Eliza Lynch was born in Charleville in 1833 to John and Elizabeth (nee Lloyd) John was in the medical profession, moved in the upper echelons of society and he also owned some property in Mallow. Eliza was baptised in 1834 in the local Catholic Church, located in the town's Chapel Street where a Plaque commemorating her was unveiled in 2014 by her great-grandson, Miguel Angel Solano Lopez, Paraguayan Ambassador to London and ambassador-designate to Ireland. The cut stone Church building served as the parish church until 1902 and is today a community hall and centre. .
They emigrated to Paris as Eliza’s eldest sister Corinne was living in France in 1847...Ireland was then in the midst of the Great Famine.
Duped into a dubious marriage with a French army officer at 16, she later left him in Algeria and somehow made her way back to Paris, where she caught the eye of the heir-apparent to the Paraguayan presidency, the fabulously rich Francisco Solano Lopez.
She became his mistress, bore him seven children, became the unofficial Queen of Paraguay when he became supreme ruler, led the country in fashion, arts and culture for 15 years, then stood by him as he died in the final vicious battle of the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) in which Paraguay was fighting against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.
Eliza Lynch supported her lover's plans going so far as to organize a female battalion of soldiers. She herself joined the battle at Cerra Cora. She was in the field with Lopez and her fifteen year old son when both were killed by Brazilian troops by being run through by a lance and slashed and stuck with swords. The image of Eliza burying Lopez and her 15-year-old son with her bare hands after they were killed in the final standoff has taken on mythic proportions.Eliza then turned to the victorious armies and faced them down, insisting she was a citizen of the British Crown, had a Passport to prove it and demanded safe passage with her surviving children. She was allowed to return to Europe where she lived in relative obscurity in Paris.
In 1875 she returned to Paraguay on the invitation of president Juan B. Gill, who supported her claims to confiscated property. However, she was again deported to France and settled again in Paris where she died in 1886.
In the 1970s, under the influence of nationalist and revisionist historians, Eliza Lynch was proclaimed a Paraguayan national heroine and her remains were removed from a grave in Paris to her adopted country in South America. A central street in Asunción was named 'Madame Lynch' in her honor .
In Film; Eliza Lynch: Queen of Paraguay (2013)
In Book; “The Lives of Eliza Lynch” by Michael Lillis and Ronan Fanning (2009) Gill & Macmillan, Dublin. ISBN 978-0717146116
Extreme Stealth required and replace this magnetic nano very carefully.