: a disgustingly abusive, cheating husband who cruelly disinherited her in his will, leaving his fortune to an assistant; a son who of AIDS, another from Hepatitis C; and a third who was nearly killed in a motorcycle accident that left him with severe long-term effects.

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The first book was that rare thing, a critical and commercial success, becoming one of the more unlikely hits of 2019, proving irresistible and unputdownable reading for anyone with a passing interest in the British aristocracy or royals.

Now, at 90, she is back with a new book, charmingly titled Whatever Next? Lessons from an Unexpected Life. She was exceptionally cool about this reporter accidentally calling an hour late because he had been at a lunch party: “Quite alright—I took the dogs for a walk.”

“I received so many letters after I wrote the first book, asking me questions about this and that and wanting to know more about me and Princess Margaret, and I was so thrilled having never done anything like this before, that I just thought—well OK I’ll write another one,” she told The Daily Beast about her motivations for writing the second tome.

One of the overarching tensions in the first book was her remaining in her marriage despite the hideous behavior of her husband.

In the new book she is much more explicit about being physically and emotionally abused by Tennant, describing a terrifying incident in which he beat her so badly that she was not only left “covered in blood,” but she also permanently lost her hearing in one ear due to a shattered eardrum.

“I sort of hinted at the domestic abuse in the first book but I felt I really had to talk about it in this book properly,” Lady Anne told The Daily Beast. “It was the right time to write about it, partly because of the queen consort, Camilla, who is doing so much to highlight the dangers of domestic abuse.

“I had so many letters from people saying that they had been through these difficult times as well, and I thought it may help people. At the end of the book, I’ve got 24 addresses for domestic abuse charities and help organizations, so if people are in trouble they can get help.”

Elaborating on why she stayed in this extremely violent, abusive relationship, Lady Anne said, “Look, I want to say this: I really don’t recommend putting up with it, but, yes, I did. In a way it was easier for me because he spent a lot of time in the West Indies. But ultimately it was how my generation did things. My generation wasn’t brought up to divorce. My mother was wonderful but she was quite strict. She used to say to me, ‘You’ve made your bed and you have to lie in it.’ She brought me up to carry on, to try and cope and to have a stiff upper lip.”

She admits in her first book to having had an affair throughout her marriage, and said it enabled her to survive, but has always refused to be drawn on the identity of the person. She has previously implied the person has now died, and there doesn’t seem to have been any other romantic liaison since. Leaving her husband never seems to have been a serious option for her.

“Of course,” Lady Anne said, when asked if, looking back now, she thought his behavior was totally unacceptable.

However, there is an undeniable fondness, in the books and her conversation, for her despicable husband. She emphasizes his drive (he turned Mustique from a mosquito-ridden patch of waste ground into a byword for exclusive celebrity luxury), verve (he is always rushing around, dreaming up some mad new venture) and sense of fun (his parties, attended by the likes of Mick Jagger and catered to by a house band who had a free house on their Scottish estate, were legendary).

She writes in the new book of Tennant, who once spiked her drink with LSD: “He was often a wonderful companion, a beloved father. He was also an incredibly selfish, damaged, and occasionally dangerous man... I lived with domestic violence and abuse for most of my marriage.”

One gets the impression that despite all the cruelty—mental and physical—he subjected her to, she grieved his passing and misses him very much.

For example, with real indulgence in her voice, she said she thinks her husband “would have been probably quite proud of me” for her books, but added, “He would also have been very jealous because I had succeeded in something. If he had been alive he would have wanted to be center stage! He would’ve said, ‘Well I could’ve written a much better book than you if I wanted to.’

“Margaret would’ve been very very supportive of me, although I do think she would also have been slightly amazed at my success.”

It is her friendship with Princess Margaret and the royal family—and indeed her family's friendship with the royals going back for generations—that is the core of both books. She was one of six maids of honor at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and as such she has a unique perspective on the celebrations due to commence shortly to mark the coronation of King Charles III.

“There has been so much written and said about the coronation over the years, but I’m the only person to have written about it who was actually in it! Cecil Beaton [the society photographer commissioned to photograph Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953] wrote about it—but he was somewhere miles away taking photos. I was right up at the front, fully involved and I have had letters from historians saying that my account of it is therefore a very interesting thing.

Flexing on Cecil Beaton is something Lady Anne does with chic aplomb.

Does she expect to be invited to King Charles’ coronation in May? “I’d love to be, of course, but I don’t think I will be as it’s so much smaller. Even the peers are having to ballot for a seat. If I’m honest I would be absolutely thrilled to be invited, but if I’m not I can watch it on television and probably get a better view!”

And yet, I say, I suspect she will be invited. Their families have been intimately linked for generations. She still has dinner with Charles at Sandringham now and again.

“Yes, I’ve known him since he was a little boy because my mother was a lady-in-waiting and he used to come up and stay at our house in Holcombe [Norfolk]. My mother taught him to drive around the estate and my father taught him to shoot.

“I’ve always known him. I’m a great fan of King Charles. I think he’s going to be a great king. He is so passionate about so many things like climate change, and he’s so interested in young people and such a great supporter of young people through his Prince’s Trust charity.”

Will Prince Harry and Meghan Markle be made welcome at the feast?

“I really don’t know,” Lady Anne said. “Charles would probably like them to come but I just don’t know. I don’t particularly like talking about Harry and Meghan, but the interesting thing is that of course I knew and was with another “spare,” Princess Margaret.

“I never heard her criticize the queen in any way. She was so loyal to her sister. The only thing she did say was that she wished she’d been better educated. The queen had tutors who came in from Oxford and Cambridge to teach her, but all Margaret ever had was a governess and I think that did annoy her. She did gripe about it a bit, but other than that she was completely loyal.

“And the queen had everything! Margaret didn’t even have her own house in England. The only house she ever actually owned herself was the one that we helped to build on Mustique.”

Lady Anne was shrewder than Margaret in that respect; when she married Tennant her father advised her to buy a farmhouse on the grounds of Holkham Hall, the grand Palladian mansion where she grew up, in her own name. She would frequently go there during the stormier moments of her marriage and now lives there full time. She hasn’t remarried and lives alone, but isn’t lonely; her three surviving children all live nearby, and her social life appears enviable: it still, for example, includes dinner at the nearby Sandringham estate with the King.

Despite Margaret’s relative penury compared to her sister, Lady Anne says, “I never heard her complaining about anything. It seems to be a sort of new thing that people are always victims. But the thing is, for our generation, Princess Margaret and I, we lived through the war.

“It was extremely frightening. We were bombed, she was bombed at Windsor, I was bombed at school, we slept in cellars, food was rationed, we lost lots and lots of people. Many friends lost their brothers or parents in the war. Life now seems wonderful in comparison—and my heart goes out to the people in Ukraine or other war zones who are going through all of this all over again.”

She paused and said, “I’m sorry. I’m giving you a lecture.”

Lady Anne said that part of the reason she wrote her books is because she was fed up with seeing Margaret incorrectly characterized “by people who never knew here” as selfish and unhappy. She has roundly criticized Margaret’s portrayal in The Crown.

“I wrote my first book because I got fed up of people writing really disagreeable things about Margaret who didn’t know her. I thought I had to redress the situation and really tell her story. She was incredibly kind, and not in any way like the way she was so often portrayed.”

What is very clear is how fondly Lady Anne remembers her time with Margaret and the enormous and genuine affection she had for her, which seems to have easily co-existed with the more formal and dutiful role of serving her.

“We had such fun together,” Lady Anne recalled. “We would find tremendous fun in very simple things. We loved swimming. We used to do simple things like collect shells and stick them onto tables. When she used to come to my farmhouse, she would always come with her rubber gloves. She’d say, ‘Your car is so dirty! I’m going to clean it for you,’ and she’d go out with her rubber gloves and clean the car. Some people, I know, found her a bit difficult but it was generally because they didn’t know her very well. What she really hated was people sucking up.

“My job as a lady-in-waiting was to be a go-between. One of the things she never liked was anybody lighting a cigarette and I used to try and warn people! I would dread it, I would see these men whizzing over with their lighters and she would just be waving them away.”

Lady Anne remembers particularly Margaret’s kindness to her son, Henry, who contracted AIDS “really early on.”

She says, “People were terrified. They didn’t know how it was caught. But Margaret always came and stayed. She brought her children. She came to his funeral. She came to the (London) Lighthouse,” a well-known HIV and AIDS hospice.

“Margaret wasn’t like Diana,” Lady Anne said. “She wasn’t touchy-feely, but she used to go into their rooms and sit down and make them laugh and they absolutely loved her. She was very caring, she was an intelligent woman.”

The key to her relationship with Margaret seems to have been the deep wellspring of trust engendered by its deep roots. “My family was always very close to their family. I met her when I was three and she was four. We lived near the beach, so we would go down to the beach and make sandcastles and dig big holes, hoping people would fall into them! We were childhood friends.”

Queen Camilla has decided to get rid of the role of lady-in-waiting, replacing them with companions. Does Lady Anne feel a tinge of sadness at their demise? “Well, I do actually, because we were very useful. We were the eyes and ears.”

The title of her new book, Whatever Next, of course begs the question of whether Lady Anne has more books in her at the age of 90. You’d be unwise to bet against it, and she is certainly enjoying her late-life fame, as she told the Financial Times in 2021: “I’ve been in the shadow all my life. I’ve always been somebody trying to make it OK for other people. Suddenly, yippee, I came out with a bang!”

There was a brief pause at the end of our conversation, and Lady Anne said, “Well, you’d better get back to your lunch, good bye.”

And that was it. Rather like Cecil Beaton, I had been sent on my way.