Earl Spencer stopped his son marrying me because he feared I had ‘mad blood’
In the last part of the aristocratic memoir that’s kept Mail readers enthralled all week, a final bombshell...
LADY Glenconner was Princess Margaret’s closest confidante and witnessed first hand the Queen’s sister’s extraordinary life. Here, in the final extract from her new memoirs, she tells how Princess Diana’s mother stole her first love.
JUST before my 18th birthday, in June 1950, I had my coming- out dance at Holkham Hall, our family seat and the fifth largest estate in England.
Tatler had just declared me ‘debutante of the year’, which I was delighted by, although the status added to the pressure I felt.
The season had only begun in May, so having my dance in June meant I hardly knew anyone.
Because my father, the 5th Earl of Leicester, was a close friend of the King, I’d grown up playing with the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, both of whom had been invited to my coming out ball.
Princess Elizabeth couldn’t come, because she was married by then and in Malta with her husband, Prince Philip. But Princess Margaret and the King and Queen arrived at about eleven, my father meeting them at the South Gate and escorting them down the long avenue.
Although I met no dashing young men at my own dance, the season led to a few boyfriends. One of them was Johnnie Althorp, who had recently returned from Australia, having been ADC to the governor of South Australia.
The moment he arrived at Holkham, at my father’s invitation, I fell madly in love with him. I thought he was wonderful: funny, handsome and charming. We went out together in London, where I was staying with Lady Fermoy — a friend of Queen Elizabeth — as a paying guest for the season.
One night Johnnie took me into the garden and asked me to marry him. A wave of euphoria swept over me and for days after I really did feel as though I was walking on air. We told both sets of parents but kept the news a secret from everybody else.
Lady Fermoy was extremely sociable. ‘If you have a young man taking you out,’ she would say, ‘ do bring him to the drawing room to have a drink first.’
SO I did. And that was my mistake. When I introduced her to Johnnie, her eyes lit up, and the next time I brought him round, not only was she there but so was her daughter Frances, whom she had deliberately called back from school. Frances was only 15 at the time, but after she met Johnnie, she sent him a letter with a pair of shooting stockings she had knitted.
Shortly after that he and I were due to meet at Ascot. He was Equerry to the King and I had been invited to stay at Windsor Castle to go to Ascot with the Royal Family.
I had borrowed my mother’s lady’s maid, and when we arrived at Windsor Castle we climbed up and up to a room in the tower.
As we unpacked, we laid out my four dresses for each day at the races. They were beautiful. I should have been excited, but as I hadn’t heard from Johnnie, and there was no message from him, I couldn’t settle.
During the tour of the gardens before lunchtime I was thinking up reasons as to why he hadn’t made contact. Even at lunch with Princess Margaret and the other guests, Johnnie was still nowhere to be seen.
After lunch we drove to the top of the racecourse and got into carriages. We arrived at the Royal Box and it was then I was told that Johnnie would not be joining us because apparently he was ill. I felt a pang of heartache and my mood flattened. Something was wrong.
I spent the day managing to pretend to be as happy as everybody else until we all went back to Windsor in cars for a rest, before going down for drinks and dinner.
When someone happened to mention that they had recently seen Johnnie, who was apparently quite well, I realised that he must be avoiding me. I felt awful. I had to stop myself looking really glum. I did a lot of hard swallowing in a bid not to cry. It was difficult trying to be polite and jolly and enjoy it. I couldn’t. I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong and Johnnie never told me why he had broken off our engagement.
Later, however, I found out that his father, Jack, Earl Spencer, had told him not to marry me because I had Trefusis blood. Trefusis blood was labelled ‘ mad blood’ or ‘ bad blood’ because the Bowes-Lyon girls, Nerissa and Katherine (Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret’s cousins), had been put in a state asylum and were hardly visited by anyone in the Royal Family to whom they were related through Queen Elizabeth.
Although the family connection was convoluted, my maternal grandmother was Marion Trefusis and, however diluted, I suppose no earl or future earl would want to risk their earldom by contaminating it with ‘mad blood’.
Not only did Johnnie then marry Frances, but their youngest daughter was Lady Diana Spencer, who later became Diana, Princess of Wales.
Johnnie and Frances would famously divorce and, rather unusually, Lady Fermoy testified against her daughter in favour of Johnnie having custody of Diana.
He went on to marry my friend Raine, Countess of Dartmouth, who, before their engagement, often rang me up asking for advice on how she could get him to commit. I wasn’t sure why she thought I was a good person to ask, considering I had never succeeded myself.
Whether Johnnie and I would
have been happy together I don’t know, and will never know, but the whole thing really did affect me. It was a brutal rejection and I spent the rest of the summer in a very gloomy mood.
THERE is a photograph of me, taken at my christening in the summer of 1932. I am held by my father, the future 5th Earl of Leicester, and surrounded by male relations wearing solemn faces.
I was a girl and there was nothing to be done about it.
My female status meant that I would not inherit the earldom, or Holkham, with its 27,000 acres of top- grade agricultural land, neither the furniture, the books, the paintings, nor the silver.
When the Duke of York was crowned King George VI in 1937, my father became his Extra Equerry; and in 1953 my mother became a Lady of the Bedchamber, a highranking Lady in Waiting, to Queen Elizabeth II on her Coronation.
My earliest memories of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret come from when I was two or three years old. Princess Elizabeth was six years older, which was quite a lot — she was rather grown-up — but Princess Margaret was only three years older and we became firm friends.
She was naughty, fun and imaginative — the very best sort of friend to have. We used to rush around Holkham, past the grand pictures, whirling through the labyrinth of corridors on our trikes or jumping out at the nursery footmen as they carried huge silver trays from the kitchen.
Princess Elizabeth was much better behaved. ‘Please don’t do that, Margaret,’ or ‘You shouldn’t do that, Anne,’ she would scold us.
In one photograph we are all standing in a line. Princess Elizabeth is frowning at Princess Margaret, suspecting she is up to no good, while Princess Margaret is staring down at my shoes.
Years afterwards, I showed Princess Margaret the photo and asked: ‘Ma’am, why were you looking at my feet?’
And she replied: ‘Well, I was so jealous because you had silver shoes and I had brown ones.’
In the summer, the princesses would come down to Holkham beach where we would spend whole days making sandcastles, clad in the most unattractive and prickly black bathing suits with black rubber caps and shoes.
OUR connection to the Royal Family was close. When I was in my late teens, Prince Charles became like a younger brother to me, spending weeks with us all at Holkham.
He would come to stay whenever he had any of the contagious childhood diseases, like chickenpox, because the Queen, having never gone to school, had not been exposed to them and the Palace wanted to protect her from catching them.
He was such a kind and loving little boy and I’ve loved him ever since — the whole family have always been deeply fond of him.
My early childhood was idyllic, but the outbreak of war in 1939 changed everything. I was seven, my sister Carey was five. My father was posted to Egypt with the Scots Guards so my mother followed to support him, as many wives did.
Everybody thought the Germans would choose to invade Britain from the Norfolk coast, so before my
mother left for Egypt, she moved Carey and me up to Scotland, to stay with my Great-Aunt Bridget, away from Mr Hitler’s U-boats.
Before she left for Egypt my mother told me: ‘You’re now too old to have a nanny, so Daddy and I have chosen a governess for you called Miss Bonner and she is very nice, and you will be very happy with her.’
Well, it turned out that Miss Bonner was not very nice.
She was fairly all right with Carey, but really cruel to me. Every night, whatever I had done, however well I had behaved, she would punish me by tying my hands to the back of the bed and leaving me like that all night.
I was too frightened of Miss Bonner to ask Carey to untie me, and Carey would have been too frightened to do it anyway. Both Carey and I suffered badly through this. I wanted to protect Carey, fearing Miss Bonner might do the same to her, so neither of us told anyone.
BECAUSE my mother had chosen Miss Bonner, I thought she knew what the governess was doing to me and didn’t mind, or even thought it was good for me. It caused me terrible confusion because I couldn’t understand why my parents would want me to be treated like that.
Fortunately, Great-Aunt Bridget’s belief in Christian Science saved me. Eventually, Miss Bonner was sacked, not because of her ill-treatment of me (which I am sure Great-Aunt Bridget knew nothing about) but for being a Roman Catholic and taking me to Mass. There was nothing worse than Catholicism, as far as GreatAunt Bridget was concerned.
Miss Bonner left an invisible scar on me. To this day, I find it almost impossible to think about what she did to me.
Years later, she sent me a card congratulating me on my engagement, which triggered the most unpleasant rush of memories and made me physically sick.
In 1943, when I was ten and Carey was eight, our parents returned from Egypt and we returned to Norfolk. By then my great-grandfather had died and my grandfather had become 4th Earl of Leicester.
My grandfather liked to interest me and, wanting to teach me about Holkham’s treasures, put me in charge of airing the Codex Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci’s seventy-two-page manuscript, a study on water and stars.
Once a fortnight, I would retrieve it from the butler’s pantry, where it was kept in a safe along with the Coke jewels and a Bible picture book.
I used to lick my finger and spin through the pages, frowning down at Da Vinci’s mirror handwriting, studying the little drawings and diagrams with interest.
Bought on the 1st Earl’s grand tour, it belonged to my family for at least 250 years before, very sadly, my father had to sell it, needing money for the upkeep of the estate. Acquired at Christie’s by an American businessman, Armand Hammer, in the Eighties, it was then sold on to Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million, a record sum, making it the most valuable book in the world — and covered with my DNA.
AFTER the war, my mother set up a pottery at Holkham. She was determined it would be a success and understood the need to raise money because, like all of the stately homes in England after the war, Holkham was becoming more and more expensive to run.
People were impressed: it was unconventional for a lady to set up a business. My father was cynical about the whole enterprise. ‘And how are you doing in the potting shed?’ he would ask her, infuriatingly condescending.
Carey and I did our best to throw pots but neither of us had the knack. So, Carey started to paint and design instead with my mother, whose artistic talent, honed at the Slade School of Art, finally found its moment.
I tried to paint, too, but it turned out I wasn’t at all artistic. I asked my mother if I could sell instead. She agreed and, almost straight away, off I set in her Mini Minor, with suitcases in the back containing all the samples wrapped up in newspaper, making my way around England.
Not only was I the only aristocrat on the road, I was the only woman on the road.
If friends lived near to where I was going, I would stay with them. But often there was no option but to stay in travelling- salesmen hotels. These were quite a shock.
They always smelled of cabbage, and each morning I would stand outside the bathroom clutching my sponge-bag in a line of travelling salesmen.
THEY never invited me to go first — I was made to jolly well wait my turn, and they all took ages shaving.
In the evenings I would sit in the hotel lounge, awkwardly reading a book. In the salesmen would come and start asking me questions, and the more I answered, the more shocked they’d become. Once they found out I was the daughter of an earl, their chins would drop to the floor.
At nine o’clock a trolley would be wheeled in and sometimes a mini-bar would appear, and the men, rather sheepishly, would ask: ‘Will you be Mother?’
Despite being the odd one out, or perhaps because of the freedom that my stays in those hotels entailed, I really enjoyed it — the independence, the responsibility, the satisfaction of making a deal and, most of all, the feeling of being taken seriously for the first time in my life.
Holkham Pottery went from strength to strength, eventually employing a hundred people and becoming the largest light industry in North Norfolk.
EXTRACTED from Lady in Waiting, by Anne Glenconner, published by Hodder & Stoughton on October 17 at £20. © Anne Glenconner 2019. To order a copy for £16 (P&P free), visit www. mailshop.co.uk or call 01603 648155.