Lynch, Eliza Alicia (1834–86), mistress of Francisco Solano Lopez (dictator of Paraguay, 1862–70), was born in Charleville, Co. Cork, the eldest of at least three children of John Lynch, MD, AB, and his wife, Jane Elizabeth, second daughter of Captain William Lloyd, RN. John Lynch was catholic and Jane Lloyd came of protestant land-owning Anglo-Irish stock; while her parents were married in the Church of Ireland cathedral in Cork city, Eliza and her brothers, John (b. 1835) and Thomas (b. 1839), were baptised in the catholic church of Charleville. Her father died when she was young and, although her mother remarried, little is known of Eliza's life before she herself married, at the age of sixteen, Xavier Quatrefages, a 34-year-old pharmacist and officer in the French army, in a Church of England church at Folkestone, Kent, on 3 June 1850. The marriage certificate describes Eliza as ‘under age’ and her mother, Jane Eliza Clarke, as one of the witnesses. Quatrefages was then serving in Calais, and it is likely that he met Eliza through her mother's sister Elizabeth and the latter's husband, Commodore William Boyle Crooke, RN, a native of Cork but then resident in nearby Boulogne-sur-Mer.
The marriage was a travesty as it could not be recognised under French military or civil law: Quatrefages's comprehensive career file confirms that he never reported it. Nor had he sought the approval of his superiors to marry, as he did in 1857, when he married Nanette Servel, with whom he had three children. During her three years with Quatrefages in France and Algeria, Eliza's status must have been one of constant humiliation. She left him in 1853 because of ‘ill health’ and rejoined her mother in France.
Eliza met Francisco Solano Lopez in Paris in early 1854 and they became lovers; a photograph taken at this time reveals a woman of remarkable beauty. She later argued that not enough time elapsed between her leaving Quatrefages and then meeting Lopez for her to have become a courtesan, as was constantly alleged by her enemies, an accusation that has continued to feed the imagination (sometimes pornographic) of hostile writers. Lopez, the son of the dictator of Paraguay, was leading his country's first diplomatic and military procurement mission to Europe, for which he had vast resources. He had previously met Queen Victoria, and Eliza accompanied him on subsequent missions to European capitals where they were received (except at the Vatican), and a bill from a Dublin linen merchant suggests they visited Dublin in July 1854. Lopez made a deal with Quatrefages, employed Eliza's brother John in the Paraguayan navy, and set up her mother in the rue Saint Honoré. In late 1854 the already pregnant Eliza and Lopez travelled separately to Buenos Aires, where Eliza remained alone until their first son, Francisco, was born; she followed Lopez to Asuncion in May 1855.
Lopez provided a residence of great style for his mistress in the centre of the Paraguayan capital as well as a country estate; he himself maintained a separate residence, and Eliza was not received by his parents or the older Spanish families of the city. Her house ‘stank of Paris’ and became the centre of a cosmopolitan milieu of which she was the principal hostess and ‘the favourite subject of conversation ... ; her beauty, her elegance, the luxury she enjoyed, her ability to seduce and enchant’ made a considerable impression (Varela). Eliza and Lopez had five more children: Corinna (1856–7), Enrique Venancio (b. 1859), Frederico (b. 1860), Carlos (b. 1861), and Leopoldo (1862–70). Although the children were illegitimate, Lopez acknowledged paternity in the baptismal registers of the catholic church. When he succeeded his father as dictator, in September 1862, Eliza's position in society was transformed, to the horror of those who had previously sought to snub her. She brought French and Italian architects, theatre groups, and musicians to Asuncion, arranged balls in the Club Nacional, and provided lavish public entertainment for the masses; through her popularising of the polka she left an enduring legacy on Paraguayan folk music.
Lopez's Napoleonic ambitions triggered the catastrophic war of the Triple Alliance against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay (1864–70), in which over 90 per cent of Paraguayan men and 50 per cent of women died. Although Eliza has been widely accused by Lopez's enemies, domestic and foreign, of inciting his ambitions, in truth, as Paraguay's fortunes declined, Lopez became paranoid to the point of insanity, and Eliza could not risk becoming the object of his rage by opposing him in any way. The war effectively ended when Brazilian forces occupied Asuncion in January 1869, and Lopez, Eliza and their children, accompanied by a coterie of stragglers and prisoners, became fugitives in the hinterland. With the capture by the Brazilians of most of their retinue and carriages, including the state archives, Eliza was reduced to extreme hardship. The end came at Cerro Cora, close to the Brazilian border, on 1 March 1870, when they were surrounded by Brazilian cavalry and Lopez and their eldest son, Francisco, were killed in Eliza's presence. Wearing a ragged ball gown and dancing slippers, she buried them with her bare hands. Eliza was arrested by the Brazilians and taken by boat to the port of Asuncion, where the Brazilian interim government resisted demands by fifty outraged society ladies that she be stripped of her remaining possessions and arraigned for multiple crimes. Claiming British citizenship, she was deported to Europe.
Eliza arrived in London with her four surviving sons on 18 July 1870, then went to Paris on 20 July, but returned to London on 22 July to bury her youngest son, Leopoldo, who had died the previous day. She sent her remaining sons to boarding school in Croydon while she pursued legal claims in London and Edinburgh for embezzlement against Dr William Stewart, the former medical adviser to the Paraguayan army, whom she had entrusted with part of her fortune; she won one of her actions, but Stewart declared bankruptcy. Although at the end of the war Eliza had succeeded in getting out some gold and jewellery through General Thomas McMahon, the Irish-born American minister to Paraguay, the Paraguayan government declared her an outlaw and appropriated all her lands in 1870; by then she was the greatest landowner in the country, having acquired approximately a third of the national territory in her own name.
In 1872–5 Eliza received repeated invitations from President Gill to return as an honoured guest to Paraguay, but this may have been an elaborate trap to force her to reveal the treasures Solano Lopez had allegedly hidden. She and her son Enrique announced her intention to travel to Asuncion to face down her accusers, and they arrived in the city on 23 October 1875; she was warmly received by the masses, with whom she had always been popular, but a group of fifty women from the more prominent families publicly demanded that she be arraigned or at least expelled. Gill refused to receive her and sent a message that she should leave immediately for her own safety. She and Enrique embarked on HMS Cracker and returned to Buenos Aires, where she wrote and published her Exposicion y protesta, a passionate defence of her entire career against her many ‘calumniators’.
Eliza then returned to Paris, where she lived discreetly. She died 25 July 1886 at 25 Boulevard Peraire, an address which discredits the myth that she died in penury, and was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery. In 1961 her remains were exhumed and returned to Asuncion by the dictator General Alfredo Stroessner, who declared her the national heroine of Paraguay; they lie in an elaborate tomb in the national cemetery, La Recoleta, because the catholic church denied permission for their interment at the side of Lopez in the National Pantheon.
The tragic war of the Triple Alliance remains the most controversial historical issue for the Paraguayan public and even for scholarly opinion. For some it was an act of unforgivable self-indulgence by Lopez; for others an epic of national defence. Eliza, forever linked with Lopez, is destined to remain either his evil genius or a national icon.