Today would have been Lady Anne Glenconner and Lord Colin Glenconner’s 69th wedding anniversary, a matrimony that was truly a royal affair.

The bride was a close friend and confidante of Princess Margaret, the young princess and the Queen Mother were among the guests at St Withburga’s Church in Holkham, Norfolk, on April 21 1956.

Margaret’s future husband Anthony Armstrong-Jones was the wedding photographer. 

But despite the glitz and glamour of their wedding day, the 54 year marriage – which ended when Lord Colin died in 2010 – was far from a fairytale.  

Meanwhile, the groom was the charismatic Hon. Colin, the 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.

Their relationship had been a whirlwind romance having met at met at a debutantes ball at The Ritz the previous summer.

Lady Anne – now 92 – gushed over her soon-to-be hubby, describing him as ‘very good-looking, charming, a marvellous dancer’, adding that ‘best of all, he talked about more than shooting and fishing’.

Their marriage would be turbulent with Lord Colin subjecting is wife to physical and emotional abuse over the slightest provocation. 

On top of this, he was constantly unfaithful to Lady Anne from the very start of their marriage and may have been bisexual. 

In fact from their very first wedding night the naive 23-year-old Lady Anne, who in her own words was ‘totally ignorant to sex’, had hoped her vastly more worldly 29-year-old new husband would help her learn with ‘gentleness and kindness’.

Instead, Lord Colin wrecked their first night as husband and wife when he had a huge tantrum that left Lady Anne exhausted.

When they did consummate the marriage on their honeymoon, it was ‘awkward, painful and not particularly enjoyable or romantic’, a theme that would permeate their sex life for the rest of their marriage.

Lord Colin 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.

Despite Lady Anne’s claim she’d ‘dread going to bed with him’ the couple still had five children together who the Lord loved greatly.

But over the course of their 54 years of marriage, Lord Colin did not show the same level of compassion for his wife who he constantly bullied and mistreated.

This manifested itself in both physically and emotionally, such as when Lady Anne said he beat her so hard with his shark-bone walking stick that it left her dead in one ear. 

And when he wasn’t sexually satisfied by his wife, Lord 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, Lord Colin told his wife that was how he ‘wanted [her] to behave all the time’. But she had been terrified by the visions and hallucinations she had experienced.

The ugliest side of his character came to the fore after Lord Colin bought the Caribbean island of Mustique in 1958, an impulse buy she described 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 Lady Anne, to regard himself as the king of Mustique and behaved accordingly.

His hubris meant he felt entitled to attack people physically, which Lady 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, his wife found herself the focus of his ire.

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

Lady Anne said: ‘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 her 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.

While she described being married to Lord Colin as ‘frightful at times and very, very difficult’, she still 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 Lord 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.’

Indeed, the couple lived increasingly separate lives, with Lord Colin choosing to stay in the Caribbean while his wife remained in England raising the children. 

He 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 Lord Colin refused to return to England for treatment when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2010, Lady 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 he had one final insult for his long-suffering wife and children from beyond the grave.

Lord Colin changed his will shortly before he died and left everything he owned to his valet, Kent Adonai.

Following a legal battle the estate was divided between the valet and Cody Charles Edward Tennant, the fourth Lord Glenconner   

Lady 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.

‘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.