Customer Reviews

A Throne in Brussels: Britain, the Saxe-Coburgs and the Belgianisation of Europe

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Belien has written a portrait of Belgium as a mirror image of its royals. This portrait is highly opinionated - he is highly critical of each monarch and his influence on Belgium - , but the book is a lively read. Belien's thesis is that you can only understand Belgium, and why it has become such a political mess, if you understand its kings. - I thought he did a really good job except for the last chapter - on the current king - where there is a bit too much guilt by association. Not much is said about the Belgianisation of Europe though.

I wish I'd read this book earlier, and I would have if it hadn't been for the subtitle. It came up on a website when I was looking at other books on the subject some time ago, but the subtitle led me to believe it was about modern Britain, Belgium and the EU. In fact, it's better described as an updated version of Theo Aronson's 1968 Defiant Dynasty: The Coburgs of Belgium, with all sorts of scandalous stories that Aronson either left out or, more likely, hadn't discovered back then. A much better title would have been `A Throne in Brussels: A Warts-and-all History of the Coburgs of Belgium'.

The information, mentioned in reviews on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, that the author is a member of a right-wing political party that wants Flanders to separate from Belgium naturally made me wonder whether the book would be shamelessly biased. But I'm interested in the subject, so I read it anyway. I read a lot of history, and I actually found it no more biased than the average work of popular or even academic history. If it had been a poorly-researched political rant full of factual errors, it might be dismissible as nothing more than a propaganda piece, but it didn't come across as that at all. I've read quite a bit on this subject, and I don't recall noticing a single factual error. That doesn't mean there aren't any, and the salacious stories about the Coburgs' marital and extra-marital upheavals also can't necessarily all be substantiated. But just because scandalous stories can't be substantiated, that doesn't guarantee they aren't true, or that they won't be proven true later on. My preference is to treat them as possibilities rather than certainties, and keep an open mind. Though as for Belien's claim that Leopold I was probably the biological father of his nephew Prince Albert, that's not even exceptional - Richard Sotnick's recent The Coburg Conspiracy: Royal Plots and Manoeuvres is devoted to proving Albert's illegitimacy, and he concludes that Leopold is one of the candidates. And, as I mentioned in my review of The Coburg Conspiracy, Sotnick doesn't seem to be aware that David Duff put forward this theory as far back as 1972, in Albert and Victoria. Neither does Belien.

This book isn't the final word on its subject, and one written from the perspective of a French-speaking citizen of Belgium would doubtless have a very different emphasis. But then, it is popular history, and as it states on the back cover, it's the only English-language popular history of Belgium. Whatever its flaws, I'm glad it was written, and in spite of its bias I enjoyed reading it.

The book description above says that Leopold of Saxe-Coburg was installed by the great powers in 1817. In reality, it was 1831. King William I of the Netherlands ruled from 1815 (one could argue 1814) until the revolution of 1830, and the treaty regarding the final disposition of Belgium, including Dutch recognition of its independence, was signed in 1839.

I have not read the book (though I plan to). Again, my intent is not to review but to correct.