Word: baudouin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...moment later, on the 120th anniversary of Belgium's birth as a nation, Baudouin Albert Charles Leopold Axel Marie Gustave, Duke of Brabant, Count of Hainaut and fifth King of the Belgians, sat on his throne for the first time...
There was polite applause. King Baudouin walked out as stiffly as he had come in, and climbed into a waiting Cadillac. As the royal car rolled through the capital's prosperous streets, cannon boomed and church bells rang out. Some 12,000 soldiers and police lined the streets to hold back the crowds craning for a look at the King they scarcely knew. Later, Baudouin appeared on the palace balcony to answer the cheers of 60,000 gathered below. For exactly 50 seconds, he extended an arm in acknowledgment. Then he went back inside. The crowd called and called...
Roman Catholic Flemings-need a King as a symbol of unity. Belgium's young dynasty, just over a century old, has usually known its place. Baudouin's grandfather, mountain-climbing King Albert, became Europe's best-loved monarch (in October 1918, in trench coat and battered helmet, Albert surprised the stout burghers of Ostend as the first allied soldier to enter that Belgian city on the heels of the fleeing Germans). But he never forgot the lesson his autocratic grandfather and predecessor Leopold I had learned through hard experience: in Belgium, a King is supposed to govern...
...King's Childhood. When King Baudouin (born 1930) was a few hours old, his maternal grandmother, Princess Ingeborg of Sweden, held him up before a cabinet meeting and said: "See how well-developed he is already! He is almost as big as a Premier!" When Baudouin was four, his grandfather Albert slipped on a mountain crag. The mourning bells for the beloved monarch were among the first impressions in the boy's mind. A year later, his mother, radiantly beautiful Queen Astrid, was killed in an automobile accident on a vacation in Switzerland (the King himself had been...
...unhappy family moved to the coldly formal Châateau de Laeken, just outside Brussels. There Leopold and his mother, Queen Elizabeth, with a regiment of nurses, governesses and tutors, supervised young Baudouin's preparation for the King business. Like his sister & brother, the young prince rose each morning at 7, pattered in to wish his grandmother good morning, did setting-up exercises before breakfast. He was bitter when his sister bested him. "I'm a man," he told the gym instructor imperiously. "The idea of your thinking I can't do as well as a girl...