At nineteen she was widowed, and pregnant with a child whose birth could settle the succession. A son would inherit his father's place. His mother would govern in his name, and spend the next quarter of a century fighting over what that government ought to mean.
Christine Charlotte of Württemberg was born in Stuttgart on 21 October 1645, a daughter of Duke Eberhard III and his first wife, Anna Dorothea of Salm-Kyrburg. The Thirty Years' War was still being fought. It would end in 1648, leaving the princes, cities and territories of the Holy Roman Empire to live with one another after decades of fighting over religion, territory and power. The question of who had the right to command whom would occupy most of her adult life.
In May 1662, aged sixteen, she married Georg Christian of East Frisia. Only weeks earlier the emperor had raised him to hereditary princely rank. She came from a ducal house; he belonged to a dynasty still climbing. There was rank on both sides of the marriage, and a territory on the North Sea whose inhabitants had considerable views of their own about the rights of its rulers.
The marriage lasted three years. They had two daughters, both of whom died in early childhood, and a son who would never meet his father. Georg Christian died suddenly on 6 June 1665, while Christine Charlotte was pregnant. His younger brother, Edzard Ferdinand, took charge provisionally. Whether he kept it depended on the child she was carrying.
On 1 October 1665 she gave birth to Christian Eberhard at Esens, almost four months after her husband's death. She was still nineteen. The succession had its boy. Christine Charlotte had a fatherless son, and the right to rule for him until he came of age.
She governed in his name.
She did not govern as a caretaker. East Frisia's estates, the assemblies that defended the country's established rights, controlled its taxation and its soldiers. Christine Charlotte wanted a strong central government. She regarded herself as a ruling princess; the estates regarded their privileges as part of the country's constitution. Each side could see the other as the obstacle to lawful government, and neither could make the other disappear.
Her son's guardianship came with partners. Edzard Ferdinand was one of the co-guardians, and the brother who had governed while she was pregnant found himself shut out of government business after the birth. His objections, tactful at first and then forceful, were ignored. The quarrel ended only when he died unexpectedly in January 1668. A shared responsibility for the child did not produce a shared understanding of who should rule.
The estates armed themselves, and she relied on her other co-guardians, the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg. More than once East Frisia came close to civil war, and the country paid for every foreign regiment in long billeting, plunder and deliberate destruction. Outside powers settled each round. Into the early 1670s the Dutch, the traditional referees of East Frisian quarrels, forced her to back down. In 1677 the emperor, appealed to by the estates, confirmed the old constitution on every point, and in November 1678 she had to come to terms.
She went back to reform. She reorganised administration and courts in the princely lordships and built a well-paid staff of trained officials, most of them from outside East Frisia. She backed Lutheran congregations in Leer and in Calvinist Emden over Emden's protests. Better government and greater princely control could advance together. To the estates, an efficient administration loyal to Christine Charlotte was also an efficient means of diminishing them.
By November 1682 the quarrel had brought Brandenburg's soldiers to the mouth of the Ems. That September the estates had signed a secret treaty with the Elector of Brandenburg, whose troops would protect their privileges and could, if needed, be used against their own princess. On 13 November Christine Charlotte wrote to Emperor Leopold I. She brought him her complaint, she wrote, "out of a grieved heart". Without her knowledge, four hundred soldiers had been shipped into her son's principality with twelve cannon, shovels, spades and hand grenades. They had first passed themselves off as troops from Brunswick-Lüneburg.
The letter was humble in every line and demanding in every paragraph. She asked Leopold to take her "together with my son" under his protection, the duty an emperor owed to widows and orphans. She swore, "as God is my witness", that she had never contemplated violence against her estates, still less committed it. Then she asked him to order the Brandenburg troops out and to cancel the imperial mandate that had let the Elector in at all. If worse followed, she would not be held responsible. Her weakness gave the emperor a duty; the threat to her authority gave him an interest. The princess who resisted every limit on her government could present herself as entirely dependent on his. Both positions served the same claim.
That November, Brandenburg troops took Greetsiel Castle, the old stronghold of her son's family. Leopold rebuked the Elector and told him to withdraw. The soldiers stayed.
She kept fighting. By the mid-1680s the estates refused to work with her at all, and late in 1684 she left East Frisia for Vienna, where she spent years pressing her case at the imperial court. In 1688 the emperor gave way to the estates and declared her son of age early. She delayed her return for another year. She came home in the autumn of 1689 and handed over the government in March 1690. The authority taken up on behalf of a newborn had lasted until he was twenty-four, and married to a bride she had chosen for him.
Christian Eberhard had been sent abroad for his education at ten. He travelled through the Netherlands, Piedmont, France, Italy and Austria, went up Vesuvius, visited Queen Christina of Sweden in Rome and paid his respects to Louis XIV in Paris. When he finally took charge in Aurich, he came to terms with the people she had spent so long resisting. In settlements with the estates in 1693 and 1698, he gave up positions his mother had held. In 1699 he made a pointed visit to Emden and was warmly received.
She died in May 1699 at Bruchhausen, while visiting Electress Sophia of Hanover, her oldest and closest friend. She was fifty-three. Her son chose a warmly praising text for her funeral sermon, and several East Frisian communities refused to use it. The child she had carried through the summer of her widowhood could honour her. He could not make her country agree.
