Word: monarchal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Emir Abdullah, meanwhile, worked hard to transform Jordan, an ungainly, rocky patch of land, into a kingdom. For two years he lived in a tent. On the tent site at Amman Abdullah later built his palace. He ruled as an absolute monarch, but the poorest Bedouin could come to plead with him at any time. He once spent a whole day personally tracking down a rascal who had made a poor woman pregnant...
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...
...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 driving). Haggard with grief, Leopold returned to his country home at Stuyvenberg. His three children...
...into Monarch. Few Belgians saw their Prince Royal while he was in final training for the kingship. Every morning at 8:45 sharp for almost a year, his black, limousine entered Brussels almost unnoticed, merged with the traffic of the city and drew up to the palace gates. Baudouin spent the morning reading and signing official papers, receiving dignitaries. He emerged again at noon and went back to Laeken. There was no royal display, no fuss, no court circulars, no grand balls to remind pleasure-loving Belgians that they had a royal family again. An occasional trickle of news seeped...
Leopold's major fault was perhaps that he wanted too much to be a King. As constitutional monarch of the Belgians, he had adamantly, and often bravely, refused to take a back seat while his ministers ran the country. His willfulness had led him into many dark hours, the darkest of which was his surrender of the Belgian army to Hitler in 1940. In recent years, Leopold's stubborn refusal to give up the throne of which more than half his people felt he was no longer worthy deeply rent Belgium...