a job in the Ministry of Information, where he met a married American co-worker Marietta Peabody FitzGerald and began a romantic relationship. He left Parliament when, in the election in 1945 at the end of the war, he was defeated by the Labour candidate at Harborough by 204 votes. Marriage to Marietta Peabody Although Tree was bisexual and twenty years older than Marietta, at the end of World War II, Tree and Peabody divorced their respective spouses, and then married on 26 July 1947; they had one child, Penelope (born 1949), who became a celebrated fashion model in the 1960s. Marietta moved into Ditchley, but found herself bored with English country life. Tree and most of his friends were conservatives, and Democrat Marietta found herself isolated. Recognising his wife's unhappiness, and for the first time in his life short of money due to the taxation of Foreign Trust income enacted by the 1945 Labour Government, Tree sold Ditchley and agreed to return to New York with Marietta, her daughter Frances FitzGerald, their daughter, and his butler Collins. Marietta immediately joined the Lexington Democratic Club, and two years later was elected the county chairwoman. She was elected to the Democratic State Committee in 1954. In 1952, Marietta became involved in the Presidential election campaign of Adlai Stevenson, and in the later 1956 campaign - both defeats. This did not put her off politics, and John F Kennedy appointed her to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1961. Marietta had started an affair with Adlai Stevenson between his two failed presidential campaigns, but her husband was unfazed by this, as the couple's marriage had largely disintegrated to a friendly separation, with Tree spending much of his time at Heron Bay, his house in Barbados. Marietta had turned down the option of returning to her earlier lover, the director John Huston, even when he had given her a role in his 1960 movie The Misfits. It was while walking in London with Marietta that Adlai suffered a heart attack, and later died at St. George's Hospital. That night in her diary, Marietta wrote, "Adlai is dead. We were together." Ronald Tree died of a stroke on 14 July 1976 in London, England. Houses of Ronald Tree Ronald Tree was, like his grandfather Lambert Tree and his father Arthur, a prominent owner and connoisseur of fine houses, both commissioning, restoring and owning