King Victor Amadeus II of Sardinia approached her family and proposed a union between Polyxena and Victor Amadeus II's son and
heir, Charles Emmanuel, Prince of Piedmont. A previous match orchestrated by
Agostino Steffani with a daughter of
Rinaldo d'Este, Duke of Modena, had come to nothing. His first wife,
Countess Palatine Anne Christine of Sulzbach, died on 12 March 1723, less than a year after her marriage and barely a week after giving birth to a son, Victor Amadeus, Duke of Aosta (7 March 1723 – 1 August 1725). Although only two years younger, Polyxena was a niece of Charles Emanuel's first wife, and belonged to the
Hesse-Rotenburg line, which was the only
Roman Catholic branch (since 1652) of the
reigning
House of Hesse. She had been nominally a
canoness of
Thorn Abbey since 1720. The engagement was announced on 2 July 1724, and she wed Charles Emmanuel by
proxy on 23 July in
Rotenburg. The marriage was celebrated in person at
Thonon in
Chablais on 20 August 1724. (left) and
Victor Amadeus (right). Her stepson Victor Amadeus, heir after his father and grandfather to the Sardinian crown, died at the age of two, a year after Polyxena's marriage and before she had a child of her own. Nonetheless, she is said to have had a close relationship with her mother-in-law,
Anne Marie d'Orléans, and the two frequented the
Villa della Regina outside the capital, where the latter died in 1728. When King Victor Amadeus announced his decision to return to the throne after having abdicated in 1730, Polyxena used her influence over her husband to have his father imprisoned at the
Castle of Moncalieri, where he was joined for a while by his
morganatic wife,
Anna Canalis di Cumiana, Polyxena's former
lady of the bedchamber. In an 1869 history of the House of Savoy, Francesco Predari wrote that despite the fact Polyxena was praised for goodness of character and beautiful virtues, her father-in-law advised her to take care to maintain separate quarters from her husband for prudence's sake. Having been ill since June 1734, she died at the
Royal Palace of Turin, and has been buried in the Royal
Basilica of Superga since 1786. Two years after her death, her
widower married Princess
Elisabeth Therese of Lorraine, sister of the future
Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor. ==Legacy==