A New Prince for Belgium's Expanding Royal Roster

Belgium is a nation famous for its sprawling bureaucracy, mounting street crime, and a state apparatus that often seems entirely detached from the realities of its citizens. Yet, amid this administrative dysfunction, the country’s royal family manages to reliably produce one thing: surprise heirs. The latest addition to the House of Saxe-Coburg is twenty-six-year-old Clément Vandenkerckhove, a former car salesman who has just been legally recognised as the son of Prince Laurent.

The formal acknowledgement took place quietly at a municipal town hall half a year ago, though the administrative machinery of the Belgian state has only just allowed the details to surface. Vandenkerckhove is the product of a romance between the prince and the Belgian singer Wendy Van Wanten, whose legal name is Iris Vandenkerckhove, well before the royal’s marriage to Princess Claire in 2003. While the young man now officially holds the title of prince, the Belgian taxpayer can breathe a rare sigh of relief. He will not receive a royal allowance, nor will he perform official duties or join his half-siblings—Princess Louise, Prince Aymeric, and Prince Nicolas—in the line of succession.

The path to royal recognition was less a fairy tale and more a study in modern awkwardness. The new prince first crossed paths with his biological father entirely by chance at a shopping precinct in 2013, completely unaware of the older man's identity. It took another revelation from his mother at age sixteen, followed by four years of gathering resolve, before he initiated contact over the telephone. Eventually, Prince Laurent proposed a medical resolution to the lingering ambiguity. The pair attended a hospital for genetic testing, where the prince reportedly volunteered to provide his sample first to ease the young man's nerves. An email from the laboratory subsequently confirmed a near-perfect genetic match of 99.5 percent.

Uncovering secret royal offspring is rapidly becoming a generational pastime for the Belgian monarchy. Prince Laurent’s own father, the former King Albert II, spent years fighting a bitter legal dispute over his paternity of the artist Delphine Boël. That particular saga contributed to Albert’s abdication in 2013, ending only when he admitted paternity in 2020 and Boël secured the right to style herself Princess Delphine de Saxe-Coburg.

Whether the newly minted prince will adopt the Saxe-Coburg surname remains unresolved. In a recent television documentary broadcast on the Flemish network VTM, Vandenkerckhove expressed deep reluctance to abandon his mother's family name, viewing such a change as a betrayal of her efforts in raising him. For now, he remains a prince in name only, quietly existing alongside a royal institution that, much like the Belgian state itself, seems to generate endless complications while offering very little practical utility to the public. Thanks to a legislative revision in 2013, the public purse is protected from this expanding royal roster, restricting state allowances to a select few senior royals including King Philippe, King Albert II, Prince Laurent, and Princess Astrid.

Written by Thomas Nussbaumer thomas.nussbaumer@alpineweekly.com