Maria Carolina of Austria

Maria Carolina Louise Josepha Johanna Antonia was born on 13 August 1752, the thirteenth child of Empress Maria Theresa and Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. She married King Ferdinand IV and III of Naples and Sicily as part of an Austrian-Spanish alliance, her husband's father being the Spanish king. After bearing a male heir in 1775, she was admitted to the Privy Council and dominated it for nearly four decades. She revoked the ban on Freemasonry, expanded the navy under her favorite Sir John Acton, expelled Spanish influence, and made Naples a centre of the arts, patronising painters Jacob Philipp Hackert and Angelica Kauffman. When the French Revolution consumed her sister Marie Antoinette, Maria Carolina abandoned enlightened absolutism and made Naples a police state. A failed invasion of French-occupied Rome in 1798 sent her fleeing to Sicily; the Parthenopean Republic replaced Bourbon rule in Naples for six months. Deposed again by French forces in 1806, she never returned, dying in Vienna on 8 September 1814 - the last surviving child of Maria Theresa, a year before her husband's restoration.