Dear Mr. Cornwell,

I just finished reading your account of the Waterloo campaign, and enjoyed  it greatly. In the afterword you however write:

`Slender Billy proved a better king than a general. His father abdicated in 1840 and the Prince became King William II of the Netherlands, which by then had lost the province of Belgium. He was generally liberal, encouraging electoral reform and accepting constitutional constraints on the monarchy. He ruled till his death in 1849.’

I feel that your praise of the man is undeserved,  he agreed to sign the 1848  constitution (which went much further than he intended), because he was being blackmailed by the radical democrats over his homosexual affair with Petrus Janssen, see Koning Willem II: 1792-1848 by Jeroen van Zanten for more details.

Kind regards,

Mathijs Wintraecken