Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown

Anne Glenconner was born in 1932 as the eldest daughter of the future 5th Earl of Leicester, at Holkham Hall, a vast estate in North Norfolk. Her birth was considered "the greatest disappointment" because, as a girl, she could not inherit the earldom or the estate. Her parents had two more daughters, Carey and Sarah, permanently breaking the male line.

Anne's childhood was shaped by the rituals of the British aristocracy and by proximity to the Royal Family. Holkham and the royal estate of Sandringham sat only ten miles apart, and the families socialized regularly. Anne became firm childhood friends with Princess Margaret, three years her senior. When World War II broke out in 1939, Anne's father was posted to Egypt with his army regiment, the Scots Guards, and her mother followed, leaving seven-year-old Anne and Carey in Scotland under the care of their Great-aunt Bridget. There, a governess named Miss Bonner secretly abused Anne by tying her hands to the bed each night. Miss Bonner was eventually sacked not for her cruelty but for taking Anne to a Catholic Mass. After three years the family reunited, though the homecoming was awkward: the children clung to their kind replacement governess, barely recognizing their own parents.

Anne attended boarding school and finishing schools before entering the debutante Season in 1950, a series of dances designed to match aristocratic young people for marriage. Tatler declared her "debutante of the year." Her coming-out dance at Holkham reunited her with Princess Margaret, and the two picked up their childhood friendship. Anne fell deeply in love with Johnnie Althorp, a suitor who would later become Earl Spencer and father of Princess Diana, but his father forbade the match due to a tenuous family connection to institutionalized relatives. Heartbroken, Anne was sent to America to sell Holkham Pottery. In February 1953, a telegram arrived: She had been chosen as a Maid of Honor at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, one of six ceremonial attendants tasked with carrying the Queen's train.

On June 2, 1953, Anne walked behind the Queen through Westminster Abbey, helping carry the twenty-one-foot velvet train. During the ceremony she nearly fainted, but the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, a ceremonial parliamentary official, discreetly steadied her. At Buckingham Palace afterwards, the Queen ran joyfully down a corridor, the Maids chasing after her, and sat on a sofa kicking up her legs in delight.

In 1955, Anne met Colin Tennant, the charismatic and volatile son of the 2nd Baron Glenconner. Colin was handsome, witty, and creative but prone to explosive rages; he promised Anne these would cease once they married. Anne's mother and Princess Margaret both expressed concern, but Anne married Colin at Holkham in April 1956. The honeymoon was disastrous: Colin raged at a Paris hotel over single beds, took Anne to watch strangers having sex as a "surprise," and trapped her against a wall by slamming a fold-up bed in anger. The trip was cut short when Anne became pregnant, and Colin's temper never improved. When Anne once fled to her mother, she was told, "Go straight back. You married him."

In 1958, Colin bought the Caribbean island of Mustique for £45,000 without setting foot on it. The island had no running water or electricity and a dying cotton estate. During Princess Margaret and Tony Armstrong-Jones's 1960 honeymoon aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, they visited Mustique, and Colin offered a plot of land as a wedding present. Princess Margaret accepted at once, and the island became her sanctuary from an increasingly unhappy marriage. Colin commissioned the celebrated stage designer Oliver Messel to design villas and pivoted from cotton to luxury real estate through the newly established Mustique Company. In 1963, Colin's father handed over Glen, the family's baronial estate in the Scottish Borders, which Anne restored and ran as a gathering place for guests including Princess Margaret. Colin's extravagant parties on Mustique cemented the island's fame: at his fiftieth-birthday Golden Ball in 1976, trees were painted gold and Robert Mapplethorpe photographed Mick and Bianca Jagger.

Anne and Colin had five children: Charlie (born 1957), Henry (born 1959), Christopher (born 1968), and twins May and Amy (born 1970). Charlie developed obsessive-compulsive disorder and began using heroin at sixteen. Over six years, Colin and Anne tried boarding schools, rehab clinics, a sheep farm in Australia, and a Highland estate, all failing. In 1977, Colin disinherited Charlie, transferring Glen's inheritance to Henry. Only after the parents followed medical advice and cut Charlie off entirely did he return weeks later saying he wanted to quit.

In 1971, Princess Margaret invited Anne to become one of her Ladies in Waiting, female attendants who accompany members of the Royal Family on official duties. Anne held the role for three decades, finding purpose and independence from Colin. Her duties ranged from managing logistics at engagements to accompanying the Princess on royal tours worldwide. In 1973, Anne introduced Princess Margaret to Roddy Llewellyn at a dinner party at Glen. Seventeen years her junior, Roddy provided warmth as the Princess's marriage to Tony deteriorated. Princess Margaret's 1978 divorce from Tony, the first high-profile royal divorce since Henry VIII, brought relentless press attention.

Tragedy struck the Tennants in rapid succession. In 1985, Henry revealed he was gay and had left his wife, Tessa, and their infant son, Euan. In December 1986, Colin told Anne that Henry had been diagnosed with HIV. Months later, Christopher suffered a catastrophic motorcycle accident in Belize, falling into a deep coma. Anne called Princess Margaret, whose private secretary, Nigel Napier, mobilized the Foreign Office and the British Army to airlift Christopher to surgery. Doctors said he would never recover, but Anne refused to accept the verdict. With the help of Barbara Barnes, the family's former nanny, Anne devised a sensory stimulation regimen applied every hour: wafting smells, playing music, and alternating textures on his skin. After four months, Christopher woke. His first word was "Lamborghini." Anne refused to install handrails or a stair lift, insisting he crawl and relearn to walk on his own.

Henry died of AIDS in January 1989 at twenty-nine. Anne arrived minutes too late to say goodbye. Charlie stayed clean, married a counselor named Sheilagh Parsons, and had a son, Cody. He died in 1996 from hepatitis C caused by his years of heroin use. Anne buried two sons in seven years.

Princess Margaret's health declined through the 1990s with strokes, badly scalded feet from a bathing accident on Mustique, and near-total loss of eyesight. Anne cared for her through each crisis. Princess Margaret died on February 9, 2002, and her funeral took place in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, fifty years to the day after her father's. The 101-year-old Queen Mother managed to stand from her wheelchair and bow as the coffin passed; she died less than two months later.

Colin moved permanently to St. Lucia in the early 1990s and became reliant on a young local man named Kent, who managed every aspect of his daily life. Colin kept a prostate cancer diagnosis secret for years. After a tender final visit during which he told Anne, "It wasn't all bad, was it?", Colin died of a heart attack on August 27, 2010. At the funeral, a lawyer read a single-sentence will leaving everything to Kent. When Anne asked Kent about Colin's wishes toward the family, he shrugged and said he did not know. After seven years of litigation initiated by Charlie's son Cody and Sheilagh, roughly half of the estate was returned to Cody.

Anne reflects on her life from her Norfolk farmhouse, from which she can see Holkham Hall's boundary wall. Christopher recovered and married; May married at St. Withburga's Church at Holkham, echoing Anne's own wedding. Anne acknowledges the enduring pain of losing Henry and Charlie but declares at eighty-seven that her life has been extraordinary and that she intends to live to a hundred, "although still always wondering, 'Whatever next?'" (321).