Engagement
In 1616, the 22-year-old Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden started looking around for a Protestant bride. He had since 1613 tried to get his mother's permission to marry the noblewoman Ebba Brahe, but this was not allowed, and he had to give up his wishes to marry her, though he continued to be in love with her. He received reports with the most flattering descriptions of the physical and mental qualities of the beautiful 17-year-old princess Maria Eleonora. Elector John Sigismund was favorably inclined towards the Swedish king, but he had become very infirm after an apoplexic stroke in the autumn of 1617. His determined Prussian wife showed a strong dislike for this Swedish suitor, because Prussia was a Polish fief and the Polish King Sigismund III Vasa still resented his loss of Sweden to Gustavus Adolphus' father Charles IX.
Maria Eleonora had additional suitors in the young William of Orange, Wladislaw Vasa of Poland, Adolph Friedrich of Mecklenburg and even the future Charles I of England. Maria Eleonora's brother George William was flattered by the offer of the British Crown Prince and proposed their younger sister Catherine (1602–1644) as a more suitable wife for the Swedish king. Maria Eleonora, however, seems to have had a preference for Gustavus Adolphus. For him it was a matter of honour to acquire the hand of Maria Eleonore and none other. He had the rooms of his castle in Stockholm redecorated and started making preparations to leave for Berlin to press his suit in person, when a letter arrived from Maria Eleonora's mother to his mother. The Electress demanded in no uncertain terms that the Queen Dowager should prevent her son's journey, as "being prejudicial to Brandenburg's interests in view of the state of war existing between Sweden and Poland". Her husband, she wrote, was "so enfeebled in will by illness that he could be persuaded to agree to anything, even if it tended to the destruction of the country". It was a rebuff that verged on an insult.
Read more about this topic: Maria Eleonora Of Brandenburg
Famous quotes containing the word engagement:
“We must continually remind students in the classroom that expression of different opinions and dissenting ideas affirms the intellectual process. We should forcefully explain that our role is not to teach them to think as we do but rather to teach them, by example, the importance of taking a stance that is rooted in rigorous engagement with the full range of ideas about a topic.”
—bell hooks (b. 1955)
“A part, a large part, of travelling is an engagement of the ego v. the world.... The world is hydra headed, as old as the rocks and as changing as the sea, enmeshed inextricably in its ways. The ego wants to arrive at places safely and on time.”
—Sybille Bedford (b. 1911)
“But not gold in commercial quantities,
Just enough gold to make the engagement rings
And marriage rings of those who owned the farm.
What gold more innocent could one have asked for?”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)