page_title: Julia, Princess of Battenberg
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Julia, Princess of Battenberg / Life
caption_attribution_description: Schloss Heiligenberg (Jugenheim)
context_page_description: Julia, Princess of Battenberg was the wife of Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine, the third son of Louis II, Grand Duke of Hesse. The daughter of a Polish general of German descent, she was not of princely origin. She became a lady-in-waiting to Marie of Hesse, wife of the future Tsar Alexander II and a sister of Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine, whom she married, having met him in the course of her duties. The marriage of social unequals was deemed morganatic, but the Duke of Hesse gave her own title of nobility as Princess of Battenberg. She was the mother of Alexander, Prince of Bulgaria, and is an ancestor of Charles, Prince of Wales, heir to the British throne, and to the current generations of the Spanish royal family.
context_section_description: Julia Therese Salomea Hauke was born in Warsaw, Congress Poland, then ruled in personal union by the Tsar of Imperial Russia. She was the daughter of John Maurice Hauke, a Polish general of German descent, and his wife Sophie (née Lafontaine), who was of French, Italian, German, and Hungarian descent.
  Julia's father had fought in Napoleon's Polish Legions in Austria, Italy, Germany, and the Peninsular War. After his service in the Polish army from 1790 and in the army of the Duchy of Warsaw from 1809 to 1814, he entered the ranks of the army of Congress Poland, was promoted to general in 1828, and was awarded a Russian title. Recognizing his abilities, Tsar Nicholas I appointed him Deputy Minister of War of Congress Poland and made him a hereditary count in 1829. In the November Uprising of 1830, led by rebelling army cadets, Grand Duke Constantine, Poland's Russian governor, managed to escape, but Julia's father was shot dead by the cadets on a Warsaw street. Her mother died of shock shortly afterwards, and their children were made wards of the Tsar.
  Julia served as lady-in-waiting to Tsesarevna Marie Alexandrovna, wife of the future Tsar Alexander II and a sister of Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine. She met Prince Alexander while performing her duties at court in St. Petersburg. The Tsar did not approve of a courtship between his son's brother-in-law and a noblewoman, and so the two arranged to leave the St. Petersburg court. By the time Julia and Alexander were able to marry, she was six months pregnant with their first child, Marie. They were married on 28 October 1851 in Breslau in Prussian Silesia (now called Wrocław and in Poland).
  Since Julia did not belong to a reigning or mediatized family, which were the only ones considered equal for royal marriage purposes, she was considered to be of insufficient rank for any of her children to qualify for succession to the throne of Hesse and by Rhine (Hesse-Darmstadt); the marriage was considered morganatic. Her husband's brother, Grand Duke Louis III of Hesse-Darmstadt, created her Countess of Battenberg in 1851, with the style of Illustrious Highness (Erlaucht), and in 1858 further elevated her to Princess of Battenberg with the style of "Her Serene Highness", (Durchlaucht). The children of Julia and Alexander were also elevated to princely rank. Thus, Battenberg became the name of a morganatic branch of the Grand Ducal Family of Hesse. Julia converted from Roman Catholicism to Lutheranism on 12 May 1875. She died at Heiligenberg Castle, near Jugenheim, Hesse, aged sixty-nine, on 19 September 1895.
caption: Schloss Heiligenberg, a property of the Mountbattens until 1920, was sold for a pittance because of inflation in Germany.
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