Charles Prince of Nassau-Usingen

born: 01.01.1712 in Usingen

died: 21.06.1775 in Biebrich Castle

Karl was the eldest surviving son of Prince Wilhelm Heinrich zu Nassau-Usingen (1684-1718) and Charlotte Amalie zu Nassau-Dillenburg. On 26.12.1734 he married Christiane Wilhelmine of Saxe-Eisenach. The marriage produced three sons and a daughter. After the death of his wife, he married Maria Magdalena Groß from Wiesbaden in a morganatic marriage in 1740. Karl spent his youth in the ancestral castle in Usingen in a very modest environment due to the strained financial situation of the house. When his father died in 1718, his mother entrusted his education to the doctor and poet Daniel Wilhelm Triller. After years of study in Strasbourg, he spent a year in Paris. When the house was divided on December 23, 1735, Karl chose all the properties on the right bank of the Rhine, including Usingen, Wiesbaden, Idstein and Lahr. In 1753, Karl became senior of the Walram branch of the House of Nassau. Imbued with a sense of class, he resumed the negotiations for the seat and vote of the Welsh line of the House of Nassau in the Imperial Diet of Regensburg, which had failed in 1688. A lack of diplomatic intuition and an unfortunate choice of advisors made under the influence of his brother caused the project to fail. In terms of foreign policy, he therefore sought to rejoin the Wetterau Counts' Association, which he joined in 1771.

Prince Karl's decision to move his residence from Usingen to Biebrich Palace in 1744 and the seat of the central authorities to Wiesbaden brought enormous burdens for the town. Arbitrary special taxes to finance the palace extension in Biebrich, to pay off the debt burden from the division of the house and the failed Regensburg project, the strict police surveillance of the inhabitants, the political disempowerment of the town council, the disregard of old municipal privileges, the numerous tax privileges for his morganatic wife and the civil servants, which were at the expense of the town, and changes to the school system caused civil unrest in 1753/54. This led to a lawsuit brought by the town against Prince Karl in the Imperial Chamber Court. It was not until the government president Karl Friedrich von Kruse took office in 1769 that relations between the prince and the capital began to ease. With his great influence on the politically inept Prince, Kruse succeeded in persuading him to agree to a policy of reconciliation with the city instead of confrontation. This included the contractual safeguarding of urban privileges as well as the systematic economic promotion of Wiesbaden with the expansion of the spa system. These measures, introduced at the end of Prince Karl's reign, were to lay the foundation for Wiesbaden's later rise to become the capital of the Duchy of Nassau. He was buried in Usingen.