dant of William the Silent.

And there was something more. The William of Orange who was to be King
of the Netherlands had a son, and the English arranged that this son
should marry our Princess Charlotte, who was heir to the throne of
England; and so all the coasts of the Netherlands opposite England,
with Antwerp and the Scheldt, were to be in the hands of a friendly
nation allied by marriage to the English Royal Family. The proposed
marriage was publicly announced in March, 1814, but it never took
place. The Princess Charlotte married a German, called Prince Leopold
of Saxe-Coburg, and the young Prince of Orange married a Russian Grand
Duchess.

The Kingdom of the Netherlands, however, was set up; and at the Battle
of Waterloo, which was fought in June, 1815, after Napoleon escaped
from Elba, a force of Netherlanders, some of them Dutch and some of
them Belgians, fought under the Duke of Wellington, when he gained the
great victory which brought peace to Europe.

And now it was supposed that the Belgians would settle quietly down,
and form one people with the Dutch, who spoke a language so like their
own Flemish, and who came of the same race. But not a bit of it. The
Dutch were mostly Protestants, and almost all the Belgians were
Catholics. There were disputes about questions of religion from the
very first. Disagreements followed on one subject after another; and,
to make a long story short, in fifteen years there was a revolution in
the Belgian provinces of the new kingdom.

The Belgians proclaimed their wish to make a kingdom of their own, and
once more the Great Powers met to consider what was to be done with
them this time. The meeting was in London, where five very shrewd and
wily gentlemen, from England, France, Russia, Austria, and Prussia,
sat and talked to each other for week after week about what they
should do with this broken kingdom, which was, as it were, thrown on
their hands. They were far too polite to quarrel openly; but Russia,
Prussia, and Austria would have liked to force the Belgians to keep to
what had been arranged in 1814, while England and France were on the
side of the Belgians. On one thing, and one thing only, they all
agreed, and that was not to have another European war.

In the long run England and France managed to persuade the others that
the best thing was to let the Belgians have their own way, and choose
a King for themselves. They first set their affections on a son of
Lo