Maria Anna of Neuburg
1667 – 1740 · Generation XV · Consort
Maria Anna (1667 – 1740). Consort. Married Charles in 1690. Second wife of Charles II; sister-in-law of Emperor Leopold I; no issue. Born at Benrath Palace, the twelfth child of Philip William, duke of Berg and Jülich, she came of a house prized for its fertility and hostile to France — the qualities that led the queen mother, Mariana of Austria, to choose her once Charles’s first wife died without an heir in 1689. After Mariana’s death in 1696 she led the pro-Austrian party, claiming more than once to be pregnant, and worked for the succession of her nephew Archduke Charles. Her cause suffered in 1700 when her ally the Inquisitor General charged the king’s confessor with bewitching him, then had the committee that acquitted him arrested. On his deathbed the king instead named the French candidate, Philip of Anjou, who exiled her first to Toledo and later to Bayonne. Readmitted to Spain only in 1739, she was lodged at Guadalajara and, after her death the next year, buried at the Escorial.
Place in the family
- Maria Anna of Neuburg married Charles II of Spain, a great-great-grandson of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.
Partners
- Married Charles II of Spain (1661 – 1700) in 1690
Life
- 1667 — Born
- 1690 — Married Charles
- 1740 — Died