Anna Pavlovna, Queen of the Netherlands — royal with roots in the Russian Empire
Anna Pavlovna was born at Gatchina Palace outside St Petersburg on 18 January 1795, the youngest daughter of Grand Duke Paul, who became Emperor Paul I the following year, and Maria Feodorovna, born Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg. She was a granddaughter of Catherine the Great and a sister of two emperors, Alexander I and Nicholas I. She was raised largely by her mother at the family's country palaces.
Her marriage was a matter of state from the start. In 1810 Napoleon considered her as a bride, and the Russian court delayed its answer until he had married elsewhere. After his defeat, her brother Alexander I and her sister Catherine arranged a match with William, Prince of Orange, heir to the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, who had been wounded at Waterloo the previous year. They were married in the Grand Church of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in February 1816 and moved to the Netherlands shortly before the birth of their first child.
She learned Dutch and was said to speak it better than her husband, with whom she mostly spoke French. In the Netherlands she was known as Anna Paulowna, and her name settled into the landscape: a polder reclaimed from the water in the 1840s, which she visited as queen, was named Anna Paulowna in her honour and is still a village of that name. The Paulownia genus of trees was also named after her by the botanist Philipp Franz von Siebold.
When her father-in-law abdicated in 1840 her husband became King William II, and she was queen consort of the Netherlands and grand duchess consort of Luxembourg until his death in 1849. She kept her Orthodox faith, supported some fifty educational and child-care institutions for poor families and spent much of her private fortune on charity. She died in The Hague on 1 March 1865, aged seventy, and was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft.
Her eldest son became King William III, and his daughter was Queen Wilhelmina. Through Wilhelmina, Juliana and Beatrix, the line runs directly to King Willem-Alexander: every Dutch monarch since 1849 has been a descendant of a grand duchess born at Gatchina. Her daughter Sophie became Grand Duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach.
"St Petersburg to the Netherlands after her marriage in 1816"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Gatchina (Saint Petersburg)
Born a Russian grand duchess at Gatchina in 1795, she married the Prince of Orange in St Petersburg in 1816 and moved to the Netherlands. Every Dutch monarch from her son William III to King Willem-Alexander descends from her.
Born Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna at Gatchina Palace in 1795, daughter of Paul I and sister of Alexander I and Nicholas I. Through her son William III she is an ancestor of every Dutch monarch since.
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Gatchina (Saint Petersburg). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.