Hello all,
I should like to start a new thread on this interesting character, who started off as a papuper prince from an unimportant family and ended up reigning over a small but nevertheless important European country shortly after its creation following the Napoleonic wars.
Leopold of Saxe-Coburg was the younger brother of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and the Duchess of Kent, who were the parents of the Prince Consort and Queen Victoria respectively. Less known is the connection with the Royal Houses of Portugal and Bulgaria, connected to him through his brother Ferdinand. Leopold was at one point offered the crown of Greece, but he declined such an offer because of the situation of his sister in England (if her brother-in-law William IV died, her daughter would become Queen under Victoire of Kent's regency, and he would indeed exert all his powers in the shadow of the throne, being an important member of the British court and his niece's favourite uncle). When the situation cooled down, he finally accepted the crown of a new country, Belgium.
His first marriage, and the most famous,w as to Charlotte of Wales, who first miscarried a baby and then delivered a stillborn child, herself dying in the process. He then married a French princess (undoubtedly because he needed the support of France, as well as the continuing of the dynasty in Belgium, and who better than a well-connected Catholic princess - we must remember that Belgium is and was at the time mainly Catholic), Louise-Marie of Orleans. The couple had four children: the first, a son nicknamed Babochon, died suddenly at a very short age; the second, a sickly, dry and unatractive boy who was distant towards both his parents and lacking in inspiring qualities, became Leopold II of the Belgians on his father's death. Then came Philip, ancestor of the present King of the Belgians, and Charlotte, a beautiful, cultivated and mentally-unstable woman who lost her husband to the Mexican revolutionaries.
