Archduke Joseph, son of Emperor Leopold II and Maria Luisa of Spain, seemed to have chosen August as his preferred month for tying the knot. On 30 August 1815, he married Hermine of Anhalt-Bernburg-Schaumburg-Hoym. Only two weeks later, on 17 September, his brother Archduke Charles married Hermine’s niece Henrietta of Nassau-Weilburg.
Unfortunately, Joseph’s marital bliss lasted only two years, as his young wife died in childbirth, after giving birth to twins, before she could turn twenty. Joseph remarried another of her nieces, Maria Dorothea of Württemberg, on 24 August 1819. This union lasted for decades and produced several children.
All three princesses, nieces of one another, were great-great-granddaughters of King George II of Great Britain through his daughter Anne, Princess of Orange. Thus, after a century, they brought a touch of British ancestry, however distant, into the Habsburg family.
Or perhaps not so distant, considering the German origins of the Hanoverian dynasty, as well as its habit of choosing royal spouses from among the German principalities.
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