Lost Love Letters: Widow Jackie O REBUFFED British Aristocrat's Marriage Proposal

Just months before marrying Aristotle Onassis, former first lady Jackie Kennedy shot down a marriage proposal from a British baron!

Jackie's bombshell rejection to English lord David Ormsby-Gore appears in recently discovered letters.

Nearly five years after the numbing assassination of John F. Kennedy, the love-struck lord — who served as England's ambassador to the U.S. — popped the question, but was rebuffed.

"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," wrote Jackie in 1968. "I can find that now — if the world will let us."

David, a close friend of JFK, had suffered tragic loss, too — when Sylvia, his wife of 27 years, died in a car crash. As David and Jackie bonded through their mutual loneliness, he hoped to rediscover happiness with the widowed beauty.

Jackie let David down gracefully, but she made it clear she didn't view him as husband material.

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

While one prominent newspaper referred to David as "the man most likely to win Jackie," the former first lady wed Aristotle months later. In fact, she wrote her rejection letter while sailing on the Greek shipping magnate's yacht!

But always-classy Jackie was gracious enough to let David know she was grateful.

"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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