Anyone who missed my last two posts on Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation on June 4, 1953, can find them here and here.

Today’s post on the last Coronation Day reflects it as seen from two of her six maids of honour, Lady Rosemary Spencer-Churchill and Lady Anne Glenconner.

The other four young women were Lady Moyra Campbell, Lady Mary Russell, Lady Jane Rayne and Baroness Willoughby de Eresby, whom Tatler described as:

six of the most glamorous and blue-blooded women in the land.

Lady Spencer-Churchill’s restored gown

The British designer of the day was Norman Hartnell. He came up with a white silk gown that each of the maids of honour wore.

Lady Spencer-Churchill had hers painstakingly restored before the Platinum Jubilee:

On June 1, 2022, Tatler reported that the gown was the subject of a restoration programme on television (emphases mine):

… Spencer-Churchill has been reunited with her dress, for a new episode of Nick Knowles: Heritage Rescue …

… the now 92-year-old Spencer-Churchill is presented with the dress she wore during the Coronation, after it was painstakingly restored to its former glory by textile conservator Emma Telford. Having suffered a dramatic rip to its front and side, Telford apparently spent 400 hours repairing the delicate silk gown.

Lady Spencer-Churchill was moved to tears by the final result:

Overwhelmed by the appearance of the restored piece, which undoubtedly brought back touching memories, she was suddenly moved to tears. Praising the efforts of Telford, she described the transformation as ‘unbelievable’ and added – after securing her glasses to better see the improvements – ‘It’s fantastic. Emma, I congratulate you.’

She recalled the rehearsals with the other maids of honour before the day:

After being asked by Knowles what she could remember from the event, Spencer-Churchill describes how well her and the other Coronation Maids of Honour had been trained by the Duke of Norfolk for the occasion. After hours of rehearsals and guidance, she had apparently believed at the time that ‘nothing could possibly go wrong’.

And nothing went wrong.

Lady Anne Glenconner remembers the Royals

Lady Anne Glenconner went on to become Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting for 34 years.

As I mentioned yesterday, she was Lady Anne Coke before she got married, the daughter of the 5th Earl of Leicester. The family home was Holkham Hall, just a few miles away from Sandringham in Norfolk. As such, she had been friends with Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret since childhood and attended each other’s birthday parties.

On November 10, 2022, Lady Glenconner gave an interview to The Times, ‘The Queen, Charles, Camilla, royal secrets and me’:

… She is 90 now, an age when she could be forgiven for staying at home by the fire in Norfolk. Instead, she’s in her cosy flat in west London, chatting animatedly and as close to bouncing up and down with excitement as it is possible to be while also maintaining correct posture and ladylike deportment at all times. Her accent makes the late Queen sound middle-class – “orf” for off, “gel” for girl – and she makes no concession whatsoever to old age, basically by refusing to acknowledge that she is, in fact, old.

She had just come out with a second book, Whatever Next? Lessons from an Unexpected Life:

The new book has a jolly anecdote for every day of the year and excellent advice typical of her generation: be stoic, don’t dwell on things and, if in doubt, laugh. “I hate the word emotional,” she says. “It’s always in the newspapers. Perhaps you don’t have it in The Times.”

The book includes more information about her family:

There is also much darker material about Glenconner’s marriage to a violent, abusive and serially unfaithful man and the loss of two of her sons. She buried Charlie and Henry while caring for a third, Christopher. He suffered catastrophic injuries in a motorbike accident in Belize and was thought unlikely to recover (he did). Charlie, her eldest, started taking heroin at 16. He contracted hepatitis C and died, aged 39, in 1996. Henry, her second son, married and had a child before coming out as gay. It wasn’t a complete surprise, she says, because as a boy he used to dress up in her clothes, but when he married she assumed it was just a phase. He was diagnosed as HIV positive 18 months after he came out and died of Aids in 1990 at the age of 26.

Glenconner turned to prayer and her Christian faith to help her to cope and spoke to a psychiatrist, although typically that was as much to help her to deal with Colin as it was to manage her depression …

Joy, she believes, is always waiting for us somewhere, even in our darkest moments.

Her husband was responsible for many of those. She had moments of “vivid happiness” with him, but he was also physically, emotionally and verbally abusive. Repeatedly unfaithful, early in their marriage he told her, “I’m going to break you, Anne.” He failed. She was 23 when they married and 78 when he died. In those 55 years she bore him five children and was spat at, kicked and had things thrown at her.

Once, on holiday on Mustique, he dragged her out of their twin daughters’ birthday party and beat her up so badly she nearly died, and has been deaf in one ear ever since. He left her bloodied and barely conscious on the floor of the house and returned to the party …

Her earlier years were much happier:

She was born in 1932 and brought up at Holkham Hall, a vast Palladian pile in north Norfolk, the eldest of two daughters of the Earl and Countess of Leicester. Her father was an equerry to George VI, her mother a lady-in-waiting to the late Queen’s mother. Christmas meant a tree with real candles and two footmen to watch over it and parties at nearby Sandringham with the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. She was a maid of honour at the Queen’s coronation and she and other young women were followed and photographed and interviewed.

“We were a sort of harbinger of the girl bands,” she says. “There’ll never be another coronation like that, ever. It was really tip top.”

She does not mind that King Charles will have a slimmed-down coronation:

I think it has to be. And anyway, I’m so fond of King Charles but, you know, he’s not young. The Queen was so beautiful, so glamorous, and look at the Duke of Edinburgh. He was to die for. People were madly in love with him. It was absolute perfection.

She is close friends with King Charles and Queen Consort Camilla:

She wouldn’t presume to call herself close friends with the King and Queen, but they clearly are. They invite her to dinner when they’re at Sandringham and send a car to pick her up. She invited them to her 90th birthday party at Holkham, a house Charles knows well. As a child, he was sent there if he had mumps or measles to avoid infecting the Queen. Glenconner’s father taught him to shoot and fish, her mother how to make pottery and drive. “Darling Elizabeth,” the young Charles wrote to her, “thank you SO MUCH for allowing me to drive your Jag and van.”

“I went to his wedding,” says Glenconner absent-mindedly. “Both weddings, actually.”

Of Charles’s reign, she told The Times:

He’ll make a “great” king. “He’s had long enough. He really minds about things and people and you can see it. And she’s great. She’s wonderful for him.”

Will he ever command the affection his mother did? “I think it’ll be different. People are different, in a way. He’s only just become king, so it’s a bit… Ask me that in a year or so.”

She also likes the Prince and Princess of Wales:

William and Kate live near her in Norfolk and Glenconner is a big fan of theirs.

“I think she’s absolutely fantastic. I don’t know her very, very well, but they come to Mustique quite often. I think she’s wonderful, and Prince William. They’re so good together. And lovely children. And she looks stunning, doesn’t she? That’s a help. I think she was very well brought up by Carole.”

Glenconner did not wish to discuss Prince Andrew:

I wasn’t a lady-in-waiting for 34 years without learning discretion.

She attended the Sussexes’ wedding and thinks that perhaps Meghan had mismatched expectations:

“I feel that probably the sort of things the royal family have to do, they’re just not very interesting. You’re not driven around in a golden coach. They had a wonderful wedding, but life isn’t going…” She pauses. “One’s own wedding was fantastic, but next day you’re back to normal. I don’t know whether she thought it was going to be all very grand.”

The interviewer compared Meghan with Princess Margaret, which met with Lady Glenconner’s disapproval:

Princess Margaret was something of a royal renegade herself, so she might have sympathised. She gives me an arch look.

“I rather doubt it.”

She was also unhappy with The Crown:

Dame Judi Dench wrote to The Times describing the series as “cruelly unjust” and “crude sensationalism” and demanded it be prefaced with a disclaimer saying it is a work of fiction.

“I think it should,” says Glenconner, who was portrayed in an earlier series. “Absolutely it should. One saw the moment when I was on, and Princess Margaret, and it bore no relation to the truth whatsoever. I don’t watch it now. I couldn’t. It would make me so angry, seeing people trashed like that. Well, not trashed, but not like them. It’s fiction. I think it should say so clearly. And,” she says darkly, “a lot of people do.”

Here’s an interesting fact about the Royal household:

We learn that there’s an NHS GP practice in the stables at Buckingham Palace, which treats all the royal household, including her.

Glenconner says that Camilla was very supportive of her writing about her abusive marriage:

She told her children she wanted to write about the abuse and they agreed that it was the right time. She was also influenced by Queen Camilla, “who’s done a wonderful job to bring domestic abuse to the fore. People talk about it.” The Glenconners’ wealth meant that, to an extent, she was able physically to get away from her husband: different bedrooms, different houses, even different countries when he bought Mustique and spent much of his time trying to turn it from a mosquito-infested dump with no running water to the luxury playground it is today. (Mick Jagger is one of many who own a house there. She looks at me as if I’m stupid when I ask if she’s ever danced with him. “Yes, of course I have. And sung with him.”)

Divorce was out of the question:

“The way I was brought up was very different,” she says. “When I did go back to my mother, just after marrying, when I was pregnant with Charlie, she said, ‘You married him. You go straight back and you make the very best of it you can.’ And I’m very glad I did and the children are very glad I did.

… “in those days, you got on with it. Now, I wouldn’t dream of saying you should stick with somebody who’s treating you badly. But I was brought up that you stuck with it for as long as you possibly could, unless you were killed. Which, of course, I very nearly was.”

Lord Glenconner’s death brought a final blow:

When Colin died in 2010, he disinherited his wife and children and left everything to his St Lucian manservant. Glenconner writes that she genuinely mourned his death and made a conscious decision “not to dwell on that final act of cruelty. And, since I made that decision, I now see every day as a gift.”

She lives near her ancestral home, Holkham Hall:

which her father presciently encouraged her to buy early in her marriage. Her eldest son, Lord Glenconner since his father’s death, recently married, making his mother the Dowager Lady Glenconner.

Lady Glenconner refuses to be called Dowager:

I don’t want to be called a dowager. I’ll be Anne, Lady Glenconner. Why? Because I spent my whole life trying to be young. That’s why I walk so much and try to sit properly. I tell people not to shuffle. If you can hoodwink your body into thinking it’s younger, it’s a jolly good thing to do.

Perhaps Lady Glenconner and Lady Spencer-Churchill will be at the Coronation on May 6. If so, I hope they have a good time.