Rare sighting of Belgian royal love child stuns
The rarely-seen European love child of a famous king has been spotted at a major national event.
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On July 21 the Belgian royal family celebrated the country’s national day, gathering on a stage on Brussel’s Place des Palais to review a military parade.
At the front, King Philipe and Queen Mathilde proudly watched as their military student son Prince Gabriel marched.
But one royal family member stood out, clad in a red vegan leather dress and heart-shaped sunglasses.
For the sartorially adventurous Princess Delphine, sister to the King, the journey to her place on that stage was a tortured and teary one that involved decades of secrets, stalking paparazzi, and court fights, a battle which took from an artsy life in the UK to The Palace of Brussels.
The day everything changed for Delphine: Her 17th birthday in 1985.
Her mother, Baroness Sybille de Selys Longchamp took her out to lunch at her favourite restaurant in London and finally revealed the truth.
Her real father was not industrialist Jacques Boël but the man who would be King Albert II of Belgium. (Albert was the heir to the throne at the time.)
What followed could not be further from any sort of Princess Diaries-type fantasy sweep. Delphine became, her lawyer later would say, a “state secret”.
For Delphine, Albert was already a family friend. She had nicknamed him Papillion - French for butterfly - and he gave her cards and presents, even holidaying with her and her mother.
After that lunch, Delphine later said, she knew she had to “shut up because the [fallout] could be terrible.”
“I had to protect, first of all, my father. I had to protect my mother. And I had to protect my country. Because if it is known that I exist and I was born outside the marriage of my father, who comes from a very Catholic background, there will be a big scandal, and my father could maybe lose his throne”.
And so in her 20s and 30s, she did just that. Delphine graduated from then Chelsea School of Art and Design in London, worked to establish herself as an artist, lived on London’s Portobello Road and stayed schtum.
Even when she began dating an American named Jim O’Hare, long since husband, she did not tell him of her royal status.
Then, in 1999, teenage monarchist Mario Danneels entered the picture, having decided to write a biography of King Albert’s wife, Queen Paola. Royal insiders, Danneels later told Vanity Fair, “just saw me as a cute little boy, I suppose, who admired the queen…A lot of people told me too much as well as a result.”
The history-changing moment came when a former courtier ‘casually’ told him: “Everyone knows Albert has a daughter with another woman.”
The existence of Delphine “was an open secret with the Belgian media,” Danneels has said. “But no one there was [willing] to report it.”
In 1999 his book came out revealing Delphine’s existence and suddenly, as he later explained, “it was open season” on her. Jim O’Hare finally found out that his father-in-law was actually a King - and Delphine’s life took a turn for the worst.
With no security and cut off from the palace, she was reportedly stalked by the press and harassed by people in the street.
Danneel’s biography, he later said, was “was the excuse that [the media] needed to go all out on this.… The next day it was in the British paper The Times—the headline was: ‘Love Child of Belgian King Living in London,’ and a huge picture of Delphine on the front cover.…”
A Belgian palace spokesperson called Danneel’s revelation “malevolent gossip,” the BBC reported at the time.
For the next two years Delphine and Albert stayed in contact until 2001 when, as she later told a documentary, “he just went mad”.
“He said, ‘Leave me alone. You’re not my daughter.’ That was a shock.”
After the King cut off contact, “I was taken aback,” she later told Talter. “It was surreal and very disturbing… You don’t have a child and then kind of… kick it… He kind of left me like a piece of met to the dogs.”
Being a not so secret princess came at a cost. Her art works were “removed from municipal buildings ahead of royal visits,” the Times reported in 2014.
Delphine, who moves in aristocratic circles, would be invited to parties - only to have the invitation rescinded if a Belgian royal was also going.
A German car said they wanted to use her art in a magazine - only for them to cancel. “The company did not want ‘trouble’” the Times reported. A company executive said, “We sell a lot of cars to the palace.”
In 2003 Delphine became a mother, welcoming her daughter Joséphine. Two years later, for the very first time she claimed in an interview that Albert was her father. (Her son Oscar was born in 2005.) The King never actually denied any of this - however nor did he claim Delphine as his own.
The last straw for her came when her UK bank accounts were reportedly closed because she and Baroness Sybille were listed as “politically exposed persons”.
“My life and that of my children had become unnecessarily difficult and at one point it became unbearable,” she has said. “When I wanted to open a bank account for my children, it was a problem. I saw that my son Oscar was referred to as PEP: a ‘politically exposed person’ who had been blacklisted.”
In 2013, Albert abdicated in favour of his son Phillipe, removing his legal protection as sovereign. Delphine told Tatler of her decision to take her father to court, “I was pretty much like: ‘I really don’t like you. And I’m going to have to fight for my life. It’s me now, and my children. Our future. No more lies. This story has to come out in the open.’”
Delphine filed a lawsuit to try and force Albert to publicly acknowledge her.
“The first time I visited him and his lawyers, he was very nasty and made me cry,” Delphine later told a documentary. During the encounter, she said, Albert “sneered” at her, saying she was taking him to court “because it’s not going so well as an artist you need some attention”.
“I thought, ‘how unbelievably rude is this?’” Delphine has said. “After the first conversation with Albert and his lawyers, I walked out of the office completely crushed and crying.”
Her lawsuit would slowly wind its way through the legal system for five years until, in 2018, a Brussels court ruled that Albert had to do a DNA test. He refused. For months still the saga dragged on until May 2019 when a judge ruled he would fine the King €5,000 euros ($8,965) a day until he did it.
You only had to look at Delphine and by then King Philipe to know what the result would be.
In October 2020, the Brussels Court of Appeal finally handed down their ruling - she was a princess and could officially be known as Delphine of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. (Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was the British royal family’s surname until World War One when King George V changed it to ‘Windsor’.)
Not only did Delphine get a title but her children became Princess Joséphine and Prince Oscar. (One day Delphine will inherit, along with her siblings, her portion of Albert’s approximately $1.4 billion fortune though she has made clear that money was never a motive. Jacques Boël is reportedly worth about twice as much as the King and after divorcing him Baroness Sybille married into Britain’s Cayzer billionaire shipping family.)
In October 2020, Delphine was finally introduced to her brother King Philipe. Several weeks later the Belgian palace released a photo of Delphine, Albert and Paola meeting in what looked like a decidedly tense face-to-face.
Things were still far from fairytale. Josephine and Oscar, she told the times, got used to being asked if their mother was “right in the head” for her royal claims.
“My children were being bullied at school by people saying that their mother is crazy, she wants attention, or God knows what. It’s very unpleasant for children to hear that about their own mother,” Delphine told Vanity Fairy in 2022.
In 2021, Delphine first appeared with her half siblings King Philippe, Princess Astrid and Prince Laurent for Belgium’s national day celebrations and since then annually turns up dressed in the most eye-popping of ensembles.
This week the princess rallied to fellow royal outsider Prince Harry’s cause, telling a podcast she “understands” him and his struggles and that “he’s just traumatised”. For decades, Delphine channeled her family drama into her art; maybe Harry needs to get himself some acrylics.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as Rare sighting of Belgian royal love child stuns
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