Princess Of The Netherlands Marianne

Princess of the Kingdom of the United Netherlands by birth, and by marriage Princess of the Kingdom of Prussia. Marianne was the youngest child and second daughter of King Willem I of the Netherlands by his wife Wilhelmine of Prussia. Her elder sister, Pauline, had died in 1806, long before her birth, so Marianne became the only daughter of her parents to survive adulthood. Her two older brothers were the future King Willem II and Prince Frederik of the Netherlands. Two other brothers were stillborn. In The Hague on 14 September 1830, Marianne married her first cousin Prince Albrecht, the fourth son of her mother's brother, King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia. The union produced five children. In 1845 she left her unfaithful husband and began to live with her lover and former coachman Johannes van Rossum. On 28 March 1849, Marianne and Albrecht of Prussia were formally divorced. Seven months later (30 October) in Cefalù, Sicily, she gave birth to her only child with van Rossum, a son, called Johannes Willem van Reinhartshausen. After this, the courts of The Hague and Berlin broke all contact with her. Marianne, Johannes and their son spent the following years in Italy and from 1853 at Weißwasser Castle near Jauernig. In 1855 Marianne bought Schloss Reinhartshausen in Erbach, Rheingau. An unusually progressive woman and cultural visionary, she made the Schloss Reinhartshausen a cultural centre of the Rhine. Marianne reconstructed part of the Schloss as a museum to house her collection of 600 paintings. On Christmas Day of 1861, her son Johannes Wilhelm died of pneumonia in Reinhartshausen at age twelve. Twelve years later, on 10 May 1873, Johannes van Rossum, Marianne's partner for almost thirty years and the love of her life, died aged sixty-four. Marianne survived him by ten years and died on 29 May 1883 in the Schloss Reinhartshausen in Erbach twenty days after her seventy-third birthday. Link to Wikipedia biography