Anna Margareta von Haugwitz (16 January 1622 in Calbe (Saale) – 20 March 1673 in Stockholm) was a German noblewoman who became a Swedish noblewoman by marriage.
Anna Margareta was a daughter of Balthasar Joachim von Haugwitz (d. 1626) and his wife, Sophie von Veltheim (d. 1630).[1] She was baptized in the church of Saint Stephen.
Her father died when she was four years old, following which she went through the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War, first as a half-orphan and soon afterwards as a full orphan. In 1630, her mother and four of her five siblings were killed when imperial troops stormed Calbe; only Anna Margareta was able to escape, finding shelter in the Cistercian convent in Egeln. Later, the Countess of Löwenstein looked after her and sent her to school. In 1636, Anna Margareta became a ward of the German countess Elisabeth Juliane of Erbach, who married the Swedish commander Johan Banér that year. Anna Margareta met Carl Gustaf Wrangel in a Swedish military camp; they became engaged in May 1640 and married for love on 1 June in Saalfeld. The marriage was controversial because Carl Gustaf was a member of the powerful Wrangel family, who thought that his relationship with an untitled and poor German noblewoman was inappropriate, but the criticism of his peers did not bother him much.
Anna Margareta was frequently pregnant during her marriage, giving birth to thirteen children between 1641 and 1665, but only five of them lived to adulthood:
The marriage was a happy one, and the couple were more devoted to each other than to their children. The death of their first child and son in 1646 was not even painful for his parents, who did not attend his funeral. After the Thirty Years' War, they lived mainly at the Wrangel estates in Swedish Pomerania, where Anna Margareta died. She bequeathed a sum of money to her hometown Calbe to be paid in annual installments on her birthdays.