Countess Sophie Henriette of Waldeck
Sophia Henriette of Waldeck (3 August 1662, Arolsen – 15 October 1702, Erbach) was a Princess of Waldeck by birth and by marriage Duchess of Saxe-Hildburghausen, Life. Sophie Henriette was the daughter of Field Marshal Prince Georg Friedrich of Waldeck and his wife Countess Elisabeth Charlotte of Nassau-Siegen (1626–1694). She married on 30 November 1680 in Arolsen with Duke Ernest of Saxe-Hildburghausen, a friend and comrade of her father, with whom she lived in Arolsen until 1683. After the completion of the Castle in Hildburghausen, the couple moved there. Sophie Henriette had a  very close relationship with her eldest son Ernest Frederick I; she arranged his marriage to her first cousin once removed Countess Sophia Albertine of Erbach-Erbach. Sophie Henriette died in 1702, ten days after her youngest son was born, before the wedding of Ernest Frederick and Sophia Albertine. She was the first person to be buried in the Royal Crypt in the Palace Church in Hildburghausen. Sophia Henriette's father died in 1692 leaving no male heirs. Waldeck-Eisenberg fell to the Waldeck-Wildungen line; the Lordship of Culemborg in the Netherlands was inherited by Sophia Henriette's older sister  Louisa Anna (by marriage Countess of Erbach-Fürstenau), and after Louise's death in 1714 without surviving issue, by Sophia Henriette's son Ernest Frederick I, who sold it to the Dutch province of Gelderland in 1748. |-