Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg (11 November 1599 – 28 March 1655) was a Queen of Sweden.

She was the daughter of Elector Johann Sigismund of Brandenburg and Anna Amalia of Prussia, daughter of Albert Frederick, Duke of Prussia.

In the year 1620 Maria Eleonora married, with her mother's consent but against her brother's will, the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus. She bore a daughter, Christina, in 1626.

She was described as the most beautiful queen in Europe, and, as her daughter later said, had "all the virtues and vices" associated with her gender.

The romantic circumstances of her marriage, in which she and her husband had to elope to escape her brother's care, was said to have fostered in her a genuine love for her husband, a very unusual condition for a queen of her time. She displayed her love very openly and inappropriately according to the etiquette of the time, which made people consider her to be emotional and hysterical and very "feminine", which meant she was not considered as very intelligent. Her husband wrote specifically that, if he should die when his heir was still a minor, his widow was not to be allowed any political influence whatsoever. He continued to be in love with Ebba Brahe their entire marriage, but it does not appear that Maria Eleonora noticed this.

When her husband died in 1632, Queen Eleonora displayed a grief that made people consider her hysterical tendencies had finally broke out in insanity; she refused to allow her husband to be buried and hugged and touched and kissed the dead body, even after it had began to rot, in an intimate way that made witnesses feel sick. After the king was finally buried, she was discovered to have broken into the burial place to try to get ahold of the body.

In 1636, she was removed from the custody of her daughter Queen Christina of Sweden, and after she fled to Denmark she was accused of attempted treachery and stripped of her allowance and officially banned from Sweden; she returned to Brandenburg in 1643.

She eventually returned to Sweden in 1648, but the relationship between her and her daughter was never very good.