Violent rages, sadistic beatings, in-your-face adultery…It should have been a fairytale marriage when the Queen's Maid of Honour married aristocrat Colin Tenant – on this day. But there were brutal surprises in store for Anne Glenconner

When 23-year-old Anne Coke married the Scottish aristocrat Colin Tennant at St Withburga’s Parish Church in Norfolk on 21 April 1956, it must have seemed like a fairytale match.

After all Lady Anne, the daughter of the 5th Earl of Leicester, was a wealthy and beautiful former Debutante of the Year whose family had been close confidantes of the Royals family for generations. 

 Her grandmother was Edward VIII’s mistress and her father an equerry to George VI, while she had been maid of honour at the late Queen’s coronation three years earlier and would later become lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret.

Indeed, Anne had been great friends with the young Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth ever since they had played together as children both at Sandringham and at her own grand home a few miles away – Holkham Hall, a stunning Palladian mansion set in its own glorious 25,000-acre estate.

Lady Anne Coke, the 23-year-old  daughter of the Earl and Countess of Leicester had been Tatler’s debutante of the year

Lady Anne Coke, daughter of the Earl of Leicester and Mr Colin Tennant, heir to Lord Glenconner pictured in 1956, shortly after they had announced their engagement

The wedding took place  at St Withburga’s Church, Holkham, Norfolk. Lady Anne was 23, Colin Tenant was 29-year

Lady Anne Coke’s  wedding dress did not arrive from London until two hours before her wedding

 Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, attended the wedding

The suave and charismatic Hon. Colin, meanwhile, was heir to Baron Glenconner and the family’s 3,500-acre estate at The Glen, near Traquair in the Scottish Borders. As part of Princess Margaret’s rather raffish set, he knew many glamorous people from the world of literature, art and show business.

The happy couple had met at a debutantes ball at The Ritz the previous summer, where Anne had been bowled over. 

She later enthused about him as ‘very good-looking, charming, a marvellous dancer’, adding that ‘best of all, he talked about more than shooting and fishing’.

Today, on their 68th wedding anniversary, Lady Anne has a rather more nuanced story to tell. For if theirs was a fairytale marriage, it was one of the dark and disturbing variety, rather than an airbrushed Disney version – as she revealed in her her 2022 autobiography ‘Whatever Next’.

In fact, Colin – later Lord Glenconner – was a physical and emotional bully who would frequently fly into violent rages at the slightest provocation. 

He was also constantly unfaithful to Anne from the very start of their marriage and may have been bisexual.

It was no surprise, then, that their relationship began to go off the rails right from the start. Anne – now 91-year-old Lady Anne Glenconner – recalled that on her wedding night she had been a naive 23-year-old who had been brought up by nannies and governesses and was ‘totally ignorant about sex’.

Her great hope was that her vastly more worldly 29-year-old new husband would help her learn with ‘gentleness and kindness’. 

But the volatile Colin was always on a hair trigger. That first night, Colin had a tantrum that, Anne said, left him exhausted.

When they did consummate the marriage on their honeymoon, it was ‘awkward, painful and not particularly enjoyable or romantic’. 

He, of course, blamed her and a few days later tried to educate her in the ways of sex by taking her to a private show at a Parisian bordello.

Anne, meanwhile, felt humiliated and felt as though her new husband was telling her, ‘You’re hopeless at it, but you’ll get some good tips from watching this.’

But despite being married for 53 years and having five children together, their sex life never did improve, and would be marked with ‘criticism and disappointment’.

According to Anne: ‘He used to get very cross with me, which of course made things worse and I used to dread going to bed with him. I tried to be enthusiastic but it never worked between us. For a very long time, I felt I must be to blame.’

Colin’s solution was to spike her drink with with what she suspects was LSD when they were on holiday in the Grenadines. Under the influence of the mind-bending drug, they finally ended up making passionate, energetic and uninhibited love.

The following day, Colin told Anne that was how he ‘wanted [her] to behave all the time’.

But she had been terrified by the visions and hallucinations she had experienced and replied she had felt awful at time – and still did.

Lady Glenconner added: ’Sex was by no means our only problem. Colin often had violent rages – one of them so severe that I thought he’d end up killing me.’

The ugliest side of his character came to the fore after Colin bought the Caribbean island of Mustique in 1958, an impulse buy she decribed as ‘a great leap into the unknown’.

After spending much of his fortune buying the island, building a new village, installing electricity and creating a lot of well-paying jobs for local people servicing the tourist industry, he came, according to Anne, to regard himself as the king of Mustique and behaved accordingly.

Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret with the father of the bride, the Earl Of Leicester, after the ceremony

The bride and groom leave for a honeymoon which turned out to be a bit of a disaster

The christening of baby Charles Edward Pevensey son of Mr Colin Tennant, now 3rd Baron Glenconner,  and mother Lady Anne

His hubris meant he felt entitled to attack people physically, which Anne says was ‘simply accepted…as what white men did’ by the islanders. Then one November night in the late 70s, as they were celebrating the birthday of their twin girls, Anne became the focus of his ire.

After visiting a bar to speak with clients at Colin’s request, Anne excused herself to return to the twins a decision that infuriated Colin, who grabbed her roughly, bundled her into his car and shook with rage during the 10-minute drive to their house.

According to Anne: ‘Drawing up at the house, I got out of the car and before I knew what was happening, he hit me across the head from behind with his shark-bone walking stick. It knocked me straight to the ground. And then he launched in on me.

‘I lay there, trying to protect my head and begging him to stop. He didn’t: he was in a frenzy, quite out of his mind. I was utterly terrified, convinced he might actually kill me.

‘I have no idea how long it lasted, but eventually he tired himself out. I lay there until I heard his car drive off, then crawled into the main house and locked myself into the bedroom.’

She was terrified he would return to ‘finish [her] off’, but later learnt he had returned to the bar where he told a mutual friend he had ‘just given Anne a thrashing’.

That thrashing left Anne in serious pain from a burst eardrum that leaves her deaf in that ear to this day.

That beating was, she recalled, the first time Colin knew he’d gone too far. He apologised, promising not to do it again in the only show of remorse she’d ever seen from him.

Anne described being married to Colin as ‘frightful at times and very, very difficult’, but insists there was happiness, too: ‘As time went on, there would be moments of vivid happiness. Dancing was one of them; we loved jive and rock and roll and would let rip in various clubs. To me, those were really magical times when I could forget myself and all the tensions between us.

‘I also learned to treasure the many moments of joy and laughter we shared with our family and friends, and appreciate the times Colin was at his best, charming the people around us.’

But sometimes, society social occasions meant coming face-to-face with Colin’s latest mistress. She added: ‘The husbands of my generation, who usually held all the financial cards, were often flagrantly unfaithful. Colin was, from the earliest days of our marriage.

‘For the most part, wives simply put up with it and didn’t make a fuss. Many made arrangements of their own. I am so glad I had that opportunity. Ten years into my marriage, I took a lover, which did me an enormous amount of good. 

I had been taught to think of divorce as impossible but I was in great need of some kindness and cherishing, and enjoying some of that affection changed my life.

Our relationship lasted 34 years until my friend died. I was very lucky. It was perfect, though it was only lunch once a week and the occasional magical weekend. 

It was only with my friend that I realised how amazing sex could be and what I had been missing. While I was so grateful to experience that, I couldn’t help feeling sad that it had been so difficult with Colin.

It’s hard not to feel cross now. I’d finally discovered it takes two to have great sex, so it was always going to be difficult with someone who only considered his own wants. I no longer had to blame myself for those difficulties.

‘My friend’s wife was very generous. She knew about our arrangement and, in fact, had one of her own though there was no question of any of us leaving our marriages.

‘When my friend was dying, she rang me and said he would like to say goodbye. I was always grateful to her for that and that she later sent me a memento. 

‘Colin, however, was terribly jealous. He couldn’t understand how on earth could I want to be with anyone else. The fact I might enjoy the company, in and out of bed, of someone who was consistently kind to me did not seem to occur to him.’

Though she spent as much time with her husband as she could, Lady Anne mainly lived in England with the children, while he preferred life in the Caribbean. 

Colin moved from Mustique to St Lucia in 1987 after investing in a 480-acre estate he wanted to develop into somewhere as spectacular as Mustique. However, the venture eventually failed, and he found himself living alone in failing health.

When Colin refused to return to England for treatment when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2010, Anne travelled to his bedside to nurse him.

She described seeing him so frail as ‘desperately upsetting’. Colin, after hearing her weep quietly to herself in her bedroom, came in, hugged her and said, ‘It wasn’t all bad, was it, Anne?’

She replied: ‘No, Colin,’ I said. ‘Of course not.’ But she returned to England soon afterwards, and would never see him again.  

But Colin had one final insult for his long-suffering wife and children from beyond the grave. He changed his will shortly before he died and left everything he owned to his valet , Kent Adonai.

Anne said the move was ‘one last flourish of his sadistic side, the side that revelled in the distress of others and which at times had made any sort of marriage to him seem an impossible burden’.

‘I could not and would not be broken by him from beyond the grave, any more than I would allow it when he was alive … I made a conscious decision not to dwell on that final act of cruelty.

‘People have often asked me if Colin was gay or bisexual, particularly so after his will was read. The innuendo was continual and inescapable. The truth is, I still don’t know.

Princess Margaret, centre, and her friends Lord Colin Tennant (left) and Lady Anne Tennant waiting on the jetty at Mustique to greet Queen Elizabeth II

Though she spent as much time with her husband as she could, Lady Anne mainly lived in England with the children, while he preferred life in the Caribbean

Colin had one final insult for his long-suffering wife and children from beyond the grave. He changed his will shortly before he died and left everything he owned to his valet , Kent Adonai

Lady Anne Glenconner at the book launch in Bonhams, Mayfair 

‘Colin always had male friends whom he mentored and encouraged, but he never gave me any indication that he was sleeping with them. On the other hand, I was painfully aware of the multiple affairs he had with women.’

But Anne added that: ‘Sex before marriage was unthinkable for a girl from my background, and divorce a shameful admission of failure.

‘Our marriage had lasted for 54 years. I can now look back and feel proud that I managed to find a way to stay married to Colin – and even to agree with him that it wasn’t all bad,’ she wrote in her book.

Perhaps that will be the positive thought at the forefront of Lady Anne’s mind as she quietly marks the anniversary of an extraordinary and often painful marriage.

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