page_title: Leopold II of Belgium
section_title: Marriage and family
hierarchical_section_title: Leopold II of Belgium / Marriage and family
context_page_description: Leopold II was the second King of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909 and, through his own efforts, the owner and absolute ruler of the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908.
  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 legitimate sons. The current Belgian king descends from his nephew and successor, Albert I.
  Leopold was the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken on his own behalf. He used 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. Leopold ignored these conditions and ran the Congo using the mercenary Force Publique for his personal gain.
context_section_description: On 22 August 1853, at the age of 18, Leopold married in Brussels Marie Henriette of Austria - a cousin of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria and granddaughter of the late Holy Roman Emperor  Leopold II. Marie Henriette, lively and energetic, 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 Some joked about this "marriage of a  stableman and a nun", with the shy and withdrawn Leopold referred to as the nun.
  The marriage produced four children: 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. The marriage became unhappy, and the couple separated completely after a last attempt to have another son, a union that resulted in the birth of their last daughter  Clementine. Marie Henriette retreated to Spa in 1895, and died there in 1902.
  Leopold had many  mistresses. In 1899, in his sixty-fifth year, Leopold took as a mistress Caroline Lacroix, a sixteen-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. Owing to these gifts and the unofficial nature of their relationship, Caroline became 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 soon emerged that he had left Caroline a large fortune, which the Belgian government and Leopold's three estranged daughters tried to seize as rightfully theirs. Caroline bore two sons, probably fathered by Leopold.
caption: Leopold as a younger man in the uniform of the Grenadiers (Portrait by Nicaise de Keyser)
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