Maria Salomé Schweppenhäuser

Maria Salomé Schweppenhäuser (Rechtenbach, 29 November 1755 – Warsaw, 5 September 1833), daughter of Heinrich Wilhelm Schweppenhäuser, a Protestant priest from Oberotterbach, and his wife, Charlotte Philippine, née Westermann, was a court chambermaid at Bad Bergzabern and Darmstadt. She was the wife of Friedrich Karl Emanuel Hauke (1737–1810), and, as such, an ancestor of the Battenberg/Mountbatten family, descended from her paternal granddaughter Julia Hauke and Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine.

Maria Salomé Schweppenhäuser by Alexander Molinari, 1806.
Headstones of Maria Salomé and her daughters Christina Hurtig and Caroline Lessel.

After the death of her father, Maria Salomé was a chambermaid at the court of Bad Bergzabern, the seat of the widowed Countess Palatine Caroline of Zweibrücken. She was later employed at the court of Darmstadt by Caroline's daughter, Princess Caroline, wife of Louis, Hereditary Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt. In 1773 Maria Salomea married Friedrich Hauke, secretary of the Count of Brühl. Brühl was summoned to Warsaw in 1782, and Friedrich Hauke became a tax collector in Poland. Friedrich and Maria Salomé's son, Johann Moritz Hauke, was a general of the Russian troops in Poland from 1816 and was elevated to Count Hauke in 1829, but was murdered in 1830, during an uprising in Warsaw, and his children went to live with their grandmother at the court of Nicholas I of Russia in Saint Petersburg. His daughter Julia married morganatically Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine in 1851. Prince Alexander's older brother the Grand Duke created Julia "Countess" and later "Princess of Battenberg", a title passing on to all of their descendants, although renounced by some.

Through her granddaughter, Maria Salomé is a direct ancestor of the British royal family. A plaque on the former rectory in Oberotterbach celebrates the town's connection to the House of Windsor. This rectory was built in 1732 by Maria Salomé's grandfather, Johann Schweppenhäuser.

  • Former Protestant rectory in Oberotterbach, built 1732
  • Memorial plaque to pastor Johann Schweppenhäuser at the former rectory in Oberotterbach

Bibliography
  • Leo van de Pas: The Lineage and Ancestry of H.R.H. Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Edinburgh, 1977
  • Bernt Engelmann: Die Aufsteiger - Wie Herrschaftshäuser und Finanzimperien entstanden. Göttingen, 1989 (German)
  • Unterdorfstraße in Oberotterbach. Ein Film von Stefanie Fink, SWR Fernsehen in Rheinland-Pfalz, Landesschau Donnerstag, 14. März 2013
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