An illicit connexion with a certain John Rubens, an exiled magistrate of Antwerp, and father of the celebrated painter, completed the list of her delinquencies, and justified the marriage of the Prince with Charlotte de Bourbon.  It was therefore determined by the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave William to remove her from the custody of the Nassaus.  This took place with infinite difficulty, at the close of the year 1575.  Already, in 1572; Augustus had proposed to the Landgrave that she should be kept in solitary confinement, and that a minister should preach to her daily through the grated aperture by which her, food was to be admitted.  The Landgrave remonstrated at so inhuman a proposition, which was, however, carried into effect.  The wretched Princess, now completely a lunatic, was imprisoned in the electoral palace, in a chamber where the windows were walled up and a small grating let into the upper part of the door.  Through this wicket came her food, as well as the words of the holy man appointed to preach daily for her edification.

Two years long, she endured this terrible punishment, and died mad, on the 18th of December, 1577.  On the following day, she was buried in the electoral tomb at Meissen; a pompous procession of “school children, clergy, magistrates, nobility, and citizens” conducting her to that rest of which she could no longer be deprived by the cruelty of man nor her own violent temperament.

[It can certainly be considered no violation of the sanctity of archives to make these slender allusions to a tale, the main features of which have already been published, not only by mm.  Groan v.  Prinsterer and Bakhuyzen, in Holland, but by the Saxon Professor Bottiger, in Germany.  It is impossible to understand the character and career of Orange, and his relations with Germany, without a complete view of the Saxon marriage.  The extracts from the “geomantic letters” of Elector Augustus, however, given in Bottiger (Hist.  Taschenb. 1836, p. 169-173), with their furious attacks upon the Prince and upon Charlotte of Bourbon, seem to us too obscene to be admitted, even in a note to these pages, and in a foreign language.]

So far, therefore, as the character of Mademoiselle de Bourbon and the legitimacy of her future offspring were concerned, she received ample guarantees.  For the rest, the Prince, in a simple letter, informed her that he was already past his prime, having reached his forty-second year, and that his fortune was encumbered not only with settlements for his, children by previous marriages, but by debts contracted in the cause of his oppressed country.  A convention of doctors and bishops of France; summoned by the Duc de Montpensier, afterwards confirmed the opinion that the conventual vows of the Princess Charlotte had been conformable neither to the laws of France nor to the canons of the Trent Council.  She was conducted to Brill by Saint Aldegonde, where she was received by her bridegroom, to whom she was united on the 12th of June.  The wedding festival was held at Dort with much revelry and holiday making, “but without dancing.”