Jan-Maat’s Reviews > Leopold I: de eerste koning van Europa > Status Update

End of the epilogue - the last year's, death, and burial of Leopold. The last complex because he died protestant in a majority Catholic state & the clergy involved were not ecuemenically minded necessitating some rapid building work to allow a protestant service in the king's chapel and burial in the royal vault.

The surgeon Henry Thompson attends Leopold to operate to remove suspected bladder stones - he is so awed to be working on a king that he barely sleeps an hour and a half the night before the operation.

End of chapter 14. Mini portraits of Leopold's children. The future Leopold II was alas very strange. Prince Philip was extremely stupid and spent most of his time smoking, though after his father's death he took up reading as well as cigars. The daughter Charlotte married an Austrian archduke who was made emperor of mexico by the French for 2 years who then went home. The Austrian was shot. Charlotte went mad.

End of chapter 13. The end of the book draws near. Silver jubilee of Leopold's reign and several political crises. Leopold is aging, sickly, & increasingly irritable.

Leopold at a royal event in Ghent in 1856 declared in Frenchthat he loved the Flemish language just as he loved the Flemish people and that he read and wrote in Flemish.

I can't help thinking that the medium contradicted the message.

Queen Victoria was inclined to think that Napoleon III did not read much, not even the dispatches from his ambassadors.

End chapter 11. Aftermath of 1848 revolutions. Rise of Napoleon III.

End of chapter 10. Revultions of 1848 . Perceptions of Albert in Britain. Napoleon III. The constitutional monarchy of the Coburgs as the golden mean between red republicanism and autocratic despotism.

Albert devises a model constitution for a united Germany - somewhat federal and incorporating the princes in a second chamber. Naturally it was not adopted.

British critisms of Prince Albert as too German and corrupting influence on British political life. Author Augusta this in part due to Albert's death and texts about him appearing during the process of German unification and so reflect new british anxieties.