Landgravine of Hesse-Eschwege, Princess of Sweden. Sister of King Carl X Gustav, cousin and foster sister of Queen Christina of Sweden. German name: Eleonore Katharine von Pfalz-Zweibrücken-Kleeburg. As the wife of Frederick, Landgrave of Hesse-Eschwege (1617–1655), she was by marriage Landgravine there. The landgrave was a second cousin of both her parents and nine years her senior. Negotiations for her marriage were difficult but finally completed in 1646. She was granted a fortune of 20,000 gulden by her father. The wedding took place at Three Crowns Castle in Stockholm on September 6th that year. After the wedding Eleanor Catherine confessed to her husband on her knees that she had had an affair with a French lute-player and actor named Beschon from the French Court Theater of Antoine de Beaulieu, and was pregnant with his child. Frederick disregarded that and kept it confidential, but it became a known scandal anyway. Beschon wrote a composition to Eleanor Catherine which he sent her along with a letter in 1647, but she gave it to her brother; the documents are now kept in the Stegeborg collection. The marriage was not happy. Frederick partook in his brother-in-law King Carl Gustav's war in Poland and was shot to death there in 1655. Eleanor Catherine never remarried. Too embarrassed by the Beschon scandal to return to the Swedish Court, she preferred to live in her fief Osterholz in Germany, where she founded a pharmacy and hired the town's first teacher and doctor. She was administrator and regent of her husband's possessions in the Holy Roman Empire (1655-1692) and sent her daughter Juliana to be brought up at the Swedish Royal Court, regarded as a prospective bride for her cousin King Carl XI until she got pregnant with someone else in 1672. Eleanor Catherine visited Sweden in 1661, 1674 and 1681. During the second visit, Lorenzo Magalotti described her as "a wicked, vane, strange, proud and melancholic woman" who spent most of her time in pious devotions. Eleanor Catherine died in Osterholz, Bremen, Germany.