Amalie Auguste of Bavaria


Amalie Auguste was a Princess of Bavaria and Queen of Saxony.

Biography

Amalie was the fourth child of King Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria and his second wife Caroline of Baden. She was the identical twin sister of Elisabeth Louise, later Queen of Prussia as wife of Frederick William IV of Prussia. Three other sisters married King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, Archduke Franz Karl of Austria and Maximilian Joseph, Duke in Bavaria.
In 1851 Amalie Auguste became chairwoman of Women's Association of Dresden, an organisation founded by her sister, the then queen. Three years later, her husband inherited the throne and she became queen. In 1859 she reorganized the association as the Zentralausschuß obererzgebirgischen und der vogtländischen Frauenvereine and established a legal basis for it, under which the organisation continued until 1932.
A firm believer in divine-right absolute monarchy, the queen despised representative government and liberalism. Although she was an ultraconservative Catholic, it is unclear to what extent she was involved in the government's harsh persecution of Saxon Protestants in the 1860s, which included torture and long periods of incarceration. But later arrested by Willhim I who saw what she did in person for those crimes and tried and convicted by a jury for those crimes and Willhim acting as prosecutor and Bismarck as judge and she was sentenced life in prison without parole and she died in a custom jail in Dresden after a long illness from tuberculosis in Dresden.

Marriage and issue

Amalie Auguste married on 21 November 1822 Prince John of Saxony, who reigned as King of Saxony between 1854 and 1873. John and Amelia had nine children, of whom six died at young ages and predeceased her: