Because the Queen chose not to record her more intimate thoughts and experiences for public dissemination, Lady Glenconner serves as a kind of proxy for Elizabeth, who was described by people close to her as wise, witty, and occasionally irreverent. In “Lady in Waiting,” Glenconner often underscores her awareness that high social standing is no obstacle to high mischief. In one chapter, she writes of anticipating a German invasion of England as a child; fearing that Holkham Hall would be occupied by Nazi leaders, and then visited by Hitler himself, she filled jam jars with a foul concoction of food scraps, medicines, muddy water, and carpet fluff, in the hope of poisoning the Führer with it. She and her sister Carey practiced the scheme on a Teddy bear, sidling up to it and offering it a drink. Glenconner writes, “We had decided to make Hitler fall in love with us, which, when I think about it now, was rather like the Mitfords. But, then, we were going to kill him—which, I suppose, was rather unlike the Mitfords.”
Even if Lady Glenconner has shown the occasional rebellious streak, she remains largely a defender of the social hierarchy in which she is enmeshed. “The aristocracy are founded on people that have done something,” Glenconner told me at Holkham Hall, citing the achievements of her Coke ancestors in law and in agriculture. “They created something—the estate, which is there, which is passed on. Some of the aristocracy fade—nothing happens, they can’t think of anything, they spend, and their houses go, and that’s it. But certain families, like this one, are able to keep on going, to keep on inventing, to keep on thinking of different things.”
In its exploration of a rarefied social stratum, “Lady in Waiting” provides a vivid case study of aristocratic degeneracy, in the person of Glenconner’s late husband, Colin Tennant. (She had earlier been engaged to Johnnie Althorp, the heir to the Earldom of Spencer, but the relationship ended after he was informed that Anne had “mad blood,” through her distant familial relationship to two cousins of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret who had been committed to an asylum. Althorp went on to marry Frances Roche; their youngest daughter was Lady Diana Spencer, the future Princess of Wales.) Tennant, whose family had a giant property of its own, the Glen estate, in Scotland, was tall, handsome, and charming, though deficits of empathy were evident from the start of their marriage. In one of the book’s most memorable episodes, Glenconner recounts her honeymoon in Paris, where Tennant—having slept through their first night together and promising her a surprise for the second—took her to a brothel. The bride, a virgin, was ushered into a velvet-upholstered wing chair and sat next to her new husband as a man and a woman energetically copulated on a bed in front of them. “The intertwined pasty bodies of the French couple squelching into each other on the bed was the most unattractive thing you could possibly imagine,” she writes. “Every now and then they asked us if we would like to join in. So, I found myself saying politely, ‘That’s very kind of you, but no thank you.’ ” These days, men sometimes approach her at public events and whisper “Squelch, squelch!” in her ear. She pretends to be deaf.
Compared with the Coke family, the Tennants were nouveaux riches: the family fortune had been made in the nineteenth century, in bleach. But the Tennants had more cash on hand. In common with many British aristocratic families in the twentieth century, the Cokes became obliged to raise money by deaccessioning art works and other valuables. In 1980, the Codex Leicester was sold at auction for $5.3 million, to Armand Hammer; fourteen years later, it went for six times that amount to Bill Gates, in whose collection it remains—“Covered with my DNA,” Glenconner notes. Tennant, meanwhile, expended vast amounts of his fortune on developing the tiny Caribbean island of Mustique as a party resort for the rich, famous, and titled, having paid forty-five thousand pounds for it in 1958. (After the success of “Lady in Waiting,” Glenconner published a murder-mystery novel, “Murder on Mustique,” which includes a dissolute rock star who bears a resemblance to Mick Jagger, a regular visitor to the island.)
Tennant’s habits and manners often came off as a parody of aristocratic eccentricity and careless decadence. Lady Glenconner writes that he went through a phase of wearing paper underpants, shocking guests at parties by declaring, “I’ll eat my knickers,” and then sticking his hands down his trousers, ripping the underpants off, and stuffing them into his mouth. In the nineteen-sixties, Tennant acquired a house on Tite Street, in the Chelsea neighborhood of London, that had once been the home of the artist James Whistler. When architects told Tennant that the interior was beyond renovation, he and Glenconner held a demolition party, providing safety glasses to guests, who shattered windows, splintered doors, and spray-painted obscenities on the walls. “Everyone behaved like complete hooligans,” she remembers. Tennant had strong views about interior decoration, and planned his homes as if they were stage sets, resisting concessions to practicality. “Kitchens are frightfully common, Anne,” he would say.
Amid this tumult, Glenconner had five children with Tennant. The first was a boy, Charlie. She writes, “Of course, since he was a boy, I was praised for having managed to produce an heir for Colin immediately. The relief was tangible.” Two more sons, Henry and Christopher, followed, and then twins, May and Amy.
Glenconner found out only after she was married that Tennant had suffered two nervous breakdowns. “Once, he had run barefooted through London in his pajamas to hospital, claiming that his heart had stopped,” she writes. (“The doctors must have wondered how he had got there if that had been the case,” she observes.) Tennant’s biographer, Nicholas Courtney, writes that he had a “very unattractive and uncontrollable temper.” Tennant’s financial dealings were equally impulsive. “He couldn’t bear to be static,” Glenconner told me. “He always wanted to be rushing around changing things, buying things. We had thirty Lucian Freuds at one point, and he sold them all. I once said to him, in a rather pathetic way, ‘You don’t seem to mind making these collections and then selling them. I like the things I have collected.’ And he said, ‘Oh, no! Once I’ve had them, and the opportunity to look at them, I want to be on to something else.’ ” Tennant “hated going to museums,” Glenconner added. “Do you know why? Nothing’s for sale.”
Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner after his father’s death, in 1983, died in 2010, leaving his widow a final surprise: he had bequeathed his entire personal fortune to his longtime valet and factotum, a St. Lucian man named Kent Adonai, whom he had originally hired, decades earlier, to help tend an elephant acquired from the Dublin Zoo. (The outward nature of the men’s relationship is on awkward display in “The Man Who Bought Mustique,” a documentary from 2000, with a domineering Tennant screeching commands at Adonai.) Lady Glenconner was not left destitute: after getting married, on the advice of her father, she had acquired a farmhouse on the Holkham estate, where she still lives. But she was reduced to buying back some personal items at auction, under the scrutiny of the tabloid press. “I said to the children, ‘We’re going to smile, we’re going to enjoy this, and we’re going to get what we can,’ ” she told me. “Afterwards, a man from the Daily Mail came up and said, ‘I don’t understand you, Lady Glenconner—we came to see you cry.’ And I said, ‘I thought you did.’ And we laughed.” She went on, “That’s the way I had been brought up. Colin dealt us this horrible thing, and I wasn’t going to let it destroy us.” Eventually, in 2018, Adonai arrived at a financial settlement with the current Lord Glenconner, a grandson of Tennant’s. One of the motivations for writing “Lady in Waiting,” Glenconner told me, was that she needed the money.
In “Whatever Next?,” Glenconner revisits her marriage, painting a fuller, and far less breezy, portrait of her late husband. “He was often a wonderful companion, a beloved father,” she writes. “He was also an incredibly selfish, damaged, and occasionally dangerous man. . . . I lived with domestic violence and abuse for most of my marriage.” From the start, her husband screamed at her, spit at her, shoved her, and threw things at her. He had numerous affairs with women, and once spiked her drink with what she suspects was LSD, in an attempt to loosen her up in the bedroom. “How strange and typical of Colin that, rather than being tender, he decided he could just drug me into doing what he liked,” she writes. One day in the late seventies, in Mustique, he lost his temper and beat her savagely with a shark-vertebrae walking stick. “I was utterly terrified, convinced he might actually kill me,” she says. The attack was never repeated, but thereafter she and Tennant lived ever more separate lives, though they remained married, fifty-four years in total. For thirty-four of them, Glenconner herself had a married lover, whose wife knew of their arrangement and had a lover of her own. (Glenconner does not name her lover in her books, and has said that she never will.) “There was no question of any of us leaving our marriages,” she writes. “It simply wasn’t done.”
The decision to write a tell-more memoir, she explained, was driven by the realization that she had made too little of Tennant’s marital bullying in “Lady in Waiting,” and by a sense that she had an obligation to other women who might be vulnerable. “Domestic abuse goes through all classes,” she told me at Holkham Hall. “And the sort of people like me are so ashamed, really, you don’t talk about it.” She remains perversely proud of having stuck out her marriage, while also being convinced that nobody should put up with what she endured. The irony of having forgone divorce—and a settlement that might have amounted to half of Tennant’s wealth—is not lost on her. “Perhaps he knew he was going to do that with his will, and he was just nice enough to me to keep me going,” she said.
Glenconner does not absolve herself from criticism: in “Lady in Waiting,” for example, she acknowledges her failings as a parent. Her two eldest boys, she notes, were handed off to a nanny, as was typical for aristocratic progeny at the time. When such nannies took their infant charges to the park, Glenconner writes, they would sit on specific benches, to indicate the rank of the families for which they worked: those employed by earls did not dare sit alongside those employed by dukes. During this period, her household staff also included a nursery maid, a housekeeper, a butler, and two cleaners. Among Glenconner’s cohort, the responsibility of a wife was to take care of her husband before her children. “Children had their routine and adults had theirs,” she writes. “Being a wife seemed more urgent than being a mother.”
Glenconner was familiar with absentee parenting from her own childhood. At the outset of the Second World War, her father was sent with the Scots Guards to Egypt, accompanied by her mother, and she didn’t see them for three years. During that time, Anne was at the mercy of a sadistic governess, Miss Bonner, who tied her hands to the bedposts at night. (In Glenconner’s second murder-mystery novel, “A Haunting at Holkham,” published in 2021, she took her revenge on Miss Bonner by having a fictional stand-in killed and buried beneath the sands of Holkham Beach.)
Charlie Tennant, Glenconner’s eldest son, was plagued from childhood by extreme compulsions: he had to open and close a door repeatedly before going through it. In his early teens, he started using drugs, and he soon became addicted to heroin. He stole from his parents to fund his habit and cycled in and out of rehab clinics. In 1977, when Charlie was nineteen, Colin Tennant took the drastic step of disinheriting him from the Glen estate, the ancestral seat in Scotland, in favor of Charlie’s younger brother Henry, fearing that Charlie would ruin it if it came into his hands.
Henry was less tortured than Charlie, but the apparent stability of his life—he married in 1983, at twenty-two, and soon fathered a son and heir—gave way in 1985, when he separated from his wife and came out as gay. “He went wild, presumably feeling finally liberated,” Glenconner writes. It was the early years of the aids crisis, with no reliable treatment yet available. Late in 1986, moments before the Glenconners hosted one of their celebrated balls on Mustique, Colin told Anne that Henry was H.I.V.-positive. “To be handed my son’s death sentence while standing in a glittering dress welcoming lots of guests felt like some sort of obscure nightmare,” Glenconner writes.
Henry, one of the first British aristocrats to speak openly about aids, died in 1990, at the age of twenty-nine. Charlie got sober after six years of heroin addiction, married, and had a son, but in 1996, at the age of thirty-nine, he succumbed to hepatitis C.
As if the fates of her two eldest sons were not terrible enough, the youngest, Christopher, suffered a serious motorbike accident in 1987, and fell into a coma. A doctor told Glenconner that there was no hope of recovery and urged her to get on with her life. Appalled, she undertook a rigorous program of stimulating Christopher’s senses: brushing his skin and exposing him to scents for fifteen minutes every hour. A roster of friends helped, including Christopher’s former nanny, Barbara Barnes, who had just stopped taking care of Princes William and Harry. In “Lady in Waiting,” Glenconner writes of Christopher, “My whole life became bound up in trying to save his.” After four months, she arrived at the hospital to find Christopher in tears—the first sign of responsiveness he had shown since the accident. Cradling him, she said that if he got better she would buy him a car, asking him what kind he would like. The response: “Lamborghini.”
Christopher regained many of his former capacities, but he walks with a limp and has other physical challenges. He lives with his wife, Johanna, in a house on the Holkham estate. His sisters also live in the area. Before Glenconner wrote further about her marriage in “Whatever Next?,” she asked her children’s permission, and all of them shared memories of their father. She found the process cathartic. Christopher told me, “I have nothing but respect and love for my dad, because he was amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing. But I can understand exactly how he might not seem that way to our mum.”