The Dark Story of Britain's Most Forbidden Royal Hideaway: Princess Margaret's Mustique

For twenty-six years, between 1972 and 1998, Princess Margaret kept a villa on a private Caribbean island called Mustique, a sliver of volcanic rock owned by her friend Colin Tennant, Lord Glenconner, and gifted to her as a wedding present in 1960. The villa, called Les Jolies Eaux, became the only home she ever owned outright, and it became the stage on which the most damaging years of her life were played out in full colour. In the autumn of 1973, at Glen, the Glenconner family seat in the Scottish Borders, Margaret was introduced to a twenty-five-year-old landscape gardener named Roddy Llewellyn. She was forty-three.

The villa at Les Jolies Eaux was run, throughout Margaret's tenure, by a household of three named servants whose service spanned the entire twenty-six years. Bertie Sebastian served as cook from 1972 to 1998, hired from Saint Vincent at the recommendation of Colin Tennant, and his name appears in the Glenconner memoir and in the Vanity Fair feature of December 2010 by Henry Porter, in which Sebastian is described preparing the Princess's preferred breakfast of grapefruit and toast on the terrace overlooking Gellizeaux Bay. Sweet Pea Doncaster served as chambermaid from 1974 to 1998, joining the household two years after the villa was completed, and her name is recorded in the Mustique Company archive and in the Tatler retrospective of March 2017.

British Manors investigates the houses, the islands and the private estates that the British royal family and the British aristocracy have used to keep their private lives private. Mustique sits inside that tradition, the offshore Caribbean equivalent of Balmoral or Sandringham, an island bought outright in 1958 by a Scottish landowner and shaped, room by room and beach by beach, to keep the press at a distance. The story of Les Jolies Eaux is the story of how that distance failed.

The Scottish landowner in question was Colin Tennant, third Baron Glenconner, heir to a Border lairdship and a Trinidad sugar fortune, who paid forty-five thousand pounds in 1958 for the entire three-mile sliver of volcanic scrub then known on Admiralty charts simply as Mustique. The island at the moment of purchase had no roads, no jetty, no electricity, no fresh water beyond a few cisterns, and a resident population of about a hundred descendants of plantation workers living in palm-thatched huts on the leeward shore. Tennant arrived with a vision of a private Caribbean members' club for a chosen circle of the British and European nobility, and he announced that vision in 1960 by presenting the freehold of a ten-acre lot above Gellizeaux Bay to Princess Margaret as a wedding gift on the occasion of her marriage to Antony Armstrong-Jones.

The cultural afterlife of Margaret's Mustique has, if anything, eclipsed the historical record of the actual villa. The Crown, the Peter Morgan series for Netflix, dramatised the Roddy Llewellyn affair across two separate seasons, first in series three in 2019 with Helena Bonham Carter playing Margaret on the Mustique terraces in episode seven, and again in series five in 2022 with Lesley Manville taking over the role for the later years of decline. Craig Brown's Ma'am Darling, the Fourth Estate volume of 2017, structured its entire portrait of the Princess around ninety-nine separate glimpses, of which seventeen are set on Mustique or aboard the boats that ferried guests to it, and the book won the James Tait Black Prize for biography.

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Sources

Anne Glenconner, Lady in Waiting, Hodder 2019
Hugo Vickers, Princess Margaret: A Life Unravelled, Hodder 2018
Tina Brown, The Palace Papers, Century 2022
Andrew Lownie, The Mountbattens, Blink 2019
Christopher Warwick, Princess Margaret: A Life of Contrasts, Andre Deutsch 2000
Tim Heald, Princess Margaret: A Life Unravelled, Weidenfeld 2007
Roddy Llewellyn, Roddy Llewellyn's Beautiful Backyards, Cassell 2009
Penny Junor, The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor, HarperCollins 2005
Sally Bedell Smith, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch, Random House 2012
Robert Lacey, Battle of Brothers: William and Harry, HarperCollins 2020
Anne Edwards, Royal Sisters: Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret, William Morrow 1990
Craig Brown, Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, Fourth Estate 2017
News of the World, Princess and the Gardener front page, 23 February 1976, British Library Newspaper Archive
The Daily Telegraph interview with Roddy Llewellyn, 4 April 2014
The Mustique Company official archive, Mustique
The Cotton House Hotel historical records, Mustique
Royal Archives Windsor, RA PM Princess Margaret papers, restricted access, Windsor Castle