Thank you. I should have been less lazy & read the thread! Must try harder.
So the provinces stayed together despite the religious differences from north to south.
Most of the Catholic southern provinces in the (original) Low Countries are now part of Belgium.
Actually, the history goes (roughly) like that: in the 15th century, most of today's Belgium and the Netherlands was under the sovereignty of the ducal house of Burgundy (a cadet branch of the royal house of France, whose native language was also French). They passed by marriage to the House of Habsburg when Archduke Maximilian(later the Holy Roman Emperior Maximilian I) married Mary of Burgundy in 1477. Their heir, Philip the Handsome, married Juana, the daughter of the Spanish Catholic Kings, and their son, the future emperor Charles V, inherited both the Crowns of Castile and Aragon, the Habsburg lands and the Burgundian territories.
Following the Reformation, the seven northern provinces, which had become mostly Protestant by then, became an independent republic, whereas the other southern provinces, known as the Spanish Netherlands (roughly today's Belgium), were ruled by the Habsburg Spanish kings until the War of Spanish Succession, when they were ceded by the Treaty of Utrecht to the Austrian Habsburgs. During the Spanish rule, the Protestant reformation was suppressed in the South as in other parts of the Spanish empire (the world's largest empire at the time !).
Following the French Revolution, the Austrian Netherlands and, later, the Dutch republic were occupied by the French. After Napoleon was defeated by a coalition of British, German and Dutch forces, the Congress of Vienna established a united kingdom under Willem I of Orange-Nassau who ruled over the present-day Netherlands and Belgium (and was also Grand Duke of Luxembourg in personal union). The united kingdom was broken by the Belgian revolution of 1830, which created the Kingdom of Belgium and installed Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (the widower of Princess Charlotte of Wales) as the first King of the Belgians.
Leopold himself was a Protestant (Lutheran), but he married the daughter of the King of the French, who was Catholic, and raised his sons in the Catholic faith, to conform to the majority religion in Belgium.
EDIT: If King Philippe had never married nor had legitimate issue, which was what many people actually expected prior to his surprise engagement to Mathilde d'Udekem d'Acoz, he would have been probably succeeded one day by Prince Amedeo, Princess Astrid's eldest son, whose father is a Habsburg and Archduke of Austria-Este. So the Habsburgs would have been returned to their allegedly rightful place as kings of Belgium. That is still a possibility if Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant, marries a Habsburg.
Yes, but I hadn't looked up the statistics for 2002, and it is possible for religious distributions to shift over two decades.
