Category:

Life at the ducal court was parochial and socially limited, dominated by Ernst Friedrich's disappointed wife, the better-connected and imperious Sophie Antonia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Through family marriages to European royalty, including Emperor Peter II of Russia and Maria Theresa of Austria, Sophie had hoped for a more advantageous match for herself. In response, she 'ruled everything at Coburg', refusing to control her spending habits and propelling Saxe-Coburg into further debt. As Prince Leopold himself later admitted in a glorious understatement, his grandmother had been 'too great a person for so small a duchy' and had treated it 'as if it had been an empire...squander[ing] the revenues in a dreadful manner'. It was the weak-willed Duke Ernst Friedrich's brother, Prince Friedrich Josias, who saved the duchy from the brink of insolvency and collapse by fighting with distinction for Maria Theresa's Hapsburg army in the Third Silesian War against the Prussians. Catherine the Great would later laud Friedrich Josias as the hero of the Coburg family. As a result, he was promoted to field marshal by the Hapsburgs and heaped with honours. His position also enabled him to secure Austrian help in the setting up of a Debt Commission in 1773 to administer the duchy's perilous financial affairs.

Julie's genial father, Prince Franz Friedrich, eldest son of the 4th duke, left little mark on his time as hereditary prince for he suffered from poor health and had no political interests. He may have been the nominal head of the household, but he appeared utterly incapable of managing his finances, leaving those, plus the running of the household and child-rearing, to his wife. Instead, he devoted himself to patronage of the arts, to singing, good food and fine wine. His passion for art was a worthy enough enterprise, except that Franz spent well beyond his means in bringing together what is nevertheless considered to be the most important eighteenth-century German collection of copperplate engravings, Old Master prints and drawings, which forms one of the key collections at the Veste Coburg today. A typical eighteenth-century dilettante, Franz also amassed botanical specimens, coins, stuffed birds and minerals. Equally characteristic of his class and time was his engagement in numerous sexual dalliances outside his marriage, for which he became notorious in Coburg at large.

When Franz's wife, Sophie of Saxe-Hildburghausen, died of influenza in 1776 after only seven months of marriage, Franz already had a substitute waiting in the wings: Countess Auguste of Reuss-Ebersdorf. But she brought no fortune with her for she came from one of the smallest and least significant German principalities in Thuringia. At only 3 miles square and with a population of 1,200, Reuss-Ebersdorf was also the centre of the Moravian Brotherhood, a pietistic Lutheran community that had been established at Herrnhut in 1722 by refugees fleeing religious persecution in Bohemia. Auguste's great-aunt, Erdmuthe Dorothea, Countess of Reuss-Ebersdorf, had married the Brotherhood's founder, Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf. Her parents, Heinrich and Karoline, were devout followers of the movement, which is reflected in the very strict social and moral attitudes with which she was inculcated as a child.

In her later years Auguste, who was born in 1757, nursed a romantic memory of the 'lovely surroundings of my bright days', though she has left us no details of them. 'Only with my life', she wrote later, 'will the sweet memory of the father's house be extinguished.' That household had nevertheless been an unremarkable, straitlaced and deeply religious one, where dancing and games were frowned upon and where Auguste had received the customary private tuition by governesses in art, French and geography, in preparation for a suitable marriage.

Straitlaced or not, such a pious lifestyle did not get in the way of Count Heinrich of Reuss-Ebersdorf's sense of urgency in marrying off his pretty daughter at the first opportunity. So, when Auguste was eighteen, her cash-strapped father shrewdly invested in commissioning a painting of her posing as Artemisia of Caria—a queen of ancient Greece—lamenting over the urn containing the ashes of her dead husband, Mausolus. It cost 100 guilders and was painted by the fashionable German court painter Johann Heinrich Tischbein at Schloss Ebersdorf. It was then exhibited at the Regensburg Diet, the imperial legislature of the Holy Roman Empire, where Prince Franz of Saxe-Coburg had seen it and was immediately so entranced that he supposedly paid four times the asking price to secure the painting. However, dynastic protocols at the time dictated that he contract a more politically strategic marriage to a relative—Princess Sophie of Saxe-Hildburghausen. After Sophie died Franz thus wasted no time in asking for the hand of Auguste. They were married at Schloss Ebersdorf on 13 June 1777. The brethren of the Moravian Church joined in the celebrations that day and played the Bach hymn 'Nun danket alle Gott'* on trumpets as the wedding group processed from the church.

==========

* It is interesting to note that this was a favourite hymn of the couple's grandson Prince Albert, who asked his daughter Alice to play it for him when he was on his deathbed at Windsor Castle in December 1861.