Countess Louise Juliana of Nassau

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Countess Louise Juliana of Nassau (31 March 1576 – 15 March 1644) was the Countess consort of the Palatinate and Electress Palatine through her marriage to Frederick IV. Born in Delft, she was the eldest daughter of William the Silent and Charlotte of Bourbon-Montpensier, and the first Dutch-born member of the House of Orange-Nassau. After her father was murdered in 1584, she and her sisters were raised by their stepmother.

She married Frederick IV on 23 June 1593. Their alliance linked two powerful Protestant dynasties. Louise Juliana had eight pregnancies; five children survived to adulthood, including Frederick V and Elisabeth Charlotte. The marriage was unhappy, so she arranged for her children to be raised by her sister Elisabeth in Sedan to shield them from their father.

When Frederick IV died in 1610, she helped govern as regent for her son Frederick V from 1610 to 1614, alongside John II, Count Palatine of Zweibrücken. She helped arrange Frederick V’s marriage to Elizabeth Stuart in 1613. After her son reached adulthood in 1614, she retired to Kaiserslautern.

Louise Juliana urged Frederick V not to accept the Bohemian crown in 1618, but he did. She cared for his children and returned to Heidelberg to advise the regent. In 1620 she fled the Palatinate with her grandchildren and went to Berlin to stay with her daughter. When Berlin was threatened by Sweden in 1631, she was given power of attorney to negotiate and helped persuade the Brandenburg Elector to concede to the Swedish demands, saving the city from destruction. She left with the Brandenburg court to Königsberg in 1638 and died there in 1644 at age 67.