The Fresh Prince of Belgium

Once upon a time, a young man of humble upbringing discovered that his father was a prince, and that royal blood had been flowing through his veins all along. In a story by the Brothers Grimm, the truth might have been revealed by an enchanted mirror, a talking frog or an elderly woman living deep in the forest. In modern Belgium, it required only a telephone call, a visit to the hospital and a DNA test.

That, at least, is the simplified version of how Clément Vandenkerckhove, a Belgian restaurant worker and former Opel salesman, became His Royal Highness Prince Clément of Belgium at the age of 26. His father is Prince Laurent, the younger brother of King Philippe, and his mother is Iris Vandenkerckhove, better known in Belgium as the singer, model and television personality Wendy Van Wanten.

The newspaper version as told by The Daily Mail is a modern Cinderella story. An ordinary young car salesman takes a DNA test and, lo and behold, he discovers that he is a prince. Unfortunately, that version leaves out the inconvenient detail that nearly everyone concerned seems to have known, or strongly suspected, the truth for years.

Wendy and Laurent had a lengthy relationship during the 1990s, before Laurent married his present wife, Princess Claire. When Wendy became pregnant in 1999, Laurent reportedly helped to design the nursery and bought a large teddy bear for the baby, which should have been a clue. After Clément was born, he took some of his first steps in the garden of Laurent’s home, Villa Clémentine, so his name itself was hardly an inspired attempt at concealment.

Rumours about the boy’s parentage began almost immediately. For example, Royal reporters noticed that the boy looked like Laurent, Wendy occasionally dropped hints, and one journalist says her manager once arranged an interview in which she intended to discuss her son, only to cancel it at the last moment. A courtier later claimed that the subject caused heated arguments between Laurent and his father, the former King Albert II.

The remarkable thing, therefore, is not that DNA eventually identified the father. It is that a mother, a prince and presumably a selection of courtiers and advisers maintained the same public deception for a quarter of a century.

Wendy did not tell Clément that Laurent was his father until he was sixteen. We don’t know if Clement ever asked who his father was, but if he didn’t he must have been extraordinarily incurious.

Four years after he found out who his dad was, Clément finally summoned up the courage to contact the prince. They met and went together for the DNA test, with Laurent gallantly volunteering to be tested first so that the young man would feel at ease. The result reportedly established paternity with a probability of 99.5 percent, not 100%, but close enough for dynastic purposes, one supposes.

Even then, the palace gates did not immediately swing open for young Clément. The DNA test appears to have taken place around 2020, but Laurent did not acknowledge Clément publicly until September 2025. (Princes have busy lives, and presumably acknowledging his own son was not high on the royal bucket list.)

Formal recognition was eventually registered at the town hall in February 2026, and the consequences were revealed six months later.

All this raises considerably more questions than it provides answers. Why was Clément denied the identity of his father throughout his childhood, even though Laurent had apparently taken an interest in him as a baby? Why did his mother wait until he was sixteen? Why did Laurent wait another four years for the son to make the first approach? Most strangely, why did another five years pass after the DNA result before the truth was formally acknowledged?

There is also the delicate question that polite royal reporting seems determined not to ask. Did Prince Laurent contribute financially to Clément’s upbringing? If he did, was it ordinary private child maintenance or was discretion, whether written or merely understood, part of the arrangement? There is no published evidence of payments or a confidentiality agreement, so it would be unfair to allege that the mother was bought off. Nevertheless, when so many people maintain the same silence for so long, it is reasonable to wonder how that silence was arranged.

Royal secrecy is rarely intended to benefit the child. It protects the adults, their marriages, their reputations and, most importantly, the institution. The child receives the privilege of wondering whether he was conceived by virgin birth, what this means for the human race, and why the adults around him refuse to say.

Belgian law has now produced a wonderfully European compromise. Clément is unquestionably a prince and may style himself His Royal Highness. He is also entitled to an equal share of Laurent’s private estate alongside Laurent’s three children by Princess Claire. He will receive no public allowance, perform no royal duties and, because he was born outside marriage, can never inherit the Belgian throne.

He has acquired a horse without a kingdom, which may be the ideal arrangement. Kings are expected to open hospitals, endure military parades under a hot sun, and pretend to enjoy folk dancing and dressing up for the opera. A prince who can never become king is free to get on with his life while retaining a magnificent answer to the question, “And who do you think you are?”

Clément has not decided whether to adopt the royal surname Saxe-Coburg. He says that abandoning Vandenkerckhove would feel like a betrayal of everything his mother did for him. That is understandable, although women give up their surnames all the time when they marry. Anyhow, Prince of Belgium” should look impressive enough on a business card, regardless of whether he adds Saxe-Coburg.

Nor can a coronet do much harm in the automobile trade. “This vehicle has been carefully driven by one royal chauffeur and polished daily” carries more authority when delivered by an actual prince. So a salesman who can trace his family to the King of Belgium should have little difficulty persuading a customer that the previous owner was a retired schoolteacher who only drove the car to church and never used the clutch or brakes. Even if Clément remains in the restaurant business, “the prince will show you to your table” ought to improve the tips.

Of course, Belgium has form for producing surprise princes. Perkin Warbeck was born around 1474 in Tournai, in what is now Belgium. He appeared during the reign of Henry VII claiming to be Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the missing Princes in the Tower and therefore the rightful King of England.

Warbeck was almost certainly an impostor, although the question has never been settled to everyone’s satisfaction. His story was sufficiently convincing to win recognition and assistance from some of Europe’s most important rulers, including Margaret of Burgundy (no relation to Margaret of Cuenca) and King James IV of Scotland. He married a Scottish noblewoman, invaded England and was proclaimed Richard IV before being captured and eventually hanged at Tyburn in 1499.

The contrast is irresistible. Perkin Warbeck was a Belgian commoner pretending to be an English prince. Clément Vandenkerckhove was a Belgian prince pretending to be a commoner. Warbeck had no DNA test available, which was probably just as well for him, while Clément had one but still had to wait years for the adults to admit what it proved.

Conception outside of the marital bed has not always prevented royal advancement. The most successful example in English history was William, Duke of Normandy, who was widely known before 1066 as William the Bastard. He was the illegitimate son of Robert I of Normandy and a woman named Herleva, traditionally described as the daughter of a tanner.

Since tanners traditionally lived and worked in by far the smelliest quarter of town, one cannot help wondering where Robert and Herleva first met, but no doubt it was all above board.

William’s illegitimacy caused him considerable difficulty in the eyes of God, but it did not prevent him from inheriting Normandy. When bastardy threatened to impede his claim to England, he resolved the constitutional question by crossing the Channel with an army, defeating the valiant English King Harold at Hastings and having himself crowned in Westminster Abbey. Success seemingly provided an excellent public relations strategy, since history stopped calling him Billy the Bastard and began calling him William the Conqueror.

Clément is unlikely to follow that example. He is not in the Belgian succession, has expressed no desire for royal duties or to conquer England, and seems more interested in establishing an ordinary relationship with his father than storming the Royal Palace. He says that what he really wants is to be able to have a beer with his dad.

That may be the most sensible ambition expressed by any European prince in several centuries and should not be too hard to arrange. But after 25 years of secrecy, Belgium should not be surprised if the rest of us would like to know who kept the truth from him, why they kept it and whether maintaining the deception involved more than an unusually large teddy bear.