Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1792–1862)
Karl Bernhard of Saxe- Weimar -Eisenach (* May 30, 1792 in Weimar, † July 31, 1862 in Bad Love Stone ) was Prince and Duke of Saxe- Weimar -Eisenach and travel writer and mathematician.
Life
Origin and family
Bernhard comes from the House of Wettin Ernestine. He was the second son of the Grand Duke Karl August of Saxe- Weimar -Eisenach (1757-1828) from his marriage to Louise (1757-1830), daughter of Landgrave Ludwig IX. of Hesse- Darmstadt. His older brother Karl Friedrich in 1828 Grand Duke of Saxe -Weimar- Eisenach, his sister Caroline was Hereditary Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg since 1810. Bernhard had been baptized by Johann Gottfried Herder and trained carefully.
Military career
As a younger son of the house Bernhard was destined for a military career and was trained in the Saxon Garde Grenadier regiment in Dresden. With the Saxon army, which belonged to the Confederation of the Rhine, Bernhard fought as a 17 -year-old at the Battle of Wagram and has been honored for his bravery connection of Napoleon the Order of the Legion of Honour. After intervention of his family, however, he did not make the Russian campaign, but was sent on his Grand Tour, which took him to Italy and Paris.
After the Battle of Leipzig, he entered again into Saxon military service, which he, however, left after the Congress of Vienna, as the strength of the Saxon army had been cut in half here, and took service in the Netherlands. As a colonel, he fought in the Battle of Waterloo. He then became commander of an infantry brigade in Ghent and promoted to major general. He was military commander of the province of East Flanders.
1825 and especially in 1828, where he was proposed by Russia at the London Conference, Bernhard was a candidate for the newly created throne of Greece, but what he decided rejected.
In 1830 it came to the Belgian Revolution. Bernhard, at the head of a Dutch Division, beat the fleeing Belgian Corps devastating and conquer Tienen in Hasselt. After that, he was separated from his family, commander of the Observation Corps in North Brabant.
After the death of his eldest son and the reduction of the Dutch army, Bernhard left the military service and lived as a private citizen. But He took on shortly afterwards for three years in command of the Dutch East India Army in Java.
Freemasonry
Bernhard was a Freemason. After the battle of Wagram, he was introduced by his father in the Weimar Lodge Amalia. About Freemasonry he tried in his military service in Ghent, where he founded a Militärloge with like-minded people to act on the moral conduct of its soldiers, but also the Protestant influence of the Netherlands in the French- dominated to increase Catholic Belgium.
Travel and Mathematics
Bernhard started from 1823 study trips. First, for several months after the United Kingdom and in 1825 for over a year criss-crossing the United States to settle with the idea in the long run there. At the invitation of Tsar Nicholas I. Bernhard was staying with his eldest son in 1837 in Russia and after a long time with his sister Adelheid in Madeira.
About his journey to America, he wrote travel memories.
He was also involved in mathematics. It is known an approximate construction it has found the side of a regular polygon, published in a 1842 published in Jena textbook of geometry in 2 volumes.
Marriage and issue
Bernhard married on 30 May 1816 in Meiningen Ida ( 1794-1852 ), daughter of Duke George I of Saxe- Meiningen and sister of the later British Queen Adelaide, with whom he had the following children:
- Luise (1817-1832)
- Wilhelm (1819-1839)
- Amalie ( * / † 1822)
- Eduard (1823-1902)
- Hermann (1825-1901)
- Gustav (1827-1892)
- Anna (1828-1864)
- Amalia (1830-1872)