Bouchout Castle

The Berthout lords of Grimbergen held a strong castle and with it the trade road from Bruges to Cologne, and neither Godfrey I of Leuven nor his son Godfrey II could force them to submit to the young Duchy of Brabant. Godfrey III answered by planting two fortifications close to Berthout ground: Nedelaar, raised in 1148 across the Zenne, and a second on the swampy, beech-grown domain of Boc-holt, granted to Wouter van Craaynem. In 1159 Brabant troops, assisted by Flanders, ended some twenty years of Grimbergen warfare and burnt the Berthout castle.

Whether Wouter's stronghold was a castle or only a fortified house is unclear: Cantillon called it a strong castle already, yet his son Willem held barely 120 to 160 hectares in the 1160s.

Willem's grandson Daniel was the first of the line to bear the name Van Bouchout. On 5 June 1288 he fought at Worringen, where the independence of Brabant was at stake, helping to capture Reinald of Guelders in the stroke that won the day for Duke Jan I. He was afterwards made seneschal, one of the duchy's highest offices.

Doperé, Ubregts and others credit him with rebuilding the fortified house, around 1300, into a water-castle proper: a donjon some 20 metres high, five successive ditches and a timber bridge of ten metres. The Flemish heritage register dates the tower earlier still, to the twelfth century. It is believed to survive as the oldest fabric on the site.

Daniel's grandson Jan van Bouchout (c. 1320-1391) came of age as Brabant's ducal succession fell into dispute. When Johanna succeeded her father Jan III in 1355, Louis of Male, Count of Flanders, pressed a rival claim through his marriage to her sister; the Brabant army was beaten at Scheut in 1356 and Bouchout was most likely taken with it. Jan became garrison commander of Brussels once peace returned, lost again to Guelders at Baesweiler in 1371, and recovered his standing in 1386 by leading a successful attack on Grave on the Meuse.

The legitimate line ran out with Margareta van Bouchout, who married Everhard van der Marck in the mid-fifteenth century. The humanist Maximilianus Transylvanus bought it from Everhard's brother Robrecht and renovated heavily before his death in the 1530s; after his son-in-law Gerard Veltwijck died in 1555 maintenance lapsed, and Spanish rule and the iconoclasm of 1566 likely left it worse still.

Around 1590 Christoffel d'Assonleville bought the decayed castle from Joanna Transylvan and by about 1600 had restored Bocholdia Castrum to its medieval state, throwing the five ditches into a single pond. A loyal minister of the Spanish administration thought to have had a part in the attempt on William of Orange, he saw Bouchout raised to a barony in 1605 and took a seat among Brabant's governing councillors.

In the 1670s the estate went to Peter-Ferdinand Roose, who bought it from the debt-ridden Renom de France and turned the medieval fortress into a fashionable château ringed with French ornamental gardens; he died childless in 1700. During the French occupation after the Revolution, soldiers burnt the wooden bridge for warmth in the severe winter of 1795, filled in the front of the pond, destroyed the forward defences and looted the buildings.

Count Amédée de Beauffort rebuilt Bouchout in the neo-Gothic taste from 1832 under the architect Tilman François Suys, in the young kingdom's medieval revival. The southern wing came down, large windows and a balcony were cut through the walls, battlements added to the towers and a door opened in the donjon's ground floor, undoing the closed defensive form.

In 1879 King Leopold II bought the domain for his sister Charlotte, dowager Empress of Mexico, whose husband Maximilian of Austria had been captured and shot by Mexican republicans in 1867. Charlotte's mind never recovered, and she kept a court at Bouchout but took no public engagements. Because she was Franz Joseph's sister-in-law the German occupiers left the domain alone in the First World War, and the people of Meise sheltered there. She died at the castle on 19 January 1927.

In 1938 the Belgian state bought the domain for the National Botanic Garden, since 2014 Meise Botanic Garden. Belgian troops looted the castle during the 1939 mobilisation, and German occupiers later ringed it with an earth rampart and four bunkers. A flying bomb fell on the west of the domain late in November 1944; neighbouring Meise Castle burnt out and was pulled down after the war. Bouchout was restored between 1987 and 1989 and has since hosted meetings, lectures and exhibitions.