Secret letters revealing how diplomat proposed to Jackie Kennedy sell for £100,000

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Secret letters between David Ormsby Gore and Jackie Kennedy has sold for almost £100,000

David Ormsby Gore, the 5th Lord Harlech, was besotted with the former First Lady and the pair were very close.

But Jackie likened him to a brother and rejected his advances in 1968 before marrying shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis months later.

The handwritten letters have been hidden away in two locked government dispatch boxes at the Harlech's family estate at Glyn Cywarch, in Gwynedd, Wales for 40 years.

They only emerged in January this year when a locksmith sliced through it to open the boxes.

The Kennedy-Harlech papers were auctioned off by Bonhams as part of a house contents sale to fund the restoration of the property.

The winning bidder, who is yet to be identified, ended up paying £98,500 for the cache which also included personal correspondence from President Kennedy, Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Wilson.

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They revealed the diplomat proposed to Jackie five years after JFK's assassination

The letters from Jackie Kennedy cover her days as First Lady, from the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 until her marriage to Onassis in October 1968.

I hope that bond of love and pain will never be cut

Jackie Kennedy

Their relationship deepened in 1967 following the tragic death in a car accident of Lord Harlech's wife, Sissy, in May of that year.

At the time Jackie wrote to him movingly, "Your last letter was such a cri de coeur of loneliness – I would do anything to take that anguish from you – You want to patch the wounds & match the loose pairs – but you can't because your life won't turn out that way."

Jackie Kennedy in pictures Thu, January 19, 2017

Jackie Kennedy Onassis, former First Lady and wife of US President John F. Kennedy.

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Former First Lady Jackie Kennedy at a picnic, circa 1960

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The handwritten letters have been hidden away at the Harlech's family estate for 40 years

The pair holidayed together and in February 1968, Lord Harlech proposed to her.

She replied: "We have known so much & shared & lost so much together – Even if it isn't the way you wish now – I hope that bond of love and pain will never be cut”

"You are like my beloved beloved brother – and mentor – and the only original spirit I know – as you were to Jack."

In the final letter written from Aristotle Onassis's yacht Christina, Jackie tries to explain why she had married the billionaire Greek shipping magnate.

She wrote: "You and I have shared so many lives and deaths and hopes and pain – we will share them forever and be forever bound together by them.

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The letters from Jackie cover her first days as First Lady until her marriage to Onassis in 1968

“If ever I can find some healing and some comfort – it has to be with someone who is not a part of all my world of past and pain – I can find that now – if the world will let us."

David Ormsby Gore was born in 1918 and educated at Eton and New College Oxford.

Elected to parliament in 1950, he held a number of Government Ministerial positions in the Foreign Office, but resigned in 1961 in order to take up the post of British Ambassador to the United States until 1965.

He became the 5th Lord Harlech on the death of his father in 1964, but died in 1985 from injuries sustained in a car crash. Senator Edward Kennedy, Jacqueline Onassis and other Kennedy family members attended his funeral.