How Anne Glenconner, 92, battled via trauma of husband’s abuse

When Lady Glenconner attended the King’s Coronation last year, she was one of just a handful of people in Westminster Abbey who had been there 70 years earlier too.

Because in 1953, Anne Coke, as she was then, was maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth II when she was crowned as millions watched on television.  

Back then, the much-loved aristocrat, who turns 92 today, was three years away from marrying the man who would define her life. 

Colin Tennant, the 3rd Baron Glenconner, subjected his wife to sadistic beatings and was a flagrant adulterer – but the couple stayed married for 54 years until his death in 2010. 

Lady Glenconner, who for decades served as a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, has also endured the pain of losing two of her five children.

Second son Henry, who came out as gay after getting married and having a son, died aged just 29 from Aids in 1990, while eldest Charles passed away in 1996 from hepatitis. 

Born on July 16, 1932 as Anne Veronica Coke to The Hon. Thomas Coke and Lady Elizabeth, she spent her much of her childhood on the family estate, Holkham Hall, in Norfolk. 

As a child, she spent time playing with young Princess Elizabeth and Margaret, both at her home and at Sandringham, which is a few miles from Holkham Hall.  

She met her husband at a debutante ball at the Ritz during the summer of 1955 and quickly fell in love. The couple married the following year. 

Lady Glenconner shared in her 2022 memoir Whatever Next?: Lessons from an Unexpected Life, how Tennant was shockingly violent at times.

His worst rages came after he bought the Caribbean island of Mustique in 1958, a decision Lady Glenconner later described as a ‘great leap into the unknown’.

The mother-of-five was left deaf in one ear after a particularly vicious beating – during which she feared her husband would kill her.

It happened one night in the late 1970s, when the family were celebrating the birthday of their twin daughters, Flora and Amy, on Mustique.

Tennant was infuriated by Lady Glenconner’s decision to excuse herself from speaking with clients so she could return to her children.

After roughly forcing her into his car and driving them home, Tennant physically attacked her.  

‘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,’ she said. 

‘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.’ 

Lady Glenconner, who is still deaf in one ear to this day, said Tennant did later apologise and promised he would not do it again. 

She also described how, despite his immense faults, there were also good times with her husband.

Tennant had spent a lot of his own money building a new village, installing electricity and creating well-paying jobs for locals on Mustique. 

It was there that Lady Glenconner and her husband hosted Princess Margaret on several joyous occasions.

She wrote: 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.’

She also expanded on Tennant’s regular liaisons with other women.  

‘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,’ she wrote. 

‘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.’

In 1987, Tennant moved to St Lucia after investing in an undeveloped 480-acre estate which he wanted to develop into somewhere like Mustique, which had become a favourite destination for celebrities. 

However, the venture failed to work out and Tennant ended up living alone. 

He became seriously ill with prostate cancer in 2010 and refused to return to England for treatment, so Lady Glenconner spent some time in the West Indies looking after him.

She said that seeing her husband so frail was ‘desperately upsetting’.

One night, she cried to herself in her bedroom, causing her husband to come into the room and embrace her. 

He asked her if it ‘wasn’t all that bad’, to which she responded, ‘no Colin. Of course not’. 

Shortly before he died, Tennant changed his will and left everything he owned to his valet, Kent Adonai.

Lady Glenconner later said that the decision 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.’

Lady Glenconner’s third son Christopher, who was born in 1968, suffered a catastrophic head injury while on a gap year in Belize.

She nursed him as he spent four months in a coma, before caring for him for five years after he woke up. 

He has life-changing injuries but has had two children from two marriages.  

Lady Glenconner admitted last year that her decision to share her own story of her husband’s abuse had been ‘influenced’ by Queen Camilla’s work with domestic abuse survivors in her role as patron of the Safelives charity. 

Since writing about her experience of domestic violence, Lady Glenconner said she has received ‘countless letters’ from women who have endured bitter struggles with their partners.

Lady Glenconner told Fox Digital she ‘didn’t say everything she wanted to’ in an earlier book, adding: ‘I was influenced, I supposed, by the Queen Consort, who has done so much for battered wives and women who are abused. And I had a talk with my children… That’s why I did it.’

As well as her 2022 memoir, Lady Glenconner is the author of Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown.

She has also written two novels, Murder on Mustique and A Haunting at Holkham.