RICHARD KAY: Lady Montagu of Beaulieu married the third baron of Beaulieu and rescued David Cassidy

At the height of his fame David Cassidy was the most hunted pop star on the planet.

Besieged by teenage girls at London’s Dorchester Hotel on one visit, he opted for a 200-ton yacht moored on the Thames on his next trip. 

But fans were just as determined to reach their idol, and jumped into the river from which they had to be rescued by the singer’s security team. 

Viewing this mayhem from her stately home, Lady Montagu of Beaulieu, who has died aged 90, offered a uniquely British solution — sanctuary in her 13th-century pile. 

Lady Montagu of Beaulieu offered him sanctuary in her 13th-century pile. Four years before he and Belinda married, he was jailed for homosexual sex

For several days in March 1973, unknown to his teeny-bopper devotees, she helped the 22-year-old Cassidy escape the hysteria by teaching him to fish in the grounds of the 8,500-acre estate on the edge of the New Forest in Hampshire. 

She also took him for a spin in one of her husband’s fabled collection of vintage cars. A plaque erected on the bank of the Beaulieu River commemorates the event, noting that Cassidy had been a guest ‘to escape the clamour of adoring fans’. 

Within months, Lady Montagu, the former Belinda Crossley, was seeking her own escape. 

But hers was from a marriage that had run out of steam and that from the outset had always seemed perilously risky. 

Her husband Edward, the third baron of Beaulieu, who had succeeded to the title at the age of two and a half, had once been regarded as Britain’s most eligible bachelor and a possible suitor to Princess Margaret. 

A flamboyant dandy who wore a full-length fur coat and old-fashioned racing goggles when driving, the handsome Edward Douglas-ScottMontagu had an impeccable aristocratic pedigree descended from dukes and marquesses. 

‘I was born lucky,’ he admitted. ‘Good looking, well-connected, tolerably well-off as well as having a title which had, and still has, an irresistible ring to it.’ But he also led a double life. 

Four years before he and Belinda married, he was jailed for homosexual sex after one of the most notorious court cases in post-war Britain. 

 Four years before Edward [pictured above] the third baron of Beaulieu, who had succeeded to the title at the age of two and a half, and Belinda married he was jailed for homosexual sex

Its widespread coverage — as well as the outrage it provoked — eventually led to the decriminalisation of homo­sexuality in 1967. 

That she knew all this suggests that Belinda Crossley’s greatest quality must have been forgiveness. 

He always denied the charges, despite later admitting to bisexuality in his youth. 

At Eton he fell passionately in love with another boy, but assumed he was just going through a passing phase of adolescence. 

It was not the case. ‘When I joined the Grenadier Guards in 1945 I found homosexuality was a fact of life,’ he said. 

At one moment he would be dining with George VI, the next enjoying the louche company of a fellow gay guards officer. 

By the time he went up to New College, Oxford, in 1948, he’d enjoyed affairs with both men and women and while at university was a member of the rakish Bullingdon Club. 

‘One night I was dancing with debs, the next I’d be in a gay club like the Rockingham,’ he said years later. 

Fellow students took a different view of his bohemian life and they smashed up his rooms after one particularly riotous party. 

It was Montagu, not his attackers, who was asked to leave the university by Oxford’s authorities. 

He weathered the storm, becoming a successful public relations executive and touring North America lecturing on Britain’s historic houses, including his own, where his family had lived for 400 years. 

He started his car collection — the National Motor Museum — in honour of his father, the first MP to drive a car and who introduced the legislation which made number plates compulsory and raised the speed limit from 12mph to 20mph. By 1953 he was engaged to a young actress called Anne Gage and then his gilded world came crashing down. 

During the August Bank Holiday some boy Scouts, camping on the Beaulieu estate, helped out as guides at the house. 

It was a hot day and Montagu invited them to swim with him and a friend in the nearby Solent. 

Two accepted and changed in the peer’s beach hut. Later, Montagu discovered that an expensive camera had gone missing. 

He reported the loss to police. The two Scouts countered the accusation by claiming Montagu and his friend had sexually molested then. 

Montagu was stunned. ‘I am bisexual. I am not a paedophile,’ he said later. 

When the case came to court the jury believed Montagu’s defence but could not reach a verdict when a new charge of indecent assault was introduced. 

But before he could stand trial again, he was rearrested for a different offence — conspiring to incite two young airmen to commit acts of gross indecency. 

He was charged along with two other men, his cousin — landowner Michael Pitt-Rivers — and Peter Wildeblood, who was the Daily Mail’s diplomatic correspondent.

 The alleged offences took place during a weekend party at a beach hut on the estate. ‘Nothing happened,’ Montagu said years later. 

‘There was some mild dancing which in comparison to the modern discotheque was very tame and more resembled a school dancing class.’ 

Montagu was subsequently jailed for 12 months and the other two received 18-month sentences. ‘The trial was horrific,’ Montagu recalled. 

‘I feel that I let the family down a bit.’ Yet something had changed, at least in the public’s mind. 

When the three men left court for prison after the verdict, instead of the expected jeers from the crowd, there were cheers of support. 

His engagement, however, did not survive. Confused about his sexual identity, Montagu continued to suffer personal anguish. He embarked on a string of affairs. 

When he got one girl pregnant, her father — a member of the House of Lords — arranged for her to have an abortion on the grounds any child of Montagu’s would have bad blood. 

But there was one person who did want to marry him. Five years his junior, Belinda Crossley had known Montagu since she was a child during World War II when she had cycled and ridden her pony around the Beaulieu estate. 

Nonetheless, his engagement to the honey-blonde commercial artist, a niece of Lord Somerleyton — a Suffolk landowner — surprised friends. 

Their wedding in 1958 was a lavish affair recorded on British Movie­tone newsreel and it included an old tradition — a soot-­blackened local chimney sweep kissed the bride as she emerged from the marriage ceremony. 

But it was not without drama. A heartbroken former lover, Ronald Clarke, a 28-year old barrow boy turned actor, who had a bit part in the TV series Dixon Of Dock Green, had threatened to kidnap Belinda on her way to church. 

Rather than arrest him, detectives kept Clarke company, even taking him to a nightclub. For 15 years Lady Montagu was a vibrant chatelaine of historic Beaulieu. 

In addition to the motor museum, she presided over the annual Beaulieu Jazz Festival. 

But after what were reported as ‘nude bathing parties, fights with broken bottles, drunken orgies and innocent bystanders beaten up’, in 1961 Montagu cancelled it.

The marriage itself, with all its tensions, could not survive either. 

The couple divorced in 1974. She never remarried and is survived by their son Ralph, who succeeded as the 4th Baron Montagu on his father’s death in 2015, and their daughter Mary. 

After the divorce, Edward married Fiona Herbert, by whom he had another son, Jonathan. 

The second Lady Montagu once observed that her husband had ‘only one bride and that was Beaulieu’. 

Remarkably, Belinda remained close to her ex-husband. An expert embroiderer and needle-worker, she created an array of souvenirs for the estate. 

Other commissions included making the kneelers for the Royal Family at the wedding of Prince Edward and the Countess of Wessex. 

She never spoke about her life with Edward, even when he ended years of silence with a memoir about his double life. 

Now, she has taken the secrets of one of Britain’s most colourful estates to her grave.