If you should be out this weekend admiring the snowfields of anemones along and around the Drève Saint-Michel, pause a moment at the Chapelle de la Reine. The shrine is set into a magnificently straight beech.
“In honour of the Virgin Mary and in memory of Queen Marie Henriette, some friends of the Sonian Forest restored this little shrine in the year 1989.”
If you read on, I’ll provide some background, thanks mainly to Ucclensia, Cercle d’Histoire, d’Archéologie et de Folklore d’Uccle et environs.
She was a keen horsewoman, who used knowledge from her upbringing to improve the bloodstock of cavalry horses here in Belgium.
Born Marie Henriette Anne of Austria in Vienna, 1836, from the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, she became Queen of the Belgians in 1865. Her marriage to Leopold, Duke of Brabant in 1853 was arranged and, by most accounts,; welcomed by neither party. Two of their daughters remain well-known, Louise and Stéphanie. The third, Clémentine, married Prince Victor Napoleon Bonaparte.
But it was the premature death of their only son in 1869 that proved pivotal and saw her increasingly distanced from court and spending long periods in the Forest, in carriage and on horse.
You can see it indicated on the Stevens map of 1905 but how did it get there?
There are two origin stories attached to it, and they are not quite the same. One is the picturesque one: Marie-Henriette, driving herself through the forest, got her carriage stuck in the mud on the Drève Saint-Michel and was rescued by a woodman or timber merchant. In thanks, she later had a modest wooden Marian shrine fixed to a fine beech on that spot. That version is quoted in Ucclensia from an earlier aristocratic reminiscence and fits the naming of the Sentier de la Reine nearby.
The second version is more devotional than anecdotal. The same Ucclensia article cites historians who link the shrine to Marie-Henriette’s deepening religious life, especially after the death of Crown Prince Léopold. In this reading, she had the shrine installed at a place in the forest where she often rode, following a long-standing Brabant custom of placing small Marian shrines along roads and forest paths, where travellers might pause for protection or give thanks. The rescue story may be local memory or later embellishment, while the devotional motive is perhaps the more sober explanation, though the two may well have merged over time.
The crucial thing that happened later was vandalism. Ucclensia records that in December 1972 the local historian Michel Maziers reported the disappearance of the Queen’s chapel. It had been torn off, and the little statue had been taken away. The forestry administration said at that point that the chapel had already been restored some years earlier, which tells us there had been deterioration or damage even before 1972. After some seven months an action committee put the chapel back on the tree with a new porcelain Virgin.
That was not the end of it. After the 1973 reinstallation, the statue was damaged again. Whether through vandalism, a blow through the grille, or frost is uncertain. During the 1989 restoration, a more durable image was chosen, a crowned Notre-Dame de Hal in stone, nursing the Christ Child and it was inaugurated on 13th May 1989.
So there you have it, the story of a tragic queen and her equally ill-fated shrine.