EARLY BELGIAN COLONIAL EFFORTS - The University of Texas at ...

life. They will not be addressed here because of the wide dispersal of their records and
a desire to limit the scope of this work. The intent, then, is to give a brief overview of
these individuals and their possible interrelationships and effects on Belgian colonial
policy.
When Leopold Georges Chrétien Frédéric, youngest son of Duke Francis
Frederick of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield (later Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) was crowned Leopold I,
King of the Belgians on June 26, 1831, it was in many ways a path well trod. The initial
offer of the Belgians was to the Duc de Nemours, son of the French king Louis-
Philippe, but Palmerston, British Foreign Minister, ever vigilant regarding a resurgent
France, threatened war. The Napoleonic wars may have become a distant memory to the
Belgians, but not to the British. The political interrelationship between the related
crowns of Britain and Belgium continued to define and determine their foreign policy
well into the twentieth century. The next and future king, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-
Gotha, the recent rejecter of the Greek crown, a king in search of a kingdom, was
something of a monarch on the loose, but most importantly he was a man known to
Britain, Palmerston, and the royal family.
Leopold’s path to the kingship was a tortuous one and certainly not one that
would have been predicable at his birth as the youngest son of a minor German duke.
Leopold was born on December 16, 1790, the youngest son of Francis Frédéric of Saxe-
Coburg-Saalfield, duke of a minor German duchy 105 located in central Germany in the
assumed that any correspondence will be found, if indeed it exists, in the correspondence between
Leopold and Van Weyer, his ambassador in London.
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Saxe-Coburg-Gotha consisted of approximately nine hundred fifty square miles.
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