Lady Glenconner Talks About Life with the British Royals in New Memoir

LONDON — For an inside track on the British royals — the good bits, at least — look no further than Lady Glenconner’s latest, and possibly her last, memoir “Manners & Mischief: An A-Z of a Life Lived Well,” a collection of anecdotes, memories and reflections from the nonagenarian who grew up with Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, and who still has dinner à deux with King Charles, whom she’s known since he was three years old.

The book, published by Bedford Square, is her sixth, and the third memoir from the British aristocrat who only began writing at age 87. Her first book “Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown,” set her on a super-successful late-career path. Her books have been translated into multiple languages and topped bestseller lists, with readers hungry for her wise insights, no-nonsense advice and details of an extraordinary life of privilege, pain and “more than my fair share of both good and bad luck.”

Unlike many royal writers or historians who have spent limited time with the family or observed them from a respectful distance, Lady Glenconner lived in the gilded trenches with Britain’s first family. She grew up at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, her family’s ancestral estate, and one of England’s grandest homes. Her father was Thomas Coke, 5th Earl of Leicester, and her mother, Lady Elizabeth Yorke, was a Lady of the Bedchamber, and a close friend, of Queen Elizabeth.

Born Lady Anne Coke, Glenconner served as a maid of honor at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, and as lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret for more than 30 years. She traveled the world on official — and unofficial — visits with the princess, and entertained her for years on Mustique, the private Caribbean island that Glenconner’s husband Colin Tennant, 3rd Baron Glenconner, bought and transformed into a private hangout for celebrities and socialites.

Her anecdotes are the real deal in a world of spin, artifice and AI-generated rubbish, and come laced with subtle humor, and a mix of high and low. One minute she’s praising Marks & Spencer bras and underpants, and the next she’s detailing the daily dress code at Balmoral and Sandringham, with three changes of outfit required: daywear, tea dress and evening dress.

“There are quite a few of the stories I haven’t written about before, but I thought ‘I’m 93. I’m just going to write what I want.’ I’ve done it as an A to Z, because a lot of people don’t have time to read, and don’t want big books. It’s very easy. You can pick and choose what you want to read,” she said in a telephone interview, adding that she pores over her 100 books of photographs for inspiration.

“I sit down and look at them and they remind me of what I’ve done and who I’ve met,” she said, adding that that she was keen to add more royal stories to this latest book. “People always love a royal story.”

She’s close to Charles and Queen Camilla and often has dinner alone with the king at Sandringham, which is near her home in Norfolk.

“Queen Camilla has her own children and grandchildren, and I think that at 93 she probably thinks I’m a safe pair of hands to keep him company. They send a car for me, which is really kind as I don’t like driving at night, and I go over and have these lovely dinners with him where we just talk and reminisce; it’s perfect,” she writes in the new book.

The two spent one dinner picking over the details of the coronation in 2023. “A few days after the ceremony he invited me over for dinner so we could talk through the ways in which his coronation had differed from his mother’s. There aren’t many of us who were at both, and I think he wanted to hear what I had to say,” she said.

In the book Glenconner also recalls Charles’ 2005 wedding to Camilla, which happened to coincide with the Grand National, the annual horse race at Aintree Racecourse in Liverpool and a sacred day for fans of the sport.

Glenconner writes that the Queen, a keen horsewoman, gave the most wonderful speech “in which she compared the course of their relationship to the racecourse at Aintree.…As soon as she’d finished the speech and the cake was cut, we noticed she beetled off to watch the race.”  

She lifts the veil on many intimate moments, including an extra-bumpy flight to America with Princess Margaret, who was not a nervous flyer. “I was clutching onto my seat, and she looked at me and patted my hand and said, ‘Don’t worry, Anne, we’ll either die or we’ll live and that’s that, no point worrying about it, but I think perhaps we ought to have another drink.’”

There are countless escapades with Princess Margaret, including a clandestine visit to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor when they were living in exile outside Paris. Margaret had wanted to visit her uncle, who abdicated the throne in 1936 so he could marry the American divorcée, Wallis Simpson. Margaret’s father succeeded him as King George VI, and her mother Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, never forgave the duke for renouncing his duty to his country.

The visit “had been kept a secret as the Queen Mother would not have wanted Princess Margaret to go. She hated the Windsors, partly because she knew the Duchess of Windsor mocked her, and partly because she blamed them for her husband having to become king and then becoming ill and dying prematurely. But Princess Margaret wanted to visit so we did a day trip,” writes Glenconner.

Throughout the book, Glenconner is clear-eyed, but also understanding about the shortcomings of the royals and others in her life. Glenconner argues that the queen “could have worked harder to try and find Charles a suitable wife.” She says Princess Diana was “so young when they married and had had very little life experience. And I think when she became so incredibly popular with the public it was very hard for Prince Charles.”

Almost in the same breath, Glenconner expresses her gratitude to Princess Diana for comforting her and her son Henry Tennant, who died of AIDS in 1990, and for being so “direct” about the illness at a time when most people couldn’t talk about it.

Glenconner was once engaged to Princess Diana’s father, John Spencer, 8th Earl Spencer, but he broke it off to marry Diana’s mother, Frances Roche.

“When I heard about their engagement, it was like a dagger to the heart; I felt very down and sad as I was still in love with him,” she writes, adding that she wasn’t even invited to the wedding at Westminster Abbey. She got over him in time. “On reflection I may have had a lucky escape as he did not treat Frances kindly and they eventually divorced,” she writes, adding that Diana grew up in an “unhappy household.”

Glenconner would eventually marry Tennant, but their marriage wasn’t a happy one, either. He was a spendthrift with an explosive temper who physically abused her. In the book, she talks at length about helping other victims of domestic abuse, and said during the interview that she tells people: “Don’t be ashamed of it, don’t think it’s your fault, because so often you are made to think it’s your fault.”

She addresses the abuse in her first memoir, and writes about it even more in her second one, “Whatever Next?” which was published in 2022. She writes that it was Queen Camilla who encouraged her to open up about her experiences. “She is very involved with domestic abuse charities and knew I’d had a difficult marriage. She felt that it would help others to talk about their experiences if I shared mine. I think sometimes people don’t realize that abuse can happen at every level of society,” she writes.

During the interview, Glenconner said she gets many letters about domestic abuse and grief, and replies to them all. “A lovely lady wrote to me the other day, saying she just lost her young daughter, and she keeps waking up in the middle of the night to cry. She kept keeps my book by the bed and reads the chapter on grief. I am very humbled that I have been able to help,” she said.

There are rays of light in the book, too. Glenconner talks about the everyday joys of gardening, having a vodka tonic in the sunshine by her beloved flower beds, or in the shade of the little wooden hut she keeps near her home in Norfolk. She’s passionate about sailing, swimming, driving along country roads and spending time with her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She’s also loving her late-career success, writing bestsellers, and giving talks and interviews about her colorful past.

Having shouldered financial troubles, watched her two eldest sons die and nursed her third son back to health after a horrific motorcycle accident that left him in a coma, she is a survivor, and proud of it, too.

The last chapter of the book is called Zest for Life. In it Glenconner says it’s the everyday pleasures that thrill her, “seeing the owls in flight that are nesting in my barn…browsing the fresh fruit and veg in my little greengrocer’s or spending time with my family. I’ve a had a long and varied life, but I’m not finished yet. There are talks to give and book festivals to attend, and one of my friends has promised to take me for one last sail,” she said.

In the interview she said this book will likely be her last. “I don’t think I can do any more — I’m too old.” But can she be believed? She’s active on Instagram, looking fabulous as she reads from her books or poses with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the fresh air, and it’s clear she’s still living well.