Qualla: Bouchout Castle

Bouchout Castle: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Template:Jacobus Harrewijn, Public domain. In June 1867, news reached Europe that Maximilian, the Habsburg archduke who had spent three years calling himself Emperor of Mexico, had been stood against a wall in Querétaro and shot. His widow Charlotte was already in Europe, having crossed the Atlantic to beg Napoleon III and the Pope for the French troops that had propped up his throne. She received nothing, and then the news. She did not return to Mexico. She did not return, in any meaningful way, to public life. Twelve years later, the Belgian royal family bought a moated castle in the village of Meise, twelve kilometers north of Brussels, and gave it to her. She lived inside its walls for forty-eight years and died there in 1927. Bouchout Castle is older than that story - it has guarded a small pond in Flemish Brabant since the late 12th century - and younger, in the sense that the neo-Gothic silhouette it presents today was finished only in the 1830s. But for nearly half a century it was, quietly, the longest residence of a woman the world had once known as Carlota of Mexico.

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Image: Template:Jacobus Harrewijn | Public domain

Bouchout Castle: A Beech in the Swamp

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kees Recourt, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bouchout sounds French. It is not. In modern Dutch the name would be written Boekhout, and it simply means 'beech' - a dialectal variant of beuk. The territory was once swampy ground full of beech trees, and the name stuck. The fortress was probably begun by Wouter van Craaynem a...

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Image: Kees Recourt | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bouchout Castle: Five Centuries of Owners

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marc Ryckaert (MJJR), CC BY 3.0. The Bouchout family line died out in the fifteenth century when Margareta van Bouchout married into the Van der Marck dynasty. The Van der Marcks held it from 1476 to 1537, then it passed to the Transylvan family, then in 1590 to Christoffel d'Assonville, a loyal minister of the ...

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Image: Marc Ryckaert (MJJR) | CC BY 3.0

Bouchout Castle: Restoring an Old Country's Pedigree

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marc Ryckaert (MJJR), CC BY 3.0. That chapter came in 1832, when Count Amadeus de Beauffort hired the architect Tilman-François Suys to do something fashionable across the young Kingdom of Belgium: reinvent a medieval castle as a more medieval-looking castle. Belgium was a new country with old buildings, and its...

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Image: Marc Ryckaert (MJJR) | CC BY 3.0

Bouchout Castle: The Empress at the Window

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephane Mignon from Bruxelles, Belgique (Europe), CC BY-SA 2.0. Charlotte of Belgium was the only daughter of King Leopold I. She married Maximilian of Austria in 1857 at the age of seventeen. When Napoleon III and a clique of Mexican monarchists offered Maximilian the throne of Mexico in 1864, the couple went. The empire lasted three years. ...

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Image: Stephane Mignon from Bruxelles, Belgique (Europe) | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bouchout Castle: Greenhouses and a Grave

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kees Recourt, CC BY-SA 3.0. After Charlotte's death, the furnishings were moved to the Palace of Laeken and the Belgian state bought the estate. The first plantings of what would become the National Botanic Garden of Belgium went in during the 1930s. The war was not kind to Bouchout - German soldiers occupi...

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Image: Kees Recourt | CC BY-SA 3.0