February 22nd, 1976. On newsstands across Britain, the News of the World ran a photograph. It showed Princess Margaret in a swimsuit on a beach on the Caribbean island of Mustique, alongside a 28-year-old man named Roddy Llewellyn. The picture was tame enough by any modern standard.
Two people in the Caribbean sun, visibly relaxed, visibly together. The man wasn’t her husband. The beach was directly below a 10-acre headland that Princess Margaret happened to own, having received it as a wedding gift 16 years earlier. And which she wouldn’t formally give away for another 20. Less than 4 weeks after the photograph ran, on March 19th, 1976, Kensington Palace issued a statement.
“Her Royal Highness, the Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, and the Earl of Snowdon, have mutually agreed to live apart.” Snowdon, reached in Australia by reporters, said he was “naturally desperately sad in every way that this had to come.” Two years of formal separation followed. The divorce was announced May 10th, 1978.
The decree absolute came through on July 11th. The photograph has been referenced for nearly 50 years. What the coverage rarely mentioned was that the beach where it was taken sat directly below the only 10 acres of land that were, in a very specific legal sense, the only property Princess Margaret had ever owned in her own name.
Not Crown property. Not a grace and favor residence occupied at the sovereign’s pleasure. Hers. She had built a house on that headland, furnished it herself, and would hold legal title to it for 36 years, longer than her marriage. Longer than any official role she held. Longer than any organizing fact of her adult life, except the accident of her birth.
She called it Les Jolies Eaux, the pretty waters. This is the story of that house. Of the eccentric Scottish peer who gave her the land. Of the theater designer who built the house on it. Of the affair photographed beside it, and the marriage that photograph ended. And of the question the coverage never stopped to ask.
What does it mean for a woman who owned nothing else to own a house on a cliff in the Caribbean for more than a quarter of a century? To understand how Margaret came to own 10 acres in the Grenadines, you need to understand Colin Tennant. Born in 1926 as Colin Christopher Paget Tennant, he was heir to a Victorian industrial fortune.
The Tennant family had built their wealth in chemicals, and educated at Eton and Oxford, which gave him the surface presentation of a conventional aristocrat. The surface was misleading. Lady Anne Glenconner, who married him in 1956 and lived with the consequences for more than 50 years, wrote of his behavior with careful understatement.
The London Review of Books, reviewing her memoir in 2019, was blunter. When it came to tantrums, eccentricity, and outrageous demands, Princess Margaret had nothing on Colin Tennant. In 1958, while on a yachting holiday in the Caribbean, having already spent years managing the family’s Trinidad land interests, Tennant heard about a small island in the Grenadines called Mustique.
He sailed around its perimeter. He bought it without setting foot on it first. The price was 45,000 pounds for 1,400 acres. What he had bought was, by any practical measure, barely worth the journey. Mustique had no electricity grid, no paved roads, no jetty worth the name, and most of its land was frazzled scrub, the old sugar plantations having collapsed and been abandoned since the 19th century.
The island’s largest landholding had belonged to the Hazel family, local sugar planters, and what remained of the agricultural history was overgrowth. The men and women who had lived on Mustique for generations, farmers and fishermen of African descent, occupying the Leeward village, had watched outside investors consider and reject the island for 5 years before Tennant appeared.
His wife’s response to the purchase was succinct. “Colin,” Lady Anne told him, “this is sheer madness.” He looked at her and said, “You mark my words, Anne. I will make Mustique a household name.” He was right. Which didn’t immediately resolve the madness. The Mustique Company, the entity through which Tennant developed and sold villa plots, was cash flow negative for its first three decades.
He sold paintings when the accounts ran dry. He threw extravagant parties to attract the kind of buyers the island needed. His 1976 Golden Ball, in which the trees were painted gold, the grass was sprayed gold, and the beach was covered in gold glitter, secured Mustique’s reputation as a hedonistic playground for the very rich.
Mick Jagger bought a villa on the island, Les Jolies Eaux, directly after that party. Tennant had also, in an earlier chapter of his life, been among the young men with some romantic interest in Princess Margaret. History.com describes him as “a British aristocrat who had once courted Princess Margaret.
” And at least one biographical account notes he had been in with a chance at one stage in the early 1950s. He married Anne Coke in 1956. His friendship with Margaret endured. In May 1960, Margaret married the photographer Antony Armstrong Jones. Their honeymoon took them through the Caribbean on the Royal Yacht Britannia.
Mustique was on the route. A boat came out from the yacht with an invitation to dinner aboard, received by Tennant and Lady Anne, who had not managed a proper bath in roughly 2 months. They accepted. On the last day of the royal couple’s Mustique visit, Tennant gave them a tour. Then he offered a wedding present.
In his own account, “Ma’am, we haven’t given you a wedding present. Would you like something in a little box, or would you like a piece of land?” Margaret turned to her husband. She made up her mind without waiting for him to respond. “Oh, I think a piece of land would be just wonderful.” Lady Anne Glenconner recorded that it was Armstrong Jones’s first and last visit to Mustique.
He referred to the island privately as Mistake. For Margaret, it would become the most important geography of her adult life. The 10 acres Tennant assigned to Margaret sat on the southeastern tip of the island, a cliff-top headland of scrubland and undergrowth, bordered on three sides by sea. Looking south across the channel between Mustique and the neighboring island of Bequia, you saw the waters the French had named Les Jolies Eaux, the pretty waters.
The plot was, in 1960, essentially valueless in practical terms. It was steep, covered in undergrowth, with no structure, no road access, and no water supply. What it had was height and air, and a view that extended, on a clear day, all the way to Bequia. It also had a legal status that nothing else in Margaret’s life possessed.
Princess Margaret lived in apartment 1A at Kensington on terms set by the Crown. She used Sandringham and Balmoral as a member of the royal family. The entire structure of her domestic life was institutional. The houses were the Crown’s, the staff were the Crown’s. The furniture in the public rooms was cataloged and would revert to royal collections.
Nothing in her life before Tennant’s gift was hers in the way a freehold is yours, absolutely, transferably, subject to inheritance tax, precisely because it belongs to a person rather than an institution. The 10 acres on the Mustique cliff changed that. In 1996, Margaret transferred the property to her son David, partly to reduce the inheritance tax burden on her estate, an act legally possible only because she held clear personal title.
Crown property does not attract inheritance tax. Her 2002 probate estate, valued at approximately 7.7 million pounds gross, didn’t include Les Jolies Eaux at all. It had already been transferred 6 years before her death. The mechanics of the transfer are reliable evidence for what Tennant gave her. A personal freehold, no Crown encumbrance.
Margaret herself knew exactly what she had. She put it plainly. “The only square inch in the world I own.” Lady Anne Glenconner, who heard this directly, gave it fuller weight in her 2019 memoir. “Margaret told me Les Jolies Eaux was the only property she had ever owned in her entire life. It was hers. She felt inordinate love and pride that this wasn’t crown property.
12 years passed between the gift and any use of it. The plot sat untouched. Then, at the beginning of 1968, Margaret telephoned Tennant. “Did you really mean it about the land?” He said, “Yes.” “And does it come with a house?” That exchange, recorded in Lady in Waiting, suggests the gift was pledged in 1960, but only activated when Margaret wanted it.
By 1968, she had reason to want it. Her marriage to Snowdon had been deteriorating for years. There had been affairs on both sides throughout the 1960s. The long handwritten letters between them, fragments of which were eventually published by biographers, were full of Snowdon’s complaints about Margaret’s drinking hours and her complaints about the silent treatment, the fed-up sighs, the flouncing out.
The idea of a house on a cliff that belonged to nobody but her, where the footmen and the protocol didn’t follow, had started to look like something worth building. Tennant told her he would build her a house. A few months later, she arrived on Mustique, quietly, with no fuss, happy to use the bucket of water hanging in the trees that served as a shower, unbothered by the tinned food.
Lady Anne Glenconner came with her to see the headland. Margaret wore a pair of Collins cotton pajamas to scramble up through the scrub, string tied around her ankles and wrists to keep the brambles off, wearing wide sunglasses and a straw hat. Lady Anne noted that she had a big smile, not minding at all.
She wasn’t vain. She just got on with things. Tennant had already identified his architect. Oliver Messel was born in 1904 in London, and he had spent four decades making himself the most celebrated theatrical designer in Britain. His first commission came in 1925. Diaghilev invited him to design masks for the Ballet Russ production Zephyr et Flore.
His most famous production was the Sadler’s Wells Ballet’s 1946 staging of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty at the Royal Opera House. He won a Tony Award on Broadway, designed the lavish suite at the Dorchester Hotel in 1953, and created the sets that defined post-war British theatrical imagination.
By the 1960s, the theatrical world had moved on. Kitchen sink realism had replaced romantic escapism. Messel, arthritic and exhausted, retreated to the Caribbean. From 1967, he based himself in Barbados, where the warmth and color of the tropics, in his own description, liberated new sources of energy and imagination.
He converted an existing Barbadian house into a showcase, began designing villas for wealthy friends, and created the aesthetic that would make him famous across the Caribbean. Whitewashed walls, slender Greek columns, flattened arches, elaborate plaster moldings, shutters painted in a particular sage green that became known throughout the region as Messel green.
There is an irony embedded in the Les Jolies Eaux commission that no one involved appears to have remarked on directly. Oliver Messel was Snowdon’s maternal uncle. Snowdon’s mother was Anne Parsons, Countess of Ross, born Anne Armstrong-Jones, Messel’s sister. The relationship between Snowdon and his uncle was warm and personal.
Snowdon later recalled being sent into Messel’s London garden as a boy to search for treasure, finding what seemed to be a bird’s nest in the hedges, only to discover his uncle had made it himself, the eggs cast from hand-painted China. The man commissioned to design the house where the Snowdon marriage effectively ended was Snowdon’s own uncle, employed by Snowdon’s wife.
It’s the kind of irony that the story produces almost without trying. Tennant commissioned the design in 1969. Messel, based in Barbados and close enough to oversee the construction, produced a single-story stone villa in what he called a theatrical neo-Georgian style. Five bedrooms, two swimming pools, and an open-plan drawing room facing the channel.
The walls were whitewashed. The shutters and doors were painted in Messel green, his Caribbean signature. The front door looked straight through the house to the view beyond, dissolving the boundary between interior and exterior in the way Messel repeated across all his Caribbean work. Glass-paneled internal doors opened the rooms onto the landscape.
The floors were decorative Caribbean ceramic tile. The ceilings were cedar. Messel cultivated the garden down slope from the terrace, calla lilies, oleanders, hibiscus, bougainvillea, all planted around the existing cedar trees rather than clearing them. The old growth providing shade and practically visual cover from the windward beach below.
Two swimming pools were positioned so that a swimmer sat at eye level with the horizon of the Caribbean and Atlantic waters combined. Construction took roughly 2 years from the commission. By February 1972, the house was complete. Margaret moved in that month. She had spent the previous year making shopping trips for furnishings, not to Colfax and Fowler, but to Peter Jones.
White furniture, Laura Ashley-style curtains, bamboo pieces she brought from London. Low-key, modest, the deliberate choice of someone who didn’t want to be grand. She named the house herself. Tennant later described what Messel had produced. Oliver had instilled the essence of the West Indies in a little cottage.
It gave Princess Margaret the greatest possible pleasure not to be reminded of the grandeur of what she was. Mustique in the early 1970s was private in a way that almost nothing in Britain’s rich public life was private. Every arrival was logged. All guests were registered. The island security team, compact, diligent, operating without the pomp of royal protection, knew who was on the island at any given time.
Tennant had structured the development to attract exactly the kind of wealthy, famous people who valued that containment. And by 1972, it was working. A brief word about what the island actually was. The Leeward village where the local population lived, men and women of African descent whose families had worked the sugar estates and stayed on, wasn’t the villa district.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines wouldn’t gain independence from Britain until 1979. The line between the resort world and the village was, as it had always been under various names, clearly drawn. Tennant’s Mustique was built on that history, and the pleasure it offered its visitors was inseparable from the geography it occupied.
Within the villa world, a social atmosphere developed that was genuinely unusual. Mick Jagger bought his house after the 1976 Golden Ball party. David Bowie acquired a villa called Mandalay. Tennant continued throwing parties at spectacular expense. Some, Lady Anne Glenconner noted, running into hundreds of thousands of pounds.
And Mustique’s name traveled accordingly. For Margaret, the social life was secondary. She could walk barefoot on the beach in the morning. She could read on the veranda without a schedule attached to it. She could eat supper with friends without footmen standing at the walls. “Some of the happiest times that Princess Margaret and I shared were on Mustique,” Glenconner wrote.
“And we went there every February for 30 years.” What those 30 Februaries gave Margaret, and what the coverage almost entirely failed to register, was the experience of being somewhere that was genuinely hers, not assigned to her, chosen by her. She had decided to build there, chosen the furniture, decided when to come.
For a woman whose entire adult life had been structured by institutional assignment, the palaces, the official schedule, the inherited rules about marriage and duty and public representation, that choice wasn’t a small thing. The marriage to Snowdon had not improved. He continued working as a photographer for the Sunday Times, conducting the affairs that had characterized the marriage from near its beginning.
Both were unhappy, and both knew it. What was new from 1972 onward was that Margaret had somewhere to go. In September 1973, Colin Tennant organized a house party at Glen, the Tennant ancestral estate in the Scottish Borders, Traquair Parish, Peeblesshire. Among the guests was a 25-year-old man named Roderick Victor Llewellyn.
His background was more substantial than the tabloids ever bothered to establish. Roddy’s father was Sir Llewellyn, the Olympic equestrian who at the 1952 Helsinki games had written a horse named Foxhunter to win Britain’s only gold medal in the team show jumping. Foxhunter and Sir Harry were, by one account, national heroes, figures that had genuinely captured the public imagination in the early 1950s.
Roddy had grown up in that shadow, attended Shrewsbury School, and arrived in Tennant’s social circle working as a landscape gardener. At the Glen House party, the meeting date comes from Glen Conner’s memoir, which acknowledges some imprecision about the timing. Tennant introduced Llewellyn to Princess Margaret.
She was 43. He was 25, 17 years her junior. The affair began within weeks. Lady Anne Glen Conner’s immediate response, by her own account, was “Heavens, what have I done?” Her concern wasn’t primarily for Margaret’s well-being, but for her public standing, and the subsequent events justified the concern.
The private arithmetic, however, was simpler. Margaret’s marriage had been emptying for years. Snowdon’s affairs were extensive and largely open within their social circle. Margaret, at 43, was lonely in ways that the official round of duties addressed not at all. Llewellyn was young, uncomplicated by the protocols she lived inside, and genuinely fond of her.
Margaret brought him to Mustique in the winter of 1974, and again in 1975. His third visit was in February 1976. The photographs ran on February 22nd, 1976. Margaret and Llewellyn on the beach at Mustique together. In swimsuits, visible to a telephoto lens positioned on the windward side of the island.
Llewellyn issued a statement almost immediately. “I much regret any embarrassment caused to Her Majesty the Queen and the royal family, for whom I wish to express the greatest respect, admiration, and loyalty.” He offered no comment on the photographs directly. He noted, separately, that he had been gardening on Mustique, which was true, and which helped no one.
On March 19th, 1976, the formal separation was announced. The statement was bland and procedural. The princess and Lord Snowdon had mutually agreed to live apart. There were no plans for divorce proceedings. Snowdon, reached in Australia, said he was “naturally, desperately sad in every way that this had to come.
” His fuller statement expressed hope for the understanding of their two children, wished Margaret happiness, and extended his love, admiration, and respect to the Queen and the Queen Mother. The statement said nothing about the years of mutual infidelity that had preceded the photograph, or the long correspondence about drinking habits and mood swings, or the dinners at Kensington Palace, where the two of them had communicated through the management of silence.
The photograph was the occasion. The marriage was the cause. Those are different things, and the newspapers in 1976 treated them as the same. The affair with Llewellyn continued until 1981, when he married Tatiana Soskin. He became a horticultural writer and garden designer, and he and Margaret remained on friendly terms until her death.
The toy boy framing, the contemptuous tone that characterized the press coverage in 1976, described something the facts didn’t support. Years later, after Margaret’s death, Queen Elizabeth reportedly told Lady Anne Glen Conner directly, “I just like to say, Anne, it was rather difficult at moments, but I thank you so much for introducing Princess Margaret to Roddy, because he made her really happy.
” She had. He had. In a house on a cliff that she owned herself. The formal divorce was announced May 10th, 1978, and the decree absolute granted July 11th. Snowdon married Lucy Lindsay-Hogg in December of that year. Margaret didn’t remarry. The property settlement confirmed what had always been true.
Les Jolies Eaux wasn’t part of anything to divide. The land had been Margaret’s personal property since Tennant transferred it to her, predating the marriage’s legal dissolution by 18 years. Margaret retained her Kensington Palace apartment. Her children, David, Viscount Linley, who was 16, and Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, 14, remained with her.
Les Jolies Eaux stayed hers, and she returned to it every February for the next 22 years. Those 22 years weren’t uniformly easy. Her health deteriorated through the 1980s. She had surgery related to skin cancer in the middle of that decade, the Caribbean sun she had been sitting under for years having eventually made its accounting.
She was a heavy smoker throughout her adult life, which compounded everything. By the early 1990s, her mobility was increasingly restricted, her circle narrowing around her. The island became harder to reach and harder to enjoy in the physical terms that had made it so appealing in the first years. She came anyway.
After 1981, when the Llewellyn affair ended, she came to Mustique with other friends and with Glen Conner, continuing the same winter pattern. She continued to collect shells on the beach. She continued to sit on the veranda with the view of the channel. None of the biographies written during Margaret’s lifetime gave these years much attention, which is itself telling.
Without the scandal element, the Mustique visit seemed like nothing more than a privileged woman taking a pleasant holiday. That was precisely what made them significant. In 1996, Margaret gave Les Jolies Eaux to her son David as a wedding gift when he married Serena Stanhope. The transfer was at least partly practical.
Moving the property before her death reduced the inheritance tax her estate would face. It was a rational act of legal planning. It was also the moment she stopped owning the one thing she had ever owned. She made one more visit. In February 1998, she was at the villa when, around the night of February 23rd, she suffered a stroke.
The palace confirmed her condition was stable. She was treated by doctors on Mustique and then flown to Barbados. She was 67 years old. She returned to England. She never went back. David sold Les Jolies Eaux in 1999 for a reported 2.4 million pounds, reportedly to his mother’s distress. The buyers were an American couple with Irish links who simplified the interior design and introduced new furnishings.
The white furniture from Peter Jones, the portrait of Queen Elizabeth that had hung at the center of the drawing room, the bamboo pieces Margaret had brought from London, all of it went. Lady Anne Glen Crown in 2019 through Hodder & Stoughton. She was in her late 80s. She had been Margaret’s lady-in-waiting from 1973 until Margaret’s death in 2002.
29 years of close witness covering the Llewellyn introduction, the separation, the divorce, the later Mustique winters, the decline. She had stood at the island jetty in 1977 when Queen Elizabeth arrived on the royal yacht Britannia for the silver jubilee tour of the Caribbean. She had been on the beach when the shells were collected.
She had been there for most of it. The book reached number one in UK non-fiction. It was, as one trade publication noted, a first-time author who became a best-seller. A reading public that had processed the tabloid version of Margaret for four decades, and had watched The Crown’s dramatized version more recently, was waiting for exactly what Glen Conner offered.
A direct account from the person who was actually present. What the Mustique chapters gave that audience was something none of the prior coverage had provided. The press had analyzed Margaret her entire adult life, but always through the aperture of her public role. What she wore, who she stood next to, what she said or failed to say at official events.
Glen Conner had watched her do other things. Scramble up a hillside in borrowed pajamas. Buy curtains at Peter Jones with a determined plainness of someone and didn’t want to be grand. Collect shells on a Caribbean beach and bring them home to clean and arrange on the cottage tables. Complain about her husband’s affairs without self-pity.
Then set the conversation aside and go back to the thing she was reading. It was the only house she ever owned, Glen Conner wrote of Les Jolies Eaux, and it made her very happy. Because apart from being beautiful, it provided her with an independent base from her husband. The word independent is carrying real weight in that sentence.
Margaret’s entire life had been structured by institutions she had not chosen. The palace, the crown, the official schedule, the inherited rules about marriage and duty and public representation. Les Jolies Eaux wasn’t exempt from those institutions. She was still a princess on Mustique, still addressed as ma’am, still accompanied by security, still operating inside the same hierarchy.
But the land was hers. The house was hers. No institution could take it away from her without a transaction she consented to. She consented in the end, in 1996. At 66, in declining health, with the practicalities of inheritance tax pressing, she transferred it to her son. It was the rational thing to do.
Glen Conner’s book also confirmed what the Queen herself privately understood about the Mustique years. By Lady Anne’s account, Queen Elizabeth told her after Margaret’s death, “I just like to say, Anne, it was rather difficult at moments. But I thank you so much for introducing Princess Margaret to Roddy, because he made her really happy.
” The public crisis of 1976 and the private relief of it were two entirely separate things. The audience reception to Lady-in-Waiting confirmed what the comment sections of every YouTube video about Margaret had suggested for years. People were ready to receive a different account of who Margaret was.
Not Margaret the cautionary tale, not Margaret the royal parasite, as members of Parliament had called her in 1976. Margaret the woman who owned 10 acres on a cliff in the Grenadines and spent 26 years going back to them every winter because it was the one place she fully chose for herself. Les Jolies Eaux is still on the cliff.
The pretty waters that gave it its name, the channel between Mustique and Bequia, blue and unstill, the trade wind from the east running over it all winter haven’t moved. The villa sits above them on the same 10 acres of headland. The old cedar trees Messel planted around the structure are still standing.
The view from the drawing room through the glass-paneled doors that Messel aligned to face the channel is the view he designed and Margaret chose. Current rental listings show the villa available at approximately £33,000 to £47,000 a week, depending on the season. It sleeps 10 guests. The stone structure carries Messel’s architecture.
The layout, the pools, the open arrangement facing the water. The interior has been renovated since the 1999 sale, and the house has changed hands more than once since then. Oliver Messel died in Barbados on July 13th, 1978 at the age of 74. Buried at Nymans, the Messel family home in West Sussex. Colin Tennant died in Saint Lucia in 2010, having sold his Mustique interests long before, having acquired and eventually lost a Saint Lucian estate, having bought an elephant from Dublin Zoo named Bupa and shipped her to the Caribbean, having been until the end entirely himself. Snowden died in 2017 at the age of 86. Margaret died on February 9th, 2002 at King Edward the 7th Hospital in London following a stroke.
She was 71 years old. Her ashes were interred in the King George the 6th Memorial Chapel at Windsor, beside her father, beside her mother, who died later that same year. And eventually, in September 2022, beside her sister. The chapel is quiet and cold in February. Every member of that family interred there was born inside the institution and died inside it.
Margaret held Les Jolies Eaux from 1960 to 1996. She visited from 1972 to 1998. She called it “The only square inch in the world I own.” And she was telling the exact truth. Not a crown residence, not a grace-and-favor house, not borrowed from an institution that had decided her place in it before she was born.
A freehold on a cliff with the pretty waters below it and the trade wind running over them and her name on the papers. 3,000 miles to the southwest in the same month, the trade wind is warm and the channel is the color that gave the house its name. She had it for a while. That is more than most people in her position ever got.
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