I know this thread has been dormant for a very long time, but can anyone throw any light on a query I have.
It is really about three marriages, but it does clearly link to that of Prince Victor of Hohenlohe - Langenburg. I would like to know why in Germany the marriages of the aforementioned Victor and Laura Seymour and that of Edward of Saxe Weimar and Lady Augusta Gordon Lennox were classed as morganatic, when the marriage of Hans Heinrich XV Prince of Pless to Daisy Conrwallis - West does not seem to have been regarded as such.
I have always been under the impression that Daisy was treated as a Princess with style and precedence in Germany and not as Hans Heinrich's morganatic wife. If this was the case, can anyone explain why Daisy was treated so favourably, when in fact her lineage and background was hardly comparable to that of either Laura or Augusta!
Were the Plesses even considered a mediatized house? I looked at the Online Gotha and they don't appear in either part I (hereditary sovereign status) or Part II (mediatized houses). Perhaps this makes a difference?
You are spot on. While the Saxe-Weimars were still reigning imperial nobility and the Hohenlohes formerly reigning (mediatized) imperial nobility, the Pless were in a bit more ambiguous position: As Imperial Counts of Hochberg and Princes of Pless, one of the
schlesische freie Standesherrschaften (Silesian Free Lordships of Estate), they undoubutedly could have assumed the position of imperial nobility à la such Austro-Bohemian families as the Kinskys, Harrachs, Stadions etc. and assumed strict Ebenbürtigkeit standards like any self-respecting immediate imperial family. See
this thread for a discussion of such Austrian families which were imperial in name only.
The point is, they didn't. Their identity was probably more directed towards being territorial Prussian nobility, like the Hatzfeldts, Dohnas, Henckel von Donnersmarcks, Bismarcks, Eulenburgs etc., some of whom also possessed such Free Lordships of Estate in Silesia. But it was more inconvenient to be minor imperial nobility in Northern Germany, because there were much fewer equal (minor) imperial noble families to intermarry with.
And important to note: You could be titled, as baron, count and even prince or duke, and still just be a member of the territorial Prussian nobility, outranked by minor imperial counts. (German grammar allows for a dinstinction between
Hochadel (titled nobility, literally High Nobility) and
hoher Adel (immediate imperial nobility, literally High Nobility!)
Being mere territorial Prussian nobility also meant that you were subject to Prussian (not imperial) law: Old Prussian territorial law stated that marriages between noblemen and "female persons of the peasant or lower burgher estate" were unequal. This regulation was abolished in 1854 and from then on no union between a Prussian nobleman, from a Prince Bismarck to the poorest Junker von Mausewitz, with any shoemaker's daughter Bertha Müller could be deemed unequal.
But even before this change, Daisy Cornwallis-West, as a member of the landowning gentry, would have been acceptable as the wife of a member of the territorial Prussian nobility.
I'd love to know what the Kaiser thought of the marriage and whether Daisy really was accepted as amongst equals!
From her entertaining memoirs, you get the impression that Kaiser Wilhelm II accepted and liked her very much. As a British-German, Wilhelm (perhaps unlike some die-hard Prussian reactionaries like his grandfather) understood that many armigerous British landowning and gentry families were just as noble as many of his own Junkers, even though they didn't have a noble predicate like
von or
de.
