How Did They Meet Their Brides?


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Yes, that's the story i've read too; the marriage was arranged by the fathers and Sophie's opinion (which wasn't positive from the start) was not taken into account...
Quite possibly one of the worst matched royal marriages in history

Dik van der Meulen, the royal biographer, supported by letters, notes, memorandums and other documents concerning the marriage came to the conclusion that Princess Sophie had a choice. Her own father wrote in letters, documented in the biography, that the ultimate choice was hers. He urged her to listen to her heart and mind. (!) Proof for this is that Sophie's elder sister Princess Marie married Alfred, Count von Neipperg, a non-equal marriage which was nevertheless made dynastic and with continuation of the royal style and the HRH for Princess Marie.

Through the whole biography (more than 700 pages!) it became clear, chapter after chapter, that many of the letters, notes, and especially the "memoirs" of Queen Sophie (written 25 years after the wedding) often shed an untrue image and clashed with other facts found in archives in The Hague, Stuttgart and Berlin. Not only the relationship with her husband was poor. The relationship with her mother-in-law and also aunt Queen Anna Pavlovna was disastrous. In the end Princess Sophie said yes. Had she said no, her cousin Prince Willem just would have went on, to another possible royal partner. The idea that she was "enforced" by the parents was a myth. The Prince of Orange (later King Willem II) had no interest in the Württemberg connection. He had more interesting liaisons in his mind but let his son free. I think it is mainly self-pity by Queen Sophie: "Buhuhuuuu.... oh pity me, the pour soul I am... enforced into a marriage with a brute!" It was the worst choice of her life. But her choice.

Note that -on her turn- Queen Sophie for once, really a rarity, agreed with her husband in his opposition to the idea of the eldest son, Prince Willem, to marry Anna Mathilde Countess van Limburg-Stirum. She fully agreed with the King that it was a grave mésalliance, "unworthy a future King and Grand-Duke". The Queen, never too tired to use everything to frustrate her spouse and to use the children as ammunition in her Holy War against Willem III, was remarkably disaproving of her son's choice. So the "Buhuhuuuu.... oh pity me, the pour soul I am..."-tone of Queen Sophie was pretty selective. The self-pity she felt for herself, she did not feel for her son. The result was a total desillusionment of her son but Queen Sophie had little understanding. Remarkably she herself begged for the same understanding for the marriage she had "to endure"....
 
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Thank you for your posts, Duc_et_Pair. Who would have inherited the British and Dutch thrones if the marriage between Princess Charlotte of Wales and the Prince of Orange had not been cancelled?
 
Thank you for your posts, Duc_et_Pair. Who would have inherited the British and Dutch thrones if the marriage between Princess Charlotte of Wales and the Prince of Orange had not been cancelled?

The Dutch wanted a sort of situation in which three thrones were under one crown: the United Kingdom, the Kingdom of the United Netherlands (= Netherlands and Belgium) and the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg. Princess Charlotte's father (the Prince-Regent) and the British Government did not oppose that idea. It would firmly place the United Kingdom with a big chunk of land between the continental powers France and Germany and unite the two maritime and colonial powers under one crown.

D. van der Meulen, Koning Willem II, page 167-168:

Like Princess Charlotte's mother, also her uncle Prince Augustus, the Duke of Sussex, was worried about the succession. In the middle of January, shortly after Charlotte's 18th birthday, he wrote to his niece that the Prince-Regent only had an eye for his own interests and that the royal family was not at all unanimous about the engagement with Prince Willem.

Prince Augustus, who had little sympathy for his brother and openly supported the opposition in Parliament, was worried about the constitutional aspects of the alliance: an union of two Heirs was an impossible case, nevertheless the fact that Prince Willem was such a nice and promising young man.* Prince Augustus could only think about one reason why his brother was so p ressing on this union: he wanted to get rid of her.**

[....]

Princess Charlotte more and more became under influence of her evil mother, her ambitious uncle Prince Augustus and factions of the opposition. They saw in obstructing the intended marriage an excellent opportunity to provoke the Prince-Regent. Princess Charlotte more or less ended the engagement by ignoring Prince Willem publicly and privately, in fact like her own father did to her mother. The poor young Hereditary Prince of Orange suffered under this.

[....]

D. van der Meulen, Koning Willem II, page 179-180:

The British ambassador in The Hague, Richard Le Poer Trench, Earl of Clancarty saw that the Prince was in poor state. On June 28 1814 the Prince visited the ambassador in The Hague. Clancarty, who was very embarrassed with the broken engagement, wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, that he was happy the Prince came to see him:

We were shocked when we saw his pale and skinny appearance but also pleased by his gentlemanlike manners, not at all having any intention to hide his sad situation with bravoure, or to blame someone, or to exploit it. He was full with the usual cordial and friendly attitude towards all and everyone he is so known for. The Prince made a defeated impression, that is true, but at the same time his behaviour was dignified and brave, like someone who suffers but whose pains are caused by others and not by himself.***

The Prince could not count on such an empathic reaction by his father Willem Frederik (King Willem I). He was not satisfied with his son's attitude and blamed him for lacking ambition. He regarded an union between Willem and Charlotte as the dynastic coronation of the special relationship between Great Britain and the Netherlands [Charlotte would have been the fourth British Consort after Mary I Stuart, The Princess Royal / Mary II Stuart / Anne of Great Britain and Hanover, The Princess Royal] and made clear to his son that he should have saved this engagement "at any price". He even demanded that Prince Willem should go back to London and "win Charlotte again". That there was no love, did not matter according him: A man can never be unhappy in a marriage because he can always find diversion somewhere.****

Prince Willem did not obey to his father. He made clear he no longer wanted to sacrifice his personal happiness for dynastic interests, for sure not for Princess Charlotte. The humiliation has been too big. Instead of London, the Prince travelled to Brussels. There the Prince made his own twist to his father's words: indeed, a man could always find diversion somewhere. [He engaged himself in the military and fought in the battles of Quatre-Bras and Waterloo].

[...]


* = Aspinall, Letters of The Princess Charlotte, page 105
** = Smith, George IV, page 130
*** = letter of Clancarty to Castlereagh June 28th 1814, Memoirs and correspondence of Viscount Castlereagh, volume X, pages 62-64
**** = autobiographic notes of King Willem I - September 1821, Royal House Archives, The Hague
 
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Prince (later Tsar) Ferdinand of Bulgaria met Princess Marie Louise of Bourbon-Parma in 1893 when their engagement was celebrated at the Castle of Schwartzau.
 
In the book "Letizia Real" they tell how Felipe and Letizia met.
It was Pedro Erquicia, director of Documentos TV, who introduced them in your house house, a charming penthouse in Madrid's Calle de Alcalá. That meeting was not by chance, as time was responsible for demonstrating. Erquicia knew that the prince wanted to meet the journalist and arranged everything necessary to ensure a meeting with a few guests of total confidence and a studied protocol.
Nor was it by chance that Felipe and Letizia sat together. The alibi the host used is that they were the youngest in the group. That night, the witnesses of the encounter realized the special connection that had emerged between the two. Of course, none imagined that they had witnessed a historical moment.
Sixteen people were invited to the dinner, including journalists Luis Mariñas and his wife, Beatriz Aranda; film director Emilio Martínez Lázaro and his wife, Soledad Alameda; the host's brother and the director and deputy director of Informe semanal, Manuel Rubio, who arrived accompanied by Letizia Ortiz.
The prince was the last to join; he did so dressed casually and escorted by his secretary, Jaime Alfonsin, and his wife, Cristina.
The attendees heard the couple talk about many current issues, those news that she told on television and that he, sometimes, starred. They also shared confidences from their new homes. He had just moved to a palace of one thousand eight hundred square meters within the complex of the palace of La Zarzuela, and she, to a flat in Valdebernardo of seventy square meters, almost the same size as the prince's bedroom. Letizia surely thought about how different their worlds were.
Felipe left Erquicia's house that night convinced that he wanted to see the journalist again, although he knew the difficulties involved in his decision.
Their short-term future would depend on the discretion with which they moved from that moment. For a prince it is not easy to relate, and even less with a person who appears every night on television.
Therefore, the security services of the King's House assigned to the protection of the heir designed a plan with which to preserve their meetings, a task that was not easy.
The operation was launched before the summer of 2003, when Felipe was clear that his relationship with Letizia Ortiz was serious and so he communicated it to his parents.
He wanted to act as cautiously as possible after his airy and frustrated romances with Isabel Sartorius, daughter of the Marquis of Mariño, and the Norwegian model Eva Sannum.
https://www.esferalibros.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Letizia-Real-primeras.pdf
 
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How Crown Prince Frederik and Mary Donaldson met.
When Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark travelled to Sydney, Australia, for the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, he could not have imagined that in a pub in Australia, he would meet his future wife. However, that is exactly what occurred on 16 September in the Slip Inn in Sydney. He was at the Slip Inn with his brother, Prince Joachim, his cousin, Prince Nikolaos of Greece, and Princess Märtha Louise of Norway after the opening ceremony. There they met up with the paternal cousin of Nikolaos, Prince Felipe of Spain. Felipe knew the sister of Mary’s flatmate.
Mary Donaldson, a graduate of the University of Tasmania with a degree in Commerce and Law, went to the pub with her flatmate, Andrew Miles and friend, Beatrice Tarnawski. While there, Beatrice began debating with Mary whether or not a man was more attractive with a hairy chest or not. Frederick, Joachim, and Nikolaos offered to be guinea pigs. After the debate between Beatrice and Mary, Frederick and Mary started up a conversation. They found they had things in common like their love of horses, adventure, and sports. At the end of the evening, Mary gave Frederick her telephone number, and he called her the very next day.
Crown Prince Frederick later said he felt like she was his soulmate when they met. Mary, on the other hand, has said it was not love at first sight since she barely knew him. However, she did admit they shared an immediate connection and that there was a sense of excitement after the meeting.

The relationship began as long distance. First, they corresponded through phone calls, letters, and e-mail. Then, Frederick began to make trips to Australia to spend time with Mary. For a while, Mary was able to remain out of the media spotlight, but that all changed after a little over a year, according to Crown Prince Frederick. She was finally identified as Mary Donaldson, from Tasmania, Australia, in November 2001.
https://royalcentral.co.uk/europe/denmark/how-mary-met-fred-olympics-and-royal-love-stories-60357/
 
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