RICHARD EDEN: Farewell to Britain’s most colorful aristocrat – Fiona, Lady Montagu of Beaulieu

She married the greatest aristocratic showman of the contemporary era – and proved she could emulate his exuberance, never more dazzling than when, dressed in a white rhinestone-encrusted jumpsuit, she danced the night away, rubbing rhinestones with Elvis lookalikes .

But when the pace got too much for Fiona, the second wife of the late Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, she took refuge in a flat far from Palace House, her husband’s ancestral seat, and the 8,500-acre estate – making her playful. described as ‘the only woman who goes to London to get away from it all’.

There she died peacefully on Sunday, at the age of 79, after a short illness.

“She was surrounded by her immediate family,” a spokesperson for the estate tells me, explaining that this included her son Jonathan and his wife Nathalie, and their daughter Akina, and her stepchildren, Mary and Ralph, who succeeded his father as the 4th Lord Montagu in 2015.

Born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), young Fiona had been sent to Switzerland to complete school, before coming to Britain where, while working as a film production assistant, she met Edward Montagu.

Beau Suede Shoes: Fiona was the second wife of the colorful Lord Montagu of Beaulieu

They married in 1974, just months after Lord Montagu’s divorce from his first wife, Belinda, whom he had married in 1958.

Four years before that first marriage, he had been jailed for a year for ‘consensual homosexual offences’ with an RAF soldier.

The case became a cause celebre that led to a change in the law decriminalizing homosexuality the following decade.

Life with Lord Montagu at Palace House was never conventional. Once, Fiona recalls, she had entered her bedroom and saw “a little girl sitting at my dressing table and brushing her hair.”

Then I decided that my bedroom should be off limits to visitors.

A portrait depicted the peer with his two wives, to whom he jointly dedicated his memoirs.

Cruisey: Fiona, left, with her husband Edward, Lord Beaulieu, and a contest winner

Fiona became the first global ambassador for the Club of Budapest, an informal association that strives for a more peaceful world with followers ranging from the Dalai Lama to Basic Instinct star Sharon Stone, while dedicating herself to the Countryside Education Trust at home.

“She brought light to every room she entered,” the director, Jane Cooper, tells me. “She was so good at talking to people.”

Including, it turns out, “a millionaire of her knowledge.” When she ran into him one day – “coincidentally” – on a beach, she immediately asked for a donation to the trust and received it.