Karoline of Wartensleben

Countess Karoline Friederike Cäcilie Klothilde von Wartensleben (6 April 1844 in Mannheim – 10 July 1905 in Detmold) was a German noblewoman. She was a paternal great-great-grandmother of King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands. She was a daughter of the 1869 marriage of Count Leopold Otto Frederick von Wartensleben (1818-1846) with Mathilde Halbach (1822-1844), daughter of Arnold Halbach,^[1] through this connection she was a first cousin of Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach.^[2]

Marriage

On 16 September 1869 in Neuhof in the Province of Posen, she married Ernest II, Count of Lippe-Biesterfeld (1842-1904), who was regent of Lippe from 1897 to 1904. In the Lippe succession dispute (1904–1905), Schaumburg-Lippe claimed that Karoline (who belonged to a non-reigning family of Germany's lower nobility, elevated to the rank of count in the 18th century) was not of high enough rank to be a legitimately dynastic wife — that would have made her sons ineligible to succeed to the throne of Lippe.

On 25 October 1905 the German Empire's arbitration panel (Reichsgericht) ruled that, since an 1897 arbitration panel had concluded that until 1815 marriages between the House of Lippe and members of the simple untitled, but old, nobility were dynastic—having been banned neither by previous house law nor by any clear marital pattern to the contrary—and that no change in dynastic policy had been subsequently implemented, the 1869 marriage to the countess was dynastic. Thus her children with the regent, Count Ernest, were dynasts.^[3]

Issue

Ernest and Karoline had six children; they were all titular counts and countesses of Lippe-Biesterfeld at birth; the ruling in 1905 made them princes and princesses of Lippe.

• Adelaide (22 June 1870 – 3 September 1948) married Prince Frederick Johann of Saxe-Meiningen; they were the grandparents of Princess Regina of Saxe-Meiningen, wife of Crown Prince Otto of Austria
• Leopold IV (30 May 1871 – 30 December 1949)
• Bernhard (26 August 1872 – 19 June 1934), married morganatically to Armgard von Sierstorpff-Cramm (1883-1971) and was the father of Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld (1911-2004), the husband of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands
• Julius (2 September 1873 – 15 September 1952) married Duchess Marie of Mecklenburg
• Karola (2 September 1873 – 23 April 1958)
• Mathilde (27 March 1875 – 12 February 1907)

References and notes