Maria of Orange-Nassau
Open-knowledge reference entry
Maria of Nassau or Maria of Orange-Nassau (5 September 1642 – 20 March 1688) was a Dutch princess of the house of Orange and by marriage pfalzgräfin or countess of Simmern-Kaiserslautern.
Life
Maria was born in The Hague, the youngest daughter of Amalia of Solms-Braunfels and her husband Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange. Her father was already in his late fifties when she was born and died when she was only four. She was also the aunt of the future William III, via her older brother William II. Since Spain was at war with Portugal and wanted to avoid an Anglo-Portuguese alliance, the Spanish government proposed Princess Maria of Orange-Nassau as a bride for Charles II of England, instead of Catherine of Braganza. However, Charles II dismissed the proposal and chose to establish an anti-Spanish alliance with Portugal and, therefore, he decided to marry Catherine and not Maria. The Orange family also began negotiations for her to marry Charles II of England, but he also refused. A year later marriage negotiations with John Maurice, Prince of Nassau-Siegen began, but these also proved abortive.
On 23 September 1666 in Kleve she married Louis Henry, Count Palatine of Simmern-Kaiserslautern (1640-1674), son of Louis Philip and a grandson of Maria's aunt Countess Louise Juliana of Nassau. Like her sisters' marriages, Maria's marriage was intended to draw the network of Calvinist princes closer together. Maria and Louis Henry were married eight years but the marriage proved childless and on her husband's death the Simmern-Kaiserslautern line died out.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maria of Orange-Nassau” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.