Inside the Caribbean Villa Princess Margaret Was Forced To Build Herself – HT
There is a peculiar paradox at the heart of Princess Margaret’s existence that only fully reveals itself when you look at a deed of sale for a house on a Caribbean speck of land called Mystique. the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II, a woman who spent her entire life in palaces, who was waited upon by footmen and ladies in waiting and household staff from the day she was born to the day she died.
Owned in the whole course of her 71 years, exactly one piece of property, not Kensington Palace, which was allocated to her by the crown and could be withdrawn at the crown’s discretion. Not a country estate which she never possessed. not a flat in Mayfair, which she could not have afforded on the income the state provided for her official duties.
One house on 10 acres on a remote island in the eastern Caribbean, 18 mi south of Saint Vincent, ringed by sea on every side. She called it Leolo, the beautiful waters, and she once described it as the only square inch in the world I own. That sentence, stripped of its royal trimmings, is the saddest and most extraordinary thing a British princess of the 20th century ever said about herself, because everything else, the palaces, the jewels, the cars, the staff, was borrowed, inherited, or funded by the state. And only this
house, this singlestory white compound of lowslung tropical pavilions perched on the southernmost tip of an island that most of Britain had never heard of, was genuinely hers. Today we trace the rooms, the relationships, and the decades of heartbreak that drove a princess to build the only home she ever owned on a headland at the edge of the Caribbean Sea.
The story of Leoli’s O begins not with Margaret, but with a wildly eccentric Scottish aristocrat named Colin Christopher Padet Tenant, heir to the Glen Connor Baron, and one of the most flamboyant personalities ever to orbit the British royal family. In the mid 1950s, while touring his family’s inherited properties in Trinidad, tenant heard that an almost entirely undeveloped island in the Grenardines chain was for sale, cabled his father requesting permission to buy it for £45,000, and with characteristic impulsiveness,
sealed the deal without having set foot on the property, a detail his wife, Lady Anne, would later recount with evident wonder. The island was called Mystique, a corruption of the French word for mosquito, which gave a reasonably accurate first impression of what awaited the new owner. It measured roughly 4 km by 2 km, small enough to walk end to end in an afternoon, and its few hundred inhabitants lived in tin huts, scraping a living from fishing, and what remained of the island’s once profitable cotton trade.
There was no electricity, no mains drainage, no running water, and the landscape was a mixture of scrub land, wild feral cows, jungle, and the remnants of an 18th century plantation system whose economic purpose had collapsed decades earlier. The one surviving substantial structure, an old plantation house called the great house, was in a state of serious disrepair.
A 1958 report had described Mustique as a desolate island covered in jungle scrub and cactus, and the description remained accurate in every particular. Tenant’s wife, Lady Anne Ko, who had been one of Queen Elizabeth II’s maids of honor at the coronation and was a childhood friend of Princess Margaret, thought her husband had lost his mind, and by any rational assessment, she was correct. The island was a liability.
Its development costs were incalculable. Its revenue potential was zero. And its location in the Ark of the Lesser Antilles, where huracans made landfall with seasonal regularity, was the kind of site that a sane investor would have examined, costed, and declined. But Colint Tenant was not investing. He was imagining, and what he imagined was something that did not yet exist anywhere in the Caribbean.
An island so exclusive, so controlled, so entirely removed from the world of ordinary tourism that ownership of a plot on it would constitute a form of social membership that no hotel reservation could provide. The logic was circular and brilliant. Exclusivity would create desiraability. Desiraability would attract wealth.
Wealth would fund development and development would be capped at a level sufficiently low that the exclusivity which started the cycle would never be diluted. The entire commercial model depended on scarcity and tenant understood with an instinct that formal business education would probably have beaten out of him. That scarcity in the Caribbean real estate market required two things.
a physical limit on the number of properties and a social impromatter that made ownership of one of those properties a mark of belonging to a world that money alone could not buy. His first efforts were characteristically hands-on and somewhat quicksotic. He and Anne camped on the island, eating beans and fish, collecting rainwater, battling the mosquitoes and climbing trees to avoid the feral cows that roamed the scrubland with the territorial confidence of animals that had never encountered a Scottish aristocrat before.
Over time, he began building an infrastructure, a drainage system, electricity, coconut palms, fruit trees, a reservoir to solve the chronic water problem that made the island uninhabitable for anyone accustomed to indoor plumbing. He built a new settlement, Lovevel Village, for the existing island population, relocating the fishing families and small holders to a slightly less prime location with improved housing, freeing up the island’s most desirable coastal sites for the private development that would eventually make Mystique one of the most
exclusive addresses on Earth. The relocation was handled with a paternalism characteristic of the era and the class. tenant provided the new settlement, its residents accepted it, and the transaction was conducted with the assumption on both sides that the island’s future lay in the hands of the man who owned it rather than the people who had lived on it for generations.
He understood that what he was creating was not a luxury resort, but a dream, a hermetically sealed world in which the very wealthy could pretend that civilization ended at the shoreline and that the rules governing their lives everywhere else did not apply. The key to that dream, as Tenant recognized almost immediately, was Princess Margaret, because her presence on the island would confer upon it a cache that no amount of marketing expenditure could purchase.
In 1968, the economic development agreement with the government of Saint Vincent formally opened the island to outside buyers with the crucial condition that total development would be capped at 140 private homes, using scarcity as the guarantor of the exclusivity on which the entire financial model depended. What tenant needed at precisely this moment was not another buyer, but a resident whose name alone would make every subsequent buyer want to follow.
On May 6th, 1960, more than 300 million people around the world watched live as Princess Margaret married Anthony Armstrong Jones at Westminster Abbey, the first royal wedding ever broadcast on television. A spectacle that assembled foreign royalty, government ministers, and the entire apparatus of the British establishment into a single ceremonial event that the country had not seen the equal of since the coronation 7 years earlier.
The bride arrived in the glass coach wearing a Norman Hartnull gown of silk oranza deliberately unadorned to suit her petite frame. The groom was a different matter entirely. Anthony Armstrong Jones was by the standards of royal matrimony a provocation, a photographer which in 1960 was regarded as a trade rather than a profession.
An itonian who moved between high society and Bohemia with practiced ease. A man described by contemporaries as a famous womanizer and swordsman with a sense of mischief in the back of his eyes and the first commoner in 400 years to marry a member of the royal family. Some biographers have suggested the marriage was partly a rebound from the devastating end of Margaret’s affair with group captain Peter Townsend, a love that the Church of England and royal protocol had made impossible and whose loss had left her with a wound that never quite healed.
She herself disputed this with characteristic directness, saying, “I married Tony 5 years after the end of Peter Town’s End, as though the passage of time was sufficient proof of emotional resolution.” What the wedding’s global audience could not see, and what Armstrong Jones’s biographers have since documented in uncomfortable detail, was that the groom was conducting an affair with Camila Fry, wife of one of his oldest friends, right up to and through the planning of the royal engagement, a fact that Armstrong Jones managed with the
compartmentalized efficiency of a man who had been juggling several different lives at the same time with extreme skill for most of his adult career. Immediately following the ceremony, the couple departed for the Royal Yacht Britannia. And that evening, the Britannia sailed south on a honeymoon cruise across the Caribbean, maintaining the full discipline of royal protocol, with all meals conducted in full evening dress, a peculiarly formal setting for a honeymoon that cost approximately $115,000 at 1960 values. It was somewhere in the
warm waters of the eastern Caribbean that the Britannia swung toward a small, largely unmapped island in the Grenardines that a mutual friend had recently purchased. The Bratannia dropped anchor off Mystique, and the newlyweds came ashore to find conditions almost comically at odds with the floating palace they had just left.
The tenants received them with rum, a hibiscus mixer that Lady Anne later described as disgusting, and the warmth of hosts who understood that the gesture mattered more than the refreshments. “We didn’t have much to offer them,” Lady Anne recalled. “Only rum and the most disgusting sour hibiscus mixer.
” But Princess Margaret had a huge smile on her face as we gave her a tour of the island. For Margaret, a woman whose bath was drawn by servants, and whose clothes were selected by ladies in waiting, the conditions on Mystique were unlike anything she had encountered. Like everyone else on the island, she showered using a bucket with holes punched in the bottom, hung from a tree, and shielded from view by a flap of sailcloth.
There were no phones, no photographers, no court functionaries, no obligations, and the freedom was intoxicating precisely because it was so utterly unlike everything else she knew. It was all an adventure to her. Lady Anne Glen Connor said later, something she’d never had in her life. This matters enormously when trying to understand what the island came to mean to Margaret, because her entire adult existence had been lived inside the machinery of an institution that required her to be permanently visible, permanently appropriate, and permanently
secondary to her sister, and the palace that surrounded her was magnificent and suffocating simultaneously, a setting in which every friendship was a potential scandal, and every relationship a constitutional question. Even the question of whether to marry Townsend, the man she genuinely loved, had been resolved not by her own heart, but by a combination of church doctrine, governmental advice, and the structural logic of a monarchy that could not accommodate a divorced man within its family.
On Mystique, none of this applied. There were no cameras. There was no protocol to enforce. And the freedom was intoxicating precisely because it was so utterly unlike everything else she knew. On the last evening of the visit, tenant made his offer. Ma’am, we haven’t given you a wedding present.
Would you like something in a little box or a piece of land? Margaret made up her mind without waiting for her new husband to respond. Oh, I think a piece of land would be wonderful. The land was on Jelliso Point, a phonetic evolution of the French Jolie Kaillou, beautiful pebbles at the island’s southernmost tip, where the Atlantic meets the Caribbean, and the views extend to neighboring islands on the horizon.
Armstrong Jones’s reaction to Mystique was the polar opposite of his wife’s. He visited once on this honeymoon and never returned, taking to calling the island mistake and later mistake, his distaste total and his absence from it over the following decades among the clearest evidence of how completely the marriage would collapse. Margaret received the gift of land on Myustique in 1960, and she did not begin building her house until 1968, a gap of 8 years during which the 10 acres sat on paper, a theoretical paradise, unrealized and never far from her mind.
The logistical explanation had several layers. The Mystique Company was not established until 1968. The airport did not open until 1969. And before that, getting to Mystique required either sailing or an indirect chain of transfers through St. Vincent, neither of which was practical for a princess who traveled with security and the full apparatus of royal life.
Even by the late 1960s, conditions remained profoundly Spartan. We only had tilly lamps for lighting. There was no hot water, and most of our food came from tins, Lady Anne Glen Connor recalled of what the tenants themselves endured. But logistics were the smaller part of the story. Margaret was not a wealthy woman in any personal sense.
The palaces she inhabited belonged to the crown, and her income derived almost entirely from the civil list, an allowance that existed to fund her performance of official duties rather than to provide her with personal capital. She was by multiple accounts famously cautious with money, deploying her royal status to obtain goods and services for free at every available opportunity.
A documentary quoted sources noting she had a unique system for financing her extravagances, often using her royal status to obtain things for free, including regular hair appointments and shopping trips to Harrods. Money in her life was never just money. It was freedom or the lack of it. And she had grown up in palaces that belong to the nation, wearing jewels that were heirlooms with histories beyond her personal ownership, in a wardrobe that functioned as a uniform rather than an expression of taste.
Building a house on a Caribbean headland required capital she did not possess, and a patron willing to absorb the costs, and the patron, as it turned out, would be tenant, though neither of them discussed the arrangement in those terms. I don’t think it ever occurred to her to offer to pay for some of the work, one source noted in documentary footage.
And she knew and tenant knew, and everyone in their circle knew that his generosity was simultaneously an act of friendship and a commercial investment, because a princess building a house on his island was worth more to Mystique’s development than any sum she could have contributed in cash.
There is something both unapologetically royal and quietly vulnerable about this dynamic. Margaret did not have the money to build her house. Tenant did, and the gift had been offered, and she was simply accepting it in the fullest possible terms. But the psychological weight of the situation, a princess who could not independently fund the construction of the one property she would ever own spoke to the strange financial dependency that governed her entire existence.
The emotional dimension of the delay mattered as much as the financial one. The years between 1960 and 1967 were years of attempting to make her marriage work. She and Armstrong Jones had two children, David in 1961 and Sarah in 1964, and the early years had enough surface warmth to suggest the project might succeed.
Armstrong Jones was created Earl of Snowden in 1961, giving the marriage its formal royal gloss. And the couple moved in the overlapping worlds of art, fashion, entertainment, and aristocracy, hosting parties and traveling in a style that made them briefly the most glamorous couple in Britain.
The disintegration came slowly, then with sickening speed. By the mid 1960s, Armstrong Jones had conducted his first major extrammarital affair with Lady Jacqueline Rufus Issacs, though the pattern of infidelity predated this significantly, and the notes he left around the apartment at Kensington Palace were among the crulest weapons in what one lady in waiting described as an environment of open warfare.
One discovered in a drawer read, “You look like a Jewish manicurist, and I hate you.” The marriage had become a competition in mutual humiliation conducted in whispers and silences and the occasional verbal explosion with the children present throughout. And it was in this context the marriage collapsing, the architecture of her formal life feeling more like a trap than a setting, that Margaret reached for the one thing that remained unclaimed, unrealized, and genuinely hers.
She picked up the telephone and called Colin Tenant. Were you really serious about the land? Yes, he told her. And does it come with a house? Tenant, who had been waiting for this call with the patience of a man who understood exactly what he was waiting for, later reflected, “Well, I could hardly say no, could I?” Margaret would choose the site, the architect, the specifications.
tenant would pay for everything because she was simultaneously his dearest friend and the most valuable commercial asset his island development could ever acquire. A few months later, Margaret flew out to survey the plot, found the marker stakes in the ground, delineating the 10 acres Tenant had promised, walked the headland with the tenants in simple cotton clothing, and quietly repositioned the stakes, enlarging the perimeter.
When tenant observed what she was doing, she replied, “I think I need a bit more.” The building of Leoli O and the escape it represented had begun. To design the house, Margaret chose Oliver Messel, and the choice was revealing on multiple levels. Messel was Lord Snowden’s uncle, his mother’s brother, which meant he was Margaret’s uncle-in-law.
a relationship that made the commission simultaneously a family affair and a quiet assertion of aesthetic independence from the husband whose contempt for her was by 1968 a feature of daily life at Kensington Palace. He was also one of the most distinguished theatrical and set designers in Britain. the man who had reimagined Sleeping Beauty for Sadler’s Wells with Margot Fontaine in 1946, who had designed Caesar and Cleopatra for the screen, and who had created the Messel Suite at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, and Margaret had seen a house
he had built on Barbados and fallen in love with it. By the late 1960s, Messel had reinvented himself entirely. The rise of kitchen sink drama in British theater had made his romantic escapist design sensibility commercially unfashionable and faced with dwindling commissions, he had moved to Barbados in 1966 for both financial and health reasons, where he began a second career designing villas for the Caribbean’s wealthy expatriate community that proved to be, as one observer noted, a case of a set designer who had initiated a whole
style of indoor or outdoor living, finding the perfect canvas for his theatrical gifts. He designed 26 homes on Mystique and Barbados in total, working almost until his death in 1978. His design philosophy in the Caribbean synthesized traditions that should have been incompatible and made them sing. From the colonial heritage, the French plantation house aesthetic of wide veranders, jealousy shutters and generous proportions oriented toward the prevailing breezes.
from his theatrical background and obsessive attention to detail and the ability to think of a house as a stage set where every room created a particular mood and from his aristocratic English sensibility neoean symmetry regency style elliptical arches palladian proportions and classical moldings. What distinguished Messel’s Caribbean houses from the work of other architects operating in the region was his understanding learned across decades of theatrical design.
That the relationship between a building and its setting is a performance. That every window frames a view the way a precenium arch frames a stage. And that the function of architecture in a landscape this beautiful is to create the conditions in which the beauty can be experienced without distraction. The result was what commentators would christen Caribbean mele or Caribbean colonial.
A style so distinctive that it became the defining visual language of mystique itself. For Leoli’s O Messel designed what both he and Margaret insisted on calling a house rather than a villa since Margaret objected fiercely to the word villa, saying it makes it sound like something you’d find in Brighton. The structure was a compound of separate pavilions, a main house containing the entrance hall, a spectacular living area that opened entirely onto covered terraces, and a formal dining room and bar with three bedrooms, a second pavilion housing the
master suite, positioned to catch the maximum breeze and oriented toward the most spectacular views the southern point could offer, and further pavilions for additional bedrooms. The whole compound arranged on a private peninsula at the island’s absolute southern tip with views taking in both the Atlantic and the Caribbean simultaneously.
The aesthetic was theatrical in the best sense. Coral stone ballastrades framing the main terrace. Plantation shutters filtering the Caribbean light into warm geometric patterns on whitewashed walls. Cedar vaulted ceilings drawing the eye upward. Regency style arches framing the sea view as precisely as a precenium arch frames a stage.
The outdoor spaces were equally considered an infinity pool, a covered dining pavilion open to the breeze and tropical gardens with fruit trees, flowers and meles characteristic classical garden follys. The entire composition designed to make the boundary between interior and exterior as psychologically irrelevant as the Caribbean climate made it physically unnecessary.
Messel’s signature sage green paint, now known as Messel Green or Mystique Green, appeared on the shutters and doors, a color so distinctive that it became inseparable from the island’s identity. He also designed bespoke wooden and iron work furniture in a Regency style with a touch of shininoazeri pieces that could be replicated by local craftsmen and that gave the interiors a quality that was neither palatial nor austere but specifically intentionally comfortable the aesthetic of someone who understood grandeur but was choosing for the first
time in her life warmth over formality. Margaret was deeply pleased. I’m very pleased with what Oliver did for Lejo Leo, she told visitors, and the pride in her voice when she spoke about the house was, by every account of a different character from the pride she brought to any other subject.
This was not the practiced satisfaction of a royal commenting on a state project. It was the personal vulnerable pride of someone showing you the one thing she had that was truly her own. Le Joli’s O was completed in 1972. The main house finished by February, though some accounts give 1973 as the completion date of the full compound.
And what emerged from four years of construction on a Caribbean headland was a five- bedroomedroom compound on approximately 11 1/2 acres with two swimming pools, full staff quarters, and a private peninsula that no other property on Mystique could match. The master bedroom, her bedroom, was painted a vivid, defiant orange.
It was not the color of a palace bedroom, and it was not the color that any decorator working within the conventions of the British royal interior would have chosen. It was the color of someone expressing a private aesthetic preference for the first time in a space that answered to nobody’s taste except her own. The rest of the house bore Messel’s characteristic pallet, his sage green on shutters and doors, whitewashed walls that caught and softened the Caribbean light, cedar ceilings that drew the heat upward, but the orange bedroom stood
apart, an interior declaration of personal identity that no residence allocated to her by the crown would have permitted. The furnishings were assembled with Margaret’s characteristic mixture of style and economy, including pieces she had obtained, in some cases entirely for free, from the annual Ideal Home exhibition in London, attending the trade show, selecting items that caught her eye, and accepting them as gifts from exhibitors who were delighted to have a princess as a client.
Alongside these, Messel had designed bespoke furniture in his Regency with Shinwazeri style, executed by local island craftsmen in a manner perfectly suited to the indooroutdoor fluidity of the rooms, and the effect was the specific atmosphere of someone who understood elegance, but was on this island choosing comfort over ceremony.
The staff quarters were a practical necessity that also revealed something about the nature of Margaret’s royal existence, even in her most private refuge. A dedicated room accommodated the Scotland Yard detectives who traveled with her at all times, their presence non-negotiable, because she was the queen’s sister, and the possibility of a truly unguarded life, was never, even on mystique, entirely real.
The housekeeper, the cook, the gardener, the full domestic team lived in the staff accommodation attached to the compound year round, maintaining the property between Margaret’s visits, and staffing it at full capacity when she was in residence, which meant that Leoli’s O was, in a sense, always waiting for her, always maintained in a state of readiness, the gardens tended, the pools clean, the rooms aired, a permanent expression of care directed at a woman who spent most of her year in a palace that cared for her institutionally
rather than personally. Margaret gave the house its name, and the French was apt on several levels. It was a direct description of the aquatic panorama visible from every terrace, the Caribbean Sea to one side, the Atlantic to the other, and it was also a pun, since the bay below the headland was already called jelliso, a creation of joli kaou, beautiful pebbles.
So in naming her house Leoli O Margaret was rhyming with the landscape itself. From the moment of completion she adopted a fixed seasonal rhythm that she maintained for nearly 30 years. She came twice a year in October or November and again in February. The first catching the tail end of the Caribbean’s warm dry season and the second calculated to coincide with the bleakest stretch of the English winter when London felt like a conspiracy of damp and obligation and must offered a temperature difference of roughly 25° and a psychological distance
that was if anything greater. She would arrive on the small island plane from Barbados or St. Luchia, a journey of 50 minutes from Barbados and 25 from St. Lucia. Stepping onto the tarmac of the airirstrip that had been opened in 1969, barely capable of receiving commercial aircraft and entering a world that the preceding weeks of London engagements had made feel not just desirable, but medically necessary. The arrival was a ritual.
The island’s small airirstrip received her party with golf carts driven by mystique company staff who knew the drill. And in the early years, Tenant arranged for bowls of fresh water to be ready near the beach, so that Margaret’s feet could be washed of sand after her daily swim. A detail so particular that it serves as a perfect emblem of the island’s character, tropical informality governed by absolute deference.
because difference there was the insistence on being called ma’am by closest friends as well as strangers, the expectation that visitors would curtsy or bow upon entering a room where she was present. The rule that dinner could not begin until she arrived, deployed with the same theatrical timing on mystique as in London.
A man followed her around with an ashtray when she was smoking at parties, just as one did at Kensington Palace. The protocol was not a cage she had escaped. It was part of who she was, so thoroughly internalized that it arrived with her on the island as naturally as her cigarettes and her famous grouse whiskey. What changed was not the protocol, but the landscape in which it operated, and that difference changed everything.
Margaret told visitors repeatedly that Leoli’s O was the only place I can relax and the declaration appeared in enough interviews, documentaries, and reminiscences to constitute a considered position. To understand what she meant requires understanding what her life was everywhere else.
At Kensington Palace, she occupied apartment 1A, a residence of 20 rooms, a formal drawing room, a library, a dining room for two dozen guests, and all the trappings of the British aristocratic interior, and it was entirely and inalienably not hers. She had no title to it, could not sell it, could not substantially alter it without permission, and the apartment was a loan from the institution of the monarchy, whose terms were set by the sovereigns discretion.
Her civil list allowance existed to fund the performance of official duties, not to provide personal capital, and she could not invest it, could not build with it, could not use it to acquire assets independently of the royal machinery that distributed it. Everything around her was magnificent, and almost none of it was hers in any sense that would survive a change of sovereign.
Margaret told me Leoli’s O was the only property she had ever owned in her entire life, said the wife of Garrett Copeland, a close friend from the island’s social circle. It was hers. She felt inordinate love and pride that this was not from the royal family. It was not her sisters. It was not grace and favor.
She loved the fact it was her own. The particular phrase grace and favor is worth pausing on because it describes the legal framework that had governed Margaret’s entire domestic experience. Grace and favor accommodations are residences assigned by the sovereign to deserving individuals as a personal gift, a gesture of royal grace rather than a right or a purchase.
and the recipient lives as a guest of the crown in a property the crown owns and administers under conditions ultimately determined by royal discretion. Margaret had lived in grace and favor accommodation for her entire adult life which meant that her experience of home was always at its foundation borrowed. She was a guest of the institution housed in exchange for her performance of the role the institution assigned her and if the role ended or the institution’s generosity was withdrawn the housing ended with it. Leolier O was
the exception the one place where the title was hers the one piece of the world where she was not anyone’s guest and not anyone’s functionary and not anyone’s spare. The freedom this conferred was simultaneously symbolic and practical because the island was privately owned with visitors registered with the Mystique Company’s security and no permanent press presence.
Lea Leo offered a degree of genuine privacy that her London existence made structurally impossible. Her mornings began by several accounts with a gin and tonic on the verander as the Caribbean morning warmed around her, a detail delightful in its unapologetic simplicity. No photographers by the gates, no equiry with the schedule, no engagement on the calendar, just the verander, the view, the drink, and the sound of two oceans meeting below the headland.
There were no cameras except the ones that eventually found her, and no reporters waiting at the airrip, and no obligation to smile at anyone she did not wish to smile at, which was a form of freedom so fundamental that most people experience it everyday without recognizing it as a privilege, and that Margaret, who had never experienced it anywhere else, recognized immediately as the most precious thing the island had to offer.
The 2-hour breakfast in bed followed, reading whatever she had brought. She was a serious and wide-ranging reader while chain- smoking her chesterfields. Then the slow process of hair and dressing, and only then, sometime around noon, the emergence onto the terrace. The pace was deliberately, consciously slow in a way that metropolitan royal life, packed with engagements and functions and commitments, almost never permitted.
And the slowness was itself a form of rebellion, a refusal to organize her hours around anyone else’s expectations that she could exercise at leisure and nowhere else. The daily swim was a significant part of her routine, the one form of exercise she embraced with genuine enthusiasm, and by the mid 1990s, after her first stroke had weakened her left side, the swimming became a form of determined daily therapy as well as pleasure.
with Lady Anne Glen Connor developing a specific side stroke to keep pace with her in the water. lunch under the poolside gazebo with whichever guests had joined her that season, late afternoons on the beach, or at the home of whichever resident was hosting that evening’s drinks, and then the evenings. On Mystique she could insist on being called mom, and then in the same evening sit at the piano in her swimsuit, and play show tunes with increasing ribbry until the small hours.
she could accept a curtsy from a new arrival and then wade into the sea for a midnight swim without telling anyone she was going. The coexistence of formality and wildness impossible anywhere near the palace was perfectly natural on the headland because it was in fact perfectly natural to her and the island was the one place that allowed both halves of her personality to occupy the same evening without either one requiring an apology.
The early Mystique social circle was a deliberately heterogeneous group. Aristocrats, rock musicians, actors, fashion designers, socialites, and writers mixed in proportions that reflected tenants Catholic social tastes, and Margaret’s genuine pleasure in company that crossed every conventional line.
In London, her world was heavily skewed toward the established aristocracy. On Mystique, MC Jagger was a neighbor, having bought on the island after Margaret encouraged him to do so, constructing his Japanese-style Star Groves villa. And David Bowie bought a multi-pillion property he called Britannia Bay, though he eventually sold it, saying the house was so tranquil and peaceful that he found it hard to get any work done.
Brian Adams built a home he still owns, and Tommy Hilfiger, Paul McCartney, and an archipelago of aristocrats and business magnates followed, each drawn by the promise of absolute seclusion that had drawn Margaret herself. People had parties with every type of person there, Lady Anne Glen Connor recalled, “And the conversations at evening drinks parties crossed lines that the drawing rooms of Kensington Palace were not designed to cross.
She could be very wild and unrestrained, several Mystique regulars noted, and she could be very difficult. She liked to be spoiled and taken care of. If she felt well cared for, she was fun. The piano was central to her evenings. She liked nothing more than to sit and drink and sing a ditty at the piano, recalled the wife of Garrett Copeland.
She sang somewhat off-color songs, sitting on the stool with a piano player. She had a very rivaled sense of humor, which around the right people was pretty bad. She loved that sort of stuff. Margaret was by training and genuine talent, an accomplished musician who had learned piano as a child and retained the technique and the ear of someone who had grown up in a household where music was practiced seriously.
At Kensington Palace, piano playing was an entertainment provided for guests. On Mystique, it was liberation. The songs got bordier as the night went on. The famous grouse whiskey circulated freely. There was dancing. People disappeared to the beach. And the behavior was, in the generous assessment of those who were present, outrageous in the pleasantest possible sense of the word.
Margaret was in these evenings the organizing principle of the island’s social world and its greatest attraction, a woman exercising the authority of the host and the owner rather than performing the role of the princess. And the difference between the two was for her the difference between obligation and pleasure.
She had spent 30 years being the permanent spare to the permanent heir. and on this headland in this house with this piano and this whiskey and these friends who were there because they wanted to be rather than because protocol required it. She was the center of the room because the room was hers. For Margaret, who had grown up as the witty, glamorous, more naturally sociable of the two sisters, and who had then spent her adult life watching the less socially gifted sister inherit the role that required social gifts, while she herself was allocated a position
that required her to be permanently charming and permanently subordinate. The reversal that Mystique provided was psychologically profound. here. She was not the supporting act, but the headliner, not the spare, but the reason everyone else had come. The early Mystique social world, in the years when the island had only 15 homeowners, and each hosted drinks every evening, was small enough to be intimate and exclusive enough to be discreet.
And this combination, the smallalness and the discretion was what allowed Margaret to be simultaneously the most royal person present and the most relaxed. The parties at Leoli O during the 1970s and 1980s entered legend. Margaret seated on a wooden throne strewn with fresh orchid petals, presiding over fashion shows to the beats of a local band.
While in the garden, the famous grouse flowed, and the conversations grew increasingly unconstrained by anything resembling metropolitan propriety. Colin Tenant understood with crystalline clarity, what Margaret’s presence on the island was worth. She was, as one commentator put it, the living proof that Mystique was a place where a royal princess could be herself, where the normal rules did not apply, where one could swim and drink and laugh without a photographer in the bushes, and her presence was the island’s greatest endorsement and its greatest
advertisement simultaneously. A consortium led by Venezuelan industrialist Hans Noman had bought 60% of the Mystique Company from tenant in 1976 when his financial difficulties had made the sale necessary and the company’s continued commercial viability depended on attracting buyers of sufficient wealth and sufficient social ambition to sustain the island’s reputation as the most exclusive private community in the Caribbean.
Margaret by simply being there accomplished more for that reputation than any amount of advertising expenditure could have purchased. In return, the island gave her the one thing she could not find anywhere else in the world. The first scandal associated with Leoli O predated even its completion. In the late 1960s, Margaret had been introduced to John Bindon, a Cockney actor who had appeared in Quadrofinia and who came with what one source described delicately as some gangster connections and who was invited to spend three weeks
on Mystique with her. The stories that circulated about their interactions were extraordinarily racy. His then girlfriend, model Vicky Hodgej, claimed that Margaret had been charmed by his cocknney accent, his rhyming slang, and dirty jokes. Photographs allegedly taken on the beach were said to have ended up in a Lloyd’s Bank vault at the center of the famous 1971 Baker Street robbery, with some accounts suggesting a Dnotice was issued to suppress press coverage and all documents relating to the robbery placed
under embargo at the National Archives until 2071. A date sufficiently distant to ensure that everyone directly involved will be long dead before the truth, whatever it is, becomes public. But Bindon was a footnote. The main event came in 1973 when Tenant introduced Margaret to Rody Llewellyn, the sweetnatured, gardening obsessed son of a baronet.
Margaret was 43 and Luellin was 25, and their affair began immediately with Mystique as its primary theater. The island offered exactly what such a liaison required. Genuine seclusion, no permanent press presence, and the diplomatic amnesia of a social world that understood what went on in private villas was supposed to stay there.
I was just following my heart, Luwellyn said later, with the straightforward simplicity of a man who had not yet learned to mistrust his own motives. Mystique in this period was not a holiday destination for Margaret, but an emotional refuge. the place she retreated to when her marriage had degenerated into open warfare, when London felt like a prison of obligations, when the pressure of being watched and judged and found wanting had become genuinely unbearable.
For nearly 3 years, the affair was conducted in the warm Caribbean latitude of Leoli Oo, with Luwell in a regular and increasingly integral part of Margaret’s island life. the two of them sharing the headland and the pool and the evenings with the freedom of people who believed the sea provided sufficient insulation from the world’s opinion.
Luwellyn, who was gentle and uncomplicated in ways that Armstrong Jones had never been, brought to Margaret’s life on Mystique a quality of calm that those around her noticed and that the architecture of her London existence had made impossible. He gardened, he swam, he sat with her on the terrace in the evenings, and he did not leave notes in drawers telling her he hated her.
The simplicity of what he offered after the Barack cruelties of the Snowden marriage was precisely what made it so valuable and precisely what made its public exposure so devastating. In 1976, the insulation failed. Paparazzi photographs of Margaret and Luwellyn appeared in the news of the world. him in Union Jack swimming trunks on the beach.
The two of them photographed with an intimacy that left nothing to the imagination. Buckingham Palace confirmed that the royal marriage had broken down. The public reaction was largely unsympathetic with politicians condemning Margaret as a royal parasite and a flooy. the queen expressing clear disapproval and real fears circulating within the palace that the scandal would damage public confidence in the monarchy at a moment when public confidence was already under strain.
Margaret had apparently suffered what some accounts describe as a nervous breakdown on Mystique in 1974, the year before the public unraveling, with friends reportedly having her room monitored and connections made with priaryy clinic doctors for treatment of serious depression. The island she had built as a refuge had in some ways accelerated the crisis by providing the conditions in which the marriages collapse became fully visible.
The divorce from Armstrong Jones was finalized in 1978, the first royal divorce in Britain in 400 years. And the public narrative that surrounded it was shaped almost entirely by the photographs from Mustique, the images of Margaret and Llewellyn on the beach that had made the private collapse of the marriage a matter of national discussion and parliamentary condemnation.
Margaret kept leoli o in a settlement that divided the assets of a marriage in which almost nothing had been genuinely shared. The villa on Mystique was the one property whose ownership was unambiguous because it had been given to Margaret before the marriage began to fail.
Built during the years of its most active deterioration and completed at the moment when the pretense of a functioning relationship had become impossible to sustain. It was the only thing in the settlement that was genuinely and unambiguously her own. For a woman who had spent decades watching her sister inherit the weight and purpose of the crown, while she was allocated a supporting role with no independent base, no defined function, and no property that did not belong to someone else, the villa on Mystique carried a meaning that the word holiday
entirely fails to capture. She had been denied the man she loved because the church could not accommodate his divorce. She had married a man who expressed his contempt in notes left around the apartment like landmines. She had been called a parasite in Parliament and a fluy in the tabloids. She had raised two children in a household where open warfare was the prevailing domestic climate, where notes left in drawers were designed to wound with surgical precision, where the man she had married in front of 300 million television
viewers, had turned the intimacy of their shared apartment into a theater of cruelty that the children witnessed and the staff endured and the palace pretended not to know about. She had performed three decades of official engagements, charity visits, foreign tours, and ceremonial obligations. All of them conducted in the knowledge that she was doing these things not because she was queen, but because she was not, and that the public who watched her do them was simultaneously impressed by her style, scandalized by her personal life,
and resentful of the cost of maintaining her in the manner to which her birth had accustomed her. The civil list allowance that funded her official existence had by 1990 reached £219,000 per year. And the figure was debated in Parliament with a hostility that would have been unthinkable had it been directed at the sovereign herself because Margaret was the spare and the spare’s expenditure was in the public mind always potentially excessive in a way that the heir’s expenditure was not.
Through all of it, she owned in the whole world one house. More than any palace, as one account noted, Princess Margaret loved her villa on mystique and the freedom that she could enjoy on the private island. The distinction this sentence draws is between a palace, which is a setting for the performance of a role, and a house, which is a setting for the living of a life.
And what Margaret understood with a clarity that her position in the royal hierarchy had given her decades to develop was that she had spent her entire adult existence in settings designed for the performance of a role she had not chosen in rooms whose dimensions were determined by institutional function rather than personal preference.
Surrounded by beauty that answered to the nation’s requirements rather than her own. The orange bedroom answered to her requirements. The piano on which she played boardy songs at midnight answered to her requirements. The headland, the two oceans, the view across the Grenardines, the sound of the water on the pebbles that gave the bay its name.
The gardens that Mess had designed with the theatrical instinct of a man who understood that beauty is most effective when it appears to have arrived without effort. All of this answered to her requirements in a way that no palace, however magnificent, ever had. She visited Leolio twice a year for nearly three decades.
The house was maintained year round by a full domestic staff who kept the gardens tended, the pools clean, the rooms aired, the compound in a permanent state of readiness for the arrival of a woman who spent most of her year in a residence she did not own, waiting for the weeks when she could return to one she did. One could buy or rent a Caribbean villa for a week and feel the pleasure of warmth and beauty and distance from obligation.
One could spend a fortnight in a property of staggering beauty and leave no trace. What Margaret felt at Leolio was categorically different. the specific irreplaceable sensation of being at home, not visiting someone else’s home, not occupying a residence as a function of a role, but home, the one place in the world where she was not a guest and not a functionary and not a spare, where the walls were the color she had chosen, and the name on the deed was her own.
She called it the only square inch in the world she owned. She was not exaggerating. The deed bore her name, and the orange walls bore her taste, and the piano bore the memory of her voice, and the headland bore the weight of the only freedom she ever found. On 10 acres of Caribbean land that a Scottish eccentric gave her, because he understood before she did, that what she needed was a place in the world she could call her own.
It was the only place she ever had. It was hers.