LADY LAVERY AND THE LOVE AFFAIR SHE HAD TO HIDE
After Kevin O’higgins’s death, secret letters were sent that tell the tale of...
THERE is an almost unbearable poignancy in the letters. Sent by Lady Hazel Lavery to Eoin O’Duffy, the best friend of the assassinated Kevin O’Higgins, they ask a simple favour. ‘I know you were near him at the last, and I think you will do me a great favour because he would wish you to,’ she asks.
‘If you can, will you put one of these flowers somewhere near to him — even a tiny blossom, it would comfort me.
‘He gave me this little brooch of white heather, and I would love to have him go on his journey with it from me.
‘I am only asking you because I am so miserable and alone. I saw him all day on Thursday, and this morning I had a letter from him, written on Saturday. It is all such a cruel, cruel thing — for us all and our Ireland.’
It would, in any other circumstances, be a simple request from a lover, but this situation demanded more discretion, because Lavery’s love for O’Higgins was clandestine. The Irish Free State was just six years old and O’Higgins, at 35 already vice-president of the Executive Council and minister for justice, was one of its chief architects.
Deeply moral, he had toyed with the idea of becoming a priest.
He fasted for six months before marrying Brigid and would father three children, one of whom died in infancy.
A scandal was the last thing the fledgling State needed; after all it was just a generation since the affair between Charles Stewart Parnell and Kitty O’Shea had sent shockwaves through deeply conservative Ireland.
O’Duffy, the Garda commissioner, was one of the few who knew of the relationship, and he kept the letters and one telegram secret.
Only recently, they were found in Co. Wexford by a woman clearing out her late father’s possessions, among an archive assembled by O’Duffy’s private secretary, Captain Liam Walsh, for a planned biography of O’Duffy that never was published.
Tomorrow, at the Clyde Court Hotel in Dublin, they go up for auction under the hammer of Fonsie Mealy, with guide prices of between €1,000 and €1,500.
They offer a unique insight into the private life not just of Lady Lavery but also of the revolutionary leader- turned- statesman whose public morality was at odds with the passion he felt for the exotic Hazel.
Of course, he was not the first to fall under her spell, as she and Michael Collins were also romantically linked, though no one ever has been able to establish if that relationship was a sexual one.
IRONICALLY, the flighty Hazel came to represent the epitome of Irish womanhood when her husband, Sir John Lavery, was commissioned to paint a picture of Kathleen Ní Houlihan, the symbol of Irish nationalism, to appear on the new Irish currency notes.
Just a year after the murder of O’Higgins, Hazel — painted in profile gazing out from under a long, modest headscarf — made her debut. She would sit in Irish pockets and wallets for 49 years.
She was born in Chicago in 1880 to a wealthy merchant, Edward Jenner Martyn, and his wife Alice. Initially known as Elsa, her name was changed to Hazel because of the stunning brown eyes that later would bewitch London and Dublin alike.
Her father died during her teens through what many believed was overwork. In 1903, despite depleted fortunes, Alice Martyn took Hazel — then 22, a fixture of Chicago society and the bearer of the soubriquet ‘the most beautiful girl in the Midwest’ — and her sister Dorothy to Brittany to have their portraits painted by Sir John Lavery.
Lavery was a widowed artist with a teenage daughter. Born in Belfast, he made his name painting in the open-air style of the French Impressionists. Upon seeing Hazel, he was immediately besotted and, despite a 24-year age gap, they began an affair, much to her mother’s displeasure.
Hazel was returned to the United States, where she married a physician, Edward Livingston Trudeau Jr, who died just five months later of pneumonia. Hazel was already pregnant, and gave birth to a daughter, Alice, in 1904 (Alice spent most of her life in Ireland and died in Co. Meath in 1991).
Still carrying a torch for Lavery, whose bohemian lifestyle was thrilling compared with the stultifying conformity of life in the Midwest, Hazel married the artist in 1909.
Their London home became an artistic and literary salon and later a safe place for British and Irish officials, among them O’Higgins and Collins, to meet out of public sight to plan the terms of independence for Ireland.
Hazel had always been impressed with a love for the country. Her father told stories of their ancestors, the Martins (changed to Martyn after the Reformation), who ruled territory near Galway in the 13th Century and who, he fancifully recounted, had been warriors and rebels.
In a letter to his wife, O’Higgins — one of 16 children born in Stradbally, Co. Laois — described the Laverys as ‘fine folks’ but confessed he felt uncomfortable among the ‘ boiled shirts and painted ladies’.
After the Treaty was signed and Collins was assassinated, Hazel kept in touch with many of the Free State protagonists, including O’Higgins. In 1923, he returned to London to have his portrait painted by Sir John Lavery. They continued to correspond, with Hazel calling the often moody O’Higgins a ‘gloomy guss’.
But their affection for each other deepened and, by 1924, he was calling her ‘dear Hazel’, and wrote: ‘I had to tell you, just once, that you are not “a friend of mine” but altogether the sweetest and most wonderful influence in my life.’
In her celebrated biography, Hazel: A Life Of Lady Lavery, Sinéad McCoole notes that Hazel censored or hid many of these letters, especially after it became clear O’Higgins had fallen in love with her.
Sensing the burgeoning relationship, Sir John insisted that he and Hazel travel to the US in 1925, and no correspondence with O’Higgins from that year survives. When it resumed, O’Higgins wrote: ‘You’re a necessity of existence, like the sun and the air, my own darling. I am yours in time and eternity.’ Despite his perceived ascetic morality, he confessed in another letter: ‘I am lost and desolate without you. I want you — all the enchantments — sight and sound and the touch of you.
‘I want you to hold you to me and hear you say again and again and again that you love me.’
His obsession found him estranged from his wife, and miserable. After the birth of his second daughter, Una, in January 1927, he wrote: ‘I am lost and broken.’
That summer, O’Higgins stopped over in London on the way to an arms conference at the League of Nations in Geneva and, from there, wrote to Hazel to say: ‘I never found you more utterly, bewilderingly beautiful, more sweetly tender, than when we last met.’
ON July 6 and 7, he saw Hazel again on the return journey. Three days later, walking without his bodyguards in Booterstown in Dublin, he was ambushed by three republicans who still harboured a grievance over his orders to execute their colleagues during the Civil War. As he lay dying, they heard him say: ‘There has been too much killing in our country. The killing has got to stop. I forgive you.’
Hazel was devastated. Her friend Shan Leslie wrote: ‘I held her for some hours while she shook and sobbed in my arms.’
The letter O’Higgins wrote to her on his return to Dublin was delivered the next morning, bringing further pain.
She did not travel to the huge State funeral; instead she wrote to Eoin O’Duffy, who later confirmed that, in all but minor detail, her wishes had been carried out.
It was some comfort. In her last letter to O’Duffy, which will be auctioned tomorrow, she wrote: ‘Your help and swift understanding seemed to melt the ice around my heart. I’ve felt frozen in misery and utterly alone. I still feel that to someone, sometime during those hours of shadow, he must have spoken of me, said a word for me, some word I would have known and understood.’
Hazel: A Life Of Lady Lavery is published by The Lilliput Press and available as a Kindle download from amazon.com at $10.21 (€7.74)