Ancestral Trails 2016 » Leopold II of BELGIUM (1835-1909)

Personal data Leopold II of BELGIUM 

• He was born on April 9, 1835 in Schloss Laeken, Laeken, Brabant Wallon, Belgium.
• He died on December 17, 1909 in Schloss Laeken, Laeken, Brabant Wallon, Belgium, he was 74 years old.
• A child of Leopold I Georg Christian Friedrich von SAXE-COBURG-SAALFELD and Louise Marie d'ORLEANS

Household of Leopold II of BELGIUM

He has/had a relationship with Marie Henriette Anne von OSTERREICH.

Child(ren):

1. Stéphanie Clotilde Louise of BELGIUM  1864-1945 
2. Louise-Marie Amélie of BELGIUM  1858-1924
3. Clémentine Albertine Marie Léopoldine of BELGIUM  1872-1955 

Notes about Leopold II of BELGIUM

Leopold II (9 April 1835 - 17 December 1909) reigned as the second King of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909. He became known for the founding and exploitation of the Congo Free State as a private venture. Born in Brussels as the second (but eldest surviving) son of Leopold I and Louise of Orléans, he succeeded his father to the Belgian throne in 1865 and reigned for 44 years until his death - the longest reign of any Belgian monarch. He died without surviving male issue; the current Belgian king descends from his nephew and successor, Albert I.

Leopold became the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken on his own behalf. He used explorer Henry Morton Stanley to help him lay claim to the Congo, the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 the colonial nations of Europe authorized his claim by committing the Congo Free State to improving the lives of the native inhabitants. From the beginning, however, Leopold essentially ignored these conditions. He ran the Congo using the mercenary Force Publique for his personal enrichment. He used great sums of the money from this exploitation for public and private construction projects in Belgium during this period. He donated the private buildings to the state before his death, to preserve them for Belgium.

Leopold extracted a fortune from the Congo, initially by the collection of ivory, and - after a rise in the price of rubber in the 1890s - by forced labour from the natives to harvest and process rubber. Under his régime millions of the Congolese people died; modern estimates range from 1 to 15 million, with a consensus growing around 10 million. Human-rights abuses under his régime contributed significantly to these deaths. Reports of deaths and abuse led to a major international scandal in the early 20th century, and the Belgian government ultimately forced Leopold to relinquish control of the colony to Belgian civil administration in 1908.

Leopold was born in Brussels on 9 April 1835. He was the second child of the reigning Belgian monarch, Leopold I, and his second wife, Louise, the daughter of King Louis Philippe of France. The French Revolution of 1848, which spared Belgium, had forced Louis Philippe to flee to the United Kingdom, of which Leopold's cousin Queen Victoria was monarch. The royal families of Belgium and the United Kingdom were linked by numerous marriages, and were additionally both descended from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Louis Philippe died two years later, in 1850. Leopold's fragile mother was deeply affected by the death of her father, and her health deteriorated. She died that same year, when Leopold was 15 years old.

Three years later, in 1853 at the age of 18, he married Marie Henriette of Austria in Brussels on August 22. Marie Henriette was a cousin of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, and granddaughter of Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor through her father, Austrian archduke Joseph. Marie Henriette was lively and energetic, and endeared herself to the people by her character and benevolence, and her beauty gained for her the sobriquet of "The Rose of Brabant". She was also an accomplished artist and musician. She was passionate about horseback riding to the point that she would care for her horses personally. Some joked about this "marriage of a stableman and a nun", the shy and withdrawn Leopold referred to as the nun.

Four children were born of this marriage, three daughters and one son, also named Leopold. The younger Leopold died in 1869 at the age of nine from pneumonia after falling into a pond. His death was a source of great sorrow for King Leopold, who lost his only heir. The marriage had become unhappy, and the couple separated completely after a last attempt to have another son, a union which resulted in the birth of their last daughter Clementine. In 1895 Marie Henriette retreated to Spa. She died there in 1902.

Leopold had many mistresses. In 1899 at age 65, Leopold took as a mistress Caroline Lacroix, a 16-year-old French prostitute, and they remained together for the next decade until his death. Leopold lavished upon her large sums of money, estates, gifts, and a noble title, Baroness Vaughan. Because of these gifts and the illegitimacy of their relationship, Caroline was deeply unpopular among the Belgian people and internationally. She and Leopold married secretly in a religious ceremony five days before his death; their failure to perform a civil ceremony rendered the marriage invalid under Belgian law. After the king's death, it was soon discovered that he had left Caroline a massive amount of wealth, which the Belgian government and Leopold's three estranged daughters tried to seize as rightfully theirs. Caroline bore two illegitimate sons who were likely Leopold's; the boys would have had a strong claim to the throne had the marriage been valid.

On 17 December 1909, Leopold II died at Laeken, and the Belgian crown passed to Albert, the son of Leopold's brother, Philip, Count of Flanders. His funeral cortege was booed by the crowd. Leopold's reign of exactly 44 years remains the longest in Belgian history. He was interred in the royal vault at the Church of Our Lady of Laeken in Brussels.

Family
Leopold's sister became the Empress Carlota of Mexico. His first cousins included both Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and her husband Prince Albert, as well as King Fernando II of Portugal. He had four children with Queen Marie-Henriette, of whom the youngest two have descendants living as of 2014:

Louise-Marie-Amélie, born in Brussels on 18 February 1858, and died at Wiesbaden on 1 March 1924. She married Prince Philipp of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
Léopold Ferdinand Elie Victor Albert Marie, Count of Hainaut (as eldest son of the heir apparent), later Duke of Brabant (as heir apparent), born at Laeken on 12 June 1859, and died at Laeken on 22 January 1869, from pneumonia, after falling into a pond.
Stéphanie Clotilde Louise Herminie Marie Charlotte, born at Laeken on 11 May 1864, and died at the Archabbey of Pannonhalma in Győr-Moson-Sopron, Hungary, on 23 August 1945. She married (1) Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and then (2) Elemér Edmund Graf Lónyay de Nagy-Lónya et Vásáros-Namény (created, in 1917, Prince Lónyay de Nagy-Lónya et Vásáros-Namény).
Clémentine, born at Laeken on 30 July 1872, and died at Nice on 8 March 1955. She married Prince Napoléon Victor Jérôme Frédéric Bonaparte (1862-1926), head of the Bonaparte family.

Leopold also fathered two illegitimate sons by Caroline Lacroix. They were adopted in 1910 by Lacroix's second husband, Antoine Durrieux. Leopold granted them courtesy titles that were honorary, as the parliament would not have supported any official act or decree:

Lucien Philippe Marie Antoine (9 February 1906 - 1984), duke of Tervuren
Philippe Henri Marie François (16 October 1907 - 21 August 1914), count of Ravenstein
SOURCE: Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium

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Timeline Leopold II of BELGIUM

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