Royal Babylon (28 page)

         

The blackest stain on the reputation of the Saxe-Coburg dynasty was undoubtedly Queen Victoria's cousin Leopold II, King of the Belgians, a monstrous man who lived only for
money, sex and power. He cared neither for Belgium nor his subjects. “I am King of a small country,” he said, “and a small-minded people.” This was the sort of inspired diplomacy that helped generate a hatred of him not only among his own people but also eventually throughout the Western world.

Leopold II was tall, cadaverous, and walked with a sciatic limp. In his youth he was known for his long, beaky nose. “It is such a nose,” Disraeli remarked, “as a young prince has in a fairy tale, who has been banned by a malignant fairy.” The nose was later upstaged by a long, white fantail beard. Queen Victoria thought her sullen cousin “very odd.” In spite of his emaciated appearance he was a hard man and a fitness fanatic. In the Belgian royal palace at Laeken he slept in a hard camp bed, from which he roused himself at 6
A
.
M
. by dousing himself with buckets of ice-cold seawater. The only drink he ever took was a cup of hot water. Throughout his life he was intensely proud of his physical condition, and even when he was in his seventies he took pleasure in making visitors stand for long periods so that he could prove he was in better shape than they were.

Like every male member of the House of Saxe-Coburg, he was driven by ambition. This particular Coburg, however, was a megalomaniac, consumed by crazy colonial ambitions which were eventually to have him condemned by the whole world as “the butcher of the Congo.”

Although his fledgling country was a bantamweight beside the great colonial powers of the Victorian era, Leopold dreamed of creating a Belgian Empire in Africa. “I do not want to miss the opportunity,” he wrote in 1877, “of our obtaining a share in this magnificent African cake. In order to turn his fantasy into reality without arousing the suspicions of
his more powerful European neighbors, Leopold set up a bogus missionary organization called the International African Association. The IAA, he announced, would take the teachings of Christ to the dark continent. In fact, it was all part of an incredibly ambitious scam—a front for Leopold's personally sponsored expedition to the Congo Basin, for which he also enlisted the services of the great explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley was unfortunately slow to realize that Leopold was not quite the innocent philanthropist he claimed to be, and that his sponsor simply wanted to acquire the Congo Basin for himself.

In 1885 Leopold was declared King-Sovereign of the Congo Free State. It was an astonishing coup. Under the noses of the British, including the ruthless land-grabbing Cecil Rhodes, the French and the Germans, and without any assistance from his own government, he had personally acquired a country eighty times the size of Belgium. He was now absolute ruler of over 1 million square miles of Africa that were rich in rubber, copper and ivory, and had a population of about 10 million people.

Whenever King Leopold's colonial adventure ran short of cash he invented bizarre fund-raising schemes. When one of his applications to the Belgian government for a personal loan was turned down, he succeeded in embarrassing them into paying up by pawning his foreign medals and his servants' livery bit by bit. Eventually a complicated deal was struck whereby Leopold leased the Congo back to his government for a considerable fortune. As the only obvious benefactor from the deal was the King himself, he had in effect pulled off a gigantic swindle.

Not content with merely owning most of central Africa, Leopold's ambitions became even more fantastic. His next plan
was to extend his lands north along the Nile by acquiring Sudan and even Egypt. Thus the House of Saxe-Coburg, he hoped, would become the new dynasty of Pharaohs. Leopold casually hinted to the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, that, if he would allow him to lease the Sudan from the Khedive of Egypt, he would lend Britain his Sudanese subjects to do with whatsoever they wanted. They could even be used, Leopold suggested helpfully, to create an army with which Britain could annex China. When Salisbury told Queen Victoria about her cousin's plan, she noted that the Belgian King had “taken leave of his senses.” The full extent of Leopold's insane greed was yet to be revealed.

Unaccountably, over a period of fifteen years, the population of the Congo had fallen by about 3 million. By the turn of the century, disturbing rumors leaked out of Leopold's Congo that began to make sense of this shortfall in numbers. Missionaries spoke of atrocities carried out by Leopold's state officials against the local population. These reports were later damningly confirmed by the American journalist Ed Morel. The phrase “Congo horrors” was heard for the first time.

In ten years, between 1896 and 1906, King Leopold made
£
3 million in clear profit from his private fiefdom in central Africa by using his monopoly to ruthlessly strip the country of its natural resources. The local population was forced to collect rubber by Leopold's government agents, usually cannibals from local tribes who were chosen by the Belgians for their expertise in human butchery. As no new rubber vines were ever planted to replace the old ones, resources were very quickly depleted. The Congolese, no longer able to supply rubber quickly enough, were forced on pain of death to work even harder.

Leopold's agents were motivated by a grisly bonus scheme: to prove that they had done their job properly they were expected to return with a quota of human hands severed from the dead. Missionaries reported seeing baskets full of human hands being inspected by Belgian officials. When the agents were accused of being too wasteful with their bullets, they simply hacked off the hands of the living. The terror tactics escalated: whole villages were razed to the ground and tribes were wiped out. Women were raped and beaten; their children were thrown to the crocodiles. Those who lived were worked to death. Leopold, meanwhile, pocketed the spoils from the massacre and spent it on the beautification of Ostend.

The international community, including Conan Doyle and Mark Twain, lined up to condemn the King of the Belgians. Twain wrote in a virulent attack:

         

In fourteen years Leopold has deliberately destroyed more lives than have suffered death in all the battlefields of this planet for the past thousand years .  .  . this moldy and piety-mouthing hypocrite, this bloody monster whose mate is not findable in human history anywhere, and whose personality will surely shame hell itself when he arrives there—which will be soon, let us hope and trust.

         

King Leopold's response to the storm of criticism was to handle it as a public-relations exercise. He set up a secret press bureau to distribute favorable propaganda and spent a fortune trying to buy the support of leading public figures.

As if the damage to his reputation by his involvement in the Congo wasn't enough, the King of the Belgians continued
to shock with his astonishing private life. Within days of making his marriage vows to his Austrian wife, Marie Henrietta Leopold, he was sleeping with a famous actress, Aimée Desclée. In an attempt to justify his behavior he sportingly put it about that he had caught his wife sleeping with the coachman. He went on to create a series of sex scandals, which earned him the nickname “Le Roi des Belges et des Belles.” Leopold scandalized his countrymen, as his father had done, by driving through the streets of Brussels with his mistresses in his royal carriage.

While the King threw himself into a spiraling life of debauchery, Queen Marie Henrietta filled the hours by teaching animals to do tricks. Visitors to the royal palace at Laeken became used to the sight of horses trotting up and down the grand staircase: her magnum opus was a pet llama that had been taught to spit in the face of anyone who stroked it.

The London
Pall Mall Gazette
published a damning article about child prostitution in the capital that named the Belgian King as a regular client of a Mrs. Jeffries, whose brothel specialized in the procurement of young girls for pedophiles. The allegations were never refuted by Leopold, nor did he sue. His biographer Ludwig Bauer wrote: “It cannot be said that any moral scruples would have restrained the King of the Belgians from the offenses attributed to him .  .  . he paid for what he wanted and took it.”

When he was in his seventies, Leopold II began a very high-profile affair with a sixteen-year-old prostitute, Caroline Lacroix, whom he met in a Parisian brothel. The sight of the white-whiskered old King parading around the fashionable spas of Europe with a teenage brunette on his arm provoked outrage and disbelief. There was wild speculation about the tricks
she surely employed to hold on to an old man whose appetite was jaded by a lifetime of prolific sexual excess. There were rumors of perversion, of strategically placed mirrors and “special” equipment. Whatever she did for him, it kept her in pole position, as it were, to his death.

Abroad, the Belgian King's reputation reached epic proportions. The German Emperor's wife found him so personally repugnant that after his state visit to Germany she ordered her court chaplain to exorcise the apartment in which Leopold had been staying. President Theodore Roosevelt, unmoved by the gift of a silver-framed picture of Leopold personally sent to him by the Belgian King, refused to invite him to visit the St. Louis Exposition, dismissing him as a “dissolute old rake.” Even Victoria's son Bertie thought it wise to give him a wide berth.

Leopold regarded his two daughters, the Princesses Louise and Stephanie, as bait to reel in even more European royal houses, in his drive to push the Saxe-Coburg name up the European royal ladder. In so doing, he condemned one to several years in a lunatic asylum, and the other to relentless marital infidelity and syphilis.

Princess Louise was betrothed at seventeen to the voluptuary thirty-one-year-old Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg. When Philip dragged her off to live in his rat-infested castle in Hungary, Louise sought affection outside her loveless marriage with a young lieutenant, Count Geza Mattatic-Keglevic, and, unwisely, paraded her new boyfriend in public. Louise quickly found out the Belgian royal family's position on divorce: when she asked her father for permission to begin the process of legal separation from her degenerate husband, her request was dismissed out of hand. The King advised her that, provided she
kept up the appearance of a respectable royal marriage, she could sleep with whoever she liked.

The cuckolded Prince Philip was determined to make Mattatic pay for making him look foolish, and was able to engineer trumped-up charges of forgery to send his wife's lover to prison. Leopold offered Princess Louise an ultimatum. She could either return to her husband and keep up the appearance of a good and loyal wife, or he would have her committed to a lunatic asylum. Without hesitating, Louise chose the latter. The Princess was duly certified insane and flung into an asylum in Linderhof, Saxony. In a touching display of fatherly concern, King Leopold advised the superintendent of the asylum: “Keep a strict watch upon the madwoman.” Neither he nor his wife visited her throughout her incarceration.

When news leaked that the perfectly sane Belgian Princess was being held in a lunatic asylum, there was public outrage. The Belgian royal family responded by having her moved to a more low-profile mental home. Four years later, Count Mattatic was released from prison and was able to organize Louise's escape and subsequent flight to Paris. She spent the next two decades penniless, relying on handouts begged from friends. Princess Louise finally obtained a divorce in 1906.

King Leopold anticipated a struggle to find a husband for his second daughter, Stephanie, who was described as having the figure of a Danube tugboat. What Stephanie lacked in looks and personality she compensated for by misplaced self-confidence. The younger Belgian Princess was, according to her mother-in-law, the Empress Elizabeth, “an obelisk of tactlessness.” One of Princess Stephanie's accomplishments was an execrable singing voice which she would inflict upon every member of her family and which would cause the family dog to
flee for cover. Although her marital prospects were considerably improved by the fact that eligible princesses were unusually scarce in 1879, her father couldn't believe his luck when, at the age of fifteen, Stephanie—or the “Rose of Brabant,” as she alone was fond of calling herself—was betrothed to Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

Rudolf's father, Emperor Franz Josef, was desperate to get his son married off as soon as he possibly could, as Rudolf appeared to be hell-bent on defiling every woman in Vienna. His sexual experience, even for a healthy young prince with time on his hands, was extraordinary. Princess Stephanie may have had some inkling of this when he turned up in Brussels to formally request her hand in marriage with his girlfriend in tow.

At her wedding she walked down the aisle, according to an eyewitness, with “all the daintiness of a dragoon,” but went to her marital bed that evening, like her elder sister, as a lamb to the slaughter. “What a night,” she wrote later. “I thought I should die!”

Leopold II later severed all connections with the two daughters he had so maliciously misused, and cut them out of his will. When Queen Marie Henrietta died, the two Princesses joined forces to claim their inheritance from Leopold's incredible fortune, and Brussels witnessed the unprecedented business of a king being sued by his daughters. Leopold won his case against a tide of public outrage. Both daughters later took their revenge in scathing autobiographies.

When Leopold was seventy-four years old and dying, he married his teenage prostitute, now ennobled as the Baroness de Vaughan. When the ceremony was over, he turned to one of the witnesses and said with a prophetic slip of the tongue, “Let me introduce you to my widow.” The following day he
had an abdominal operation. Forty-eight hours later, on the forty-fourth anniversary of his accession to the Belgian throne, Leopold “the Unloved” died. The first act of the late King's family was to kick the Baroness de Vaughan out of the house, from where she fled screaming back to Paris. On December 22, 1909, Queen Victoria's cousin was dispatched with a full state funeral. It was noted that the pamphleteers peddling salacious exposés of his private life along the funeral route outnumbered the official mourners by three to one.