"Never explain, never complain" ("Never explain, never complain"). This maxim is still practiced among the British aristocracy, to which Lady Anne Glenconner has belonged throughout her long life. She was not in vain the eldest daughter of the Earl of Leicester, she is the widow of a lord and, since she was a child, she was a friend of the princesses Isabel and Margarita of England. Without forgetting that she served as a maid of honor at the coronation of Elizabeth II and, for three decades, she was a lady-in-waiting to Margarita.
However, despite such a pedigree, Anne Glenconner has not strictly followed the aristocratic saying of keeping quiet no matter what. In recent years she has explained, and a lot. In 2019 she published Lady in Waiting (Hodder
In fact, Lady Anne also appears in The Crown. Her character is played by Nancy Carroll, who also met with the aristocrat to prepare the role of her. Like Bonham Carter, she invited her to tea, naturally, and they talked for hours. Looking back on those old days, Anne Glenconner thought that she might be worth writing about. She did, and her first book was a success. So much so that she has just published a sequel: Whatever Next ?, where Lady Anne explains even more and also allows herself to complain a bit.
If for all this the aristocrat passed almost on tiptoe in her first memories, in the second, she no longer shuts up. "In Lady in Waiting I wrote about Colin's tantrums," she recalls, referring to the episodes starring her husband who bit a taxi driver in India because he took the wrong direction ("Luckily, he didn't make him bleed"), and to put on a show on a plane because they wouldn't let him go first class (consequently he was banned from British Airways for life). But if in that first book he tried to minimize the inadmissible, claiming that Lord Glenconner could be a "wonderful" man when he wanted, in this one, Lady Anne has no problem admitting "the deep humiliation and suffering" that the conduct caused her. of her husband during the more than fifty years of marriage.
Anne Veronica Coke was born in London in 1932. Her parents, sons of earls and viscounts, came from the old aristocracy: "My family crest is an ostrich swallowing a horseshoe, a symbol of our ability to digest anything," she writes. Her childhood was spent at Holkham Hall; the gigantic family home in Norfolk, with over a thousand acres of land. In her galleries were exhibited classical Greek statues and works by Rubens and Van Dyck collected by Thomas Coke; first Earl of Leicester and who built the house in the 18th century. She also treasured a code written by Leonardo da Vinci. At ten years old, Anne was entrusted with the task of "airing it out," which meant taking it out of the safe and carefully flipping through all seventy-two pages of it. The manuscript today belongs to Bill Gates.
Like so many English stately homes, Holkham Hall is open to the public. However, when Anne was a child, she and her family were the only ones who enjoyed it. She was only admitted to friends; to highlight, the English royal family, whose palace, Sandringham, is a few kilometers away. King George V and King George VI hunted with Anne's grandfather and father. “Holkham was a completely masculinity-oriented estate and their entire organization was definitely old-fashioned,” the author explains. In fact, her father was the last Earl of Leicester by direct line: following English primogeniture laws, having no male issue, title and ownership passed to a distant nephew, not Anne. "I tried with all my might to be a boy and even weighed almost five kilos at birth, but I was a girl and there was nothing to do," she summarizes.
While the men hunted pheasants and partridges and the women drank tea, the Coke sisters played with the princesses Isabel and Margarita. Anne remembers the future Queen of England as a responsible and cautious girl, while her sister, with whom Anne was three years older: "She was mischievous, fun and imaginative." From those summers on Holkham beach under the watchful eye of nannies, and Christmas parties at Windsor Castle, a friendship would emerge between the two that would literally last until Princess Margaret's death in 2002.
During those decades, both endured the war, appeared in society, married, had children, lived stormy marriages, traveled together and attended hundreds of parties and social events on behalf of the crown. However, if there is an episode linked to the royal family that Lady Anne remembers in detail, it is the coronation of Elizabeth II, in which she served as one of her six ladies-in-waiting. His role of her? Help carry the sovereign's velvet and ermine train. A task for which he had to practice for hours under the supervision of the Duke of Norfolk, the organizer of the royal event (“He had 94 diagrams, each one showing different parts of the ceremony, each minute was planned and each movement prescribed”) .
Young Anne Coke remembers another nobleman, the Marquess of Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley), with more rapture: “He was gorgeous and very proud of his appearance.” The problem was that, "as he had not dressed himself in his life", he was not able to fasten the hooks of one of the garments in a part of the ceremonial. In the end, the issue was solved by putting square brackets, easier to manipulate.
Lady Anne still remembers with emotion the arrival at Westminster Abbey of the royal carriage: “I have been asked many times if the queen seemed nervous. No: she was calm, as always. She knew exactly what she had to do." She will never forget how, before starting the procession, Elizabeth II turned to her ladies-in-waiting and said: "Ready, girls?" (Ready, girls?). "We all nodded and started walking."
With hardly any sleep and no breakfast, there was a coronation moment when Anne began to feel dizzy. Fortunately, the usher gentleman of the Black Cane, one of the many participating senior officials, came to her rescue, discreetly supporting her. Soon after, adrenaline (plus a shot of whiskey offered by the Archbishop of Canterbury) came to her aid and the rest of the day passed without incident. "Going outside, behind the queen, was even more exciting than going into the abbey (...) it seemed like the whole country was cheering."
The only one who seemed not to have had such a good time, he observed, was Princess Margaret. When, years later, she asked him why, the answer was clear: “He told me that of course he was sad: 'I just lost my dear father, and really, I just lost my sister too, who is going to be very busy as of now,'” writes Lady Glenconner. The figure of Margarita is a constant in her memories, but if someone dominates them it is Anne's husband, Colin Tennant, with whom she had five children, three of whom survive.
Colin was the great-grandson of Charles Tennant, 1st Baron Glenconner and inventor of lye. The heir to a large family fortune, among the things he liked the most was buying lavish homes without consulting his wife, dressing flashily, not using dishes to eat, and organizing parties. “Eccentricity ran in the family,” explains Anne. Eccentricity and something else: even before getting married, the young bride was literally paralyzed by her husband's sudden attacks of anger: "From one moment to the next, Colin could change completely, his face would be transformed by anger , like that of a werewolf, and exploded. However, Anne believed the promise of her future husband that, once married, she would "change", which did not happen.
She soon learned that her marriage was hopeless, but she never thought of breaking up. It was something that the women in his circle, he says, did not cross their minds. Both her mother and her friends (among them, Princess Margarita), urged her to shut up and endure: “Practically all of us were told that we had to move on and not complain. Even the queen, head of state, had to work hard to make her husband happy,” she observes in her latest book. Consequently, her role as Lord Glenconner's wife was: "Do what he wanted, fix the troubles she got into, and always appear delighted with everything."
On Mustique, Lady Anne Glenconner experienced some of the most fabulous and frightening moments of her life: fun family holidays with her five children, sophisticated parties and evenings with Princess Margaret at Basil's Bar, then the only one on the island. They both also spent many hours on the beach, collecting shells and swimming in the turquoise waters while their friends froze in England. But it was also in Mustique where, one night, her aristocratic husband beat her with a cane made of shark bone, leaving her deaf in one ear and convalescing for several days.
That, he says, implied a turning point in his marriage. Unlike Princess Margaret, however, Lady Anne did not get divorced, instead she chose to be as far away from her husband as possible. She dedicated herself to her children and to her role as a lady-in-waiting for the princess, whom she always called "Madam". She also began collaborating with aid projects for battered women, something she continues to do in her nineties.
Colin, for his part, spent most of his time in the Caribbean. Always capricious, he had an elephant rescued from a Scottish zoo brought to the island. In time, the animal's caretaker, a village boy named Kent, would become his butler. And Lord Glenconner left his entire fortune to Kent after his death in 2010. “I still don't know why he made this horrible decision, but I experienced it as a last gesture of his sadistic side, who rejoiced in the discomfort of others and who, Often, it made my marriage become an impossible burden”, sums up Lady Anne, the woman who has decided to stop keeping quiet.
