(6 of 8)
Unlike Britain's Edward VIII, Leopold did not discuss with his ministers the question of his marriage to a commoner. He called it a "private" affair. The marriage was morganatic; i.e., neither Mary Liliane nor any of her children could aspire to royal standing. Leopold had the church's blessing; his good friend Joseph Cardinal van Roey performed the ceremony.
The Baels were of humble Flemish fisherfolk stock right up to the time of Mary Liliane's father. A self-made man, Henri Baels won a scholarship at Louvain University, became a lawyer and Ostend politician. His big break occurred in World War I. He was assigned to ferry prominent Ostend citizens to England lest the Germans seize them as hostages. He did so, stayed on in England (where Mary Liliane was born), took charge of the refugee Ostend fishing fleet, spent a profitable war. Afterward, he stood off lawsuits by fishing fleet owners, bought boats of his own, branched lucratively into resort real estate, re-entered politics and eventually became governor of West Flanders.
Henri Baels built himself an estate at elegant Le Zoute. Since Leopold and Astrid had also bought land there, it was inevitable that the two families should meet. For a time the King's three children played with the Baelses' Mary Liliane.
When Astrid died, the Baels girl was 23 and maturing into a tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty. She was fun-loving and flirtatious. She had the complexion of a rose, said one admirer, and the build of a Venus. People spoke of her as "a woman who has a gift for stirring men up and who is perfectly aware of it." Says one who knew her in those days: "There were many roosters always around that chick, each, vigilantly eyeing the other. Naturally, they all beat a hasty retreat when the big rooster entered the game."
The lonely widower King began noticing Mary Liliane at Le Zoute. She played golf with him;, was always around to congratulate him or condole over his score. The King asked her to be governess to his children, installed her at Laeken. She was waiting for him there when he came home from the wars in 1940.
Obedient Regent. Like Leopold, brother Charles stayed in Belgium. He was silent when Mary Liliane's sister Lydie gushed over Naziism's "beautiful aspects." He dismissed a music teacher who had broadcast for the Germans. He refused to see his sister, Princess Marie-Jose, who had married Italy's Crown Prince Umberto, when she came to visit. She had stopped off to see the ruins of Fort Eben-Emael, still sickly sweet with the smell of rotting Belgian bodies killed by the Germans. (Marie-Jose is now going blind—a curse, Belgians say, for looking on Eben-Emael out of curiosity.)
When the exile cabinet in London ordered him underground, Charles obeyed. He disappeared, hiding out as an itinerant charcoal vendor until the Allied liberators arrived. Since the Nazis had taken Leopold into captivity in Germany, Charles was elected Regent. He loyally proclaimed: "I am awaiting the hour when [King Leopold] will again take over the high constitutional powers that belong to him."