Lilian Baels
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Princess Lilian of Belgium (born Mary Lilian Baels) (November 28, 1916 – June 7, 2002) was best known as Princess de Réthy, the controversial second wife of King Léopold III of the Belgians.
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[edit] Childhood and early adulthood
Mary Lilian Lucy Josepha Monique Baels was born in Highbury, London, England, one of eight children of Henri Baels, an attorney and fish trader from Ostend, Belgium, and his wife Anne Marie de Visscher, who were living in England during World War I.
In 1936, Henri Baels became Belgian Minister of Agriculture and King Léopold III appointed him Governor (royal representative) of the province of West Flanders. An avid golfer, and regular visitor to the Knokke-le-Zoute golf course, Baels's daughter Lilian attracted the attention of King Léopold, a widower, and the two became frequent golf partners. (The king's popular first wife, née Princess Astrid of Sweden, had been killed in an automobile accident in 1935 at age 29; her husband, who had been king for just a year, was at the wheel and lost control of the vehicle in what has been described as "a moment of inattention.") Eyebrows were raised at the still-grieving king's frequent outings with the alluring commoner but Queen Mother Elisabeth reportedly played Cupid. According to an unauthorized biography of Lilian, Leopold's mother invited the young woman to distract the king from his troubles. The details of the couple's celebrated courtship will become clearer in 2033, when their love letters will be available for study.
[edit] Marriage to the king
On September 11, 1941, Lilian Baels married secretly the king in a purely religious ceremony, which had no value under Belgian law. But less than two months later, a legal marriage before a civil official took place. This was a quite strange situation since in Belgium it is prohibited to conclude a religious marriage ceremony if this is not preceded by a civil marriage. It is not totally clear why this happened but it seems that Leopold, who first only should have accepted Lilian as a "secret" unofficial wife, must have change his mind. It is quite obvious that Lilian was pregnant during the second ceremony, since a child was born seven months later.
The public announcement of the king's second marriage was made the day after the legal marriage, December 6, when Cardinal Joseph-Ernest Van Roey, primate of Belgium, wrote an open letter to parish priests throughout the country. The letter revealed that the king's new wife would be known as Princess de Réthy, not Queen Lilian, and that any children they might have would have no claim to the throne though they would be princes or princesses of Belgium. The Réthy title however was never official, since it was not approved by the government, through it was the name by which she was popularly known (however, through her marriage she became automatically a Princess of Belgium).
[edit] Controversy and intrigue
That fateful date of December 6, 1941 has been called king's personal Pearl Harbor. The public disapproval was stunning. According to an obituary of Lilian that appeared in the London Telegraph on October 6, 2002, a leading Belgian newspaper expressed the thoughts of many in the country at the time when it published the following words: "Sire, we thought you had your face turned towards us in mourning. Instead you had it hidden in the shoulder of a woman."
The king's new wife was widely though unfairly suspected of Nazi sympathies (Hitler sent flowers and a letter of congratulations to the king for his wedding ), and the marriage was to many Belgians an affront to the memory of the beloved Queen Astrid. Léopold's reputation would be further undermined by lingering questions about his wartime actions, among them his surrender of Belgium to the Germans in 1940, an action that resulted in the Belgian government in exile declaring the king unable to rule and naming as regent his brother, Prince Charles of Belgium. (Revisionist historians have sifted through the evidence, however, and discovered that the king was braver and more concerned about the welfare of his country than he appeared and may well have been a scapegoat.)
Unable to overcome the nation's low opinion of his remarriage and distressed by left-wing riots against his return to the throne after the war -- Leopold, his wife, and his four children had been held under house arrest by the Nazis in Belgium, Germany, and Austria, and spent some years in Swiss exile before returning to Belgium in 1950 after a national referendum -- the king handed over his constitutional powers to his son Baudouin on August 10, 1950. He abdicated 11 months later.
Soon, however, concerns were raised by royal insiders that Baudouin, who was 20 when he assumed the throne, might be in love with his glamorous stepmother, who was 14 years his senior. Secretly recorded telephone calls between young king and the princess raised alarms in ministerial circles. Disturbing, too, according to an article written by journalist Jean-Claude Broché after Princess de Réthy's death, was the pair's trip to the Tyrol in the winter of 1952-53, when they travelled in adjoining train compartments. (Information about that journey was publicly revealed when the journals of Achille Van Acker, a Belgian prime minister, were published.) As time went by, the concerns appear to have subsided but observers surely clucked after they learned of the unexplained actions of Princess de Réthy and Prince Léopold in the weeks after December 15, 1960, the day Baudouin married a Spanish noblewoman two years his senior, Fabiola de Mora y Aragón. When the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon, they discovered that Lilian and Léopold had abruptly moved out of Kasteel Laeken, the sprawling royal palace where they had lived with Baudouin for a decade, and set up house in a 1920s neoclassical country house, Domaine d'Argenteuil, near Waterloo. A prolonged and mysterious period of estrangement between the couples followed.
Her personal style of dressing was apparently so attractive and well known in certain circles that Jacqueline Kennedy, in the December before she assumed her role as the First Lady, wrote to Oleg Cassini that she would like his clothing designs for her to be "very Princess de Rethy, but young."
[edit] Children
The three children of King Léopold III and his second wife, Princess Lilian of Belgium, are:
- Alexander Emmanuel Henry Albert Marie Léopold, Prince of Belgium, born in Brussels on July 18, 1942. Married, in 1991, Léa Inge Dora Wolman (married became public knowledge in 1998).
- Marie-Christine Daphné Astrid Elisabeth Léopoldine, Princess of Belgium, born in Brussels on February 6, 1951. Married first, in 1981 (separated 1981, divorced 1985), Paul Drucker, a.k.a. Paul Drake, divorced; married second, in 1989, Jean-Paul Gourgues. Resides in California.
- Maria-Esmeralda Adélaïde Lilian Anne Léopoldine, Princess of Belgium, born in Brussels on September 30, 1956. Married, in 1998, Salvador Enrique Moncada. A journalist, her professional name is Esmeralda de Réthy.
[edit] Titles
- Miss Mary Lilian Baels (1918-1941)
- Her Royal Highness Princess Lilian of Belgium, Princess de Réthy (1941-1951)
- Her Royal Highness Princess Lilian of Belgium, Duchess of Barbant, Princess de Réthy (1951-1983)
- Her Royal Highness Princess Lilian of Belgium, Dowager Duchess of Barbant, Princess de Réthy (1983-death)
[edit] Death
Princess Lilian of Belgium, Dowager Duchess of Brabant was interred next to her husband in the royal vault at the Church of Our Lady in Laeken, Belgium. Her surviving stepchildren attended the funeral, as did her stepdaughter-in-law, the widowed Queen Fabiola. Her son and younger daughter and their spouses also were present at the ceremony; Marie-Christine, her long-estranged eldest daughter, however, "stayed away," according to the royal-watching website [1].fr:Lilian Baels nl:Lilian Baels sv:Lilian Baels
