Notes |
- BIOGRAPHY
Charlotte Brabantina was born 17 September 1580 in Antwerp, daughter of Willem I 'the Silent', Prince of Orange, and his third wife Charlotte de Bourbon. After her father's murder, it was his widow, Louise de Coligny, who looked after her.
Accompanying both her step-mother and her sister, Elisabeth, she went as a 13-year-old to Paris. It was the need for foreign alliances that made the Duc de Bouillon propose to her sister Elisabeth. Through this marriage she met the Duc's cousin, the Duc de Thouars, and married him when she was seventeen. From having been small and skinny, she developed into a beauty and was called 'La Belle Brabant' by her sister Elisabeth. However, this marriage lasted only six years as, in 1604, the Duc de Thouars died aged thirty-four. For the rest of her life she remained a widow, finding support in her sister Elisabeth.
After initial objections of the king in 1619, Charlotte Brabantina's son, the young Henri, Duc de Thouars, married Marie de La Tour d'Auvergne, his cousin, as she was the daughter of Elisabeth, Duchesse de Bouillon. The initial joy of this Huguenot alliance soon faded as, only nine years later, her son became a Roman Catholic, causing a rift between them. The two sisters regarded this conversion as a betrayal; however, his wife Marie remained a staunch Protestant and a support to her mother and aunt.
Her other son, Frederique, Comte de Laval, was also no consolation to her, wandering aimlessly through Europe and addicted to gambling. He died in Venice in a duel. Her eldest daughter, Elisabeth, had died as a four-year-old child and the second, Charlotte, married the Earl of Derby and moved to England. Consequently the two sisters who had been close since childhood remained each other's support, but not for long as Charlotte Brabantine died at the early age of fifty.
|