Leopold I of Belgium

The youngest son of a minor German duke, Leopold fought Napoleon in the Russian army after French troops rolled through Saxe-Coburg. He moved to Britain in 1816 and married Princess Charlotte of Wales; the marriage was happy but ended after a year and a half when she died delivering a stillborn son. He stayed on in Britain with considerable status. After the Greek War of Independence he was offered the Greek throne under the 1830 London Protocol but turned it down as too precarious. Belgium, newly independent in 1830, offered him its crown instead - he had the royal connections and wasn't aligned with France or other powers that might upset the Vienna settlement. He took his oath on 21 July 1831, married Princess Louise of Orléans the next year, and had four children with her plus two sons by his mistress Arcadie Claret. His reign saw Dutch attempts to recapture the country, internal splits between Liberals and Catholics, and his own quiet expansion of royal power through constitutional ambiguity. He pushed economic modernization, helped fund Belgium's first railway in 1835, and blocked the 1848 revolutions from spreading into his kingdom. He died in 1865 and le