The square exists because the Palace of Coudenberg burned down. After the fire of 3 February 1731, the medieval seat of the Burgundian and Habsburg rulers of the Low Countries sat as a ruin for more than forty years, the Cour brulee or Burnt Court, while nobody could decide what to do with it. The breakthrough came in 1774, when Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine proposed clearing the wreckage and replacing it with something French. Empress Maria Theresa approved the demolition. The French architects Jean-Benoit-Vincent Barre and Gilles-Barnabe Guimard drew up plans for a neoclassical royal square modelled almost line-for-line on the Place Royale in Reims of 1759, itself an echo of the Place Stanislas in Nancy. Construction took from 1775 to 1782. The result was rectangular, symmetrical, 77 metres long, ringed by matching white facades with porticoes at the corners. One Gothic chapel of the old palace had survived the fire; the architects pulled it down anyway because it clashed.

On 21 July 1831, on a wooden platform raised in front of the Church of Saint-Jacques-sur-Coudenberg on the eastern side of the square, a forty-year-old German prince named Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha took the oath that made him Leopold I, the first King of the Belgians. The country was less than a year old. The Belgian Revolution against Dutch rule had ended in independence in 1830, and the new constitutional monarchy needed a king from somewhere - preferably someone with international connections but no entanglements in the old Low Countries' rivalries. Leopold, a widower with English political contacts and an empty schedule, agreed to the job. The choice of venue was deliberate. The square had already been the site of cavalcades in honour of Napoleon in 1810 and of William I of the Netherlands' inauguration in 1815. By staging the oath here, the new Belgian state was reclaiming a stage that empires had used and writing its own opening line on top of theirs. 21 July is still Belgian National Day.

In 1848, the empty plinth at the centre of the square finally got its third statue, an equestrian bronze by Eugene Simonis showing Godfrey of Bouillon as he departs for the First Crusade in 1096. Godfrey waves a standard and shouts "Dieu le veut!" - God wills it. The choice was political. The young Belgian state, hunting for patriotic figures to tie its identity to, reached back to the medieval Duchy of Bouillon in what is now Belgian territory and to a leader of European Christendom going off to recapture Jerusalem. The optics, in 2026, are uncomfortable - the First Crusade was a brutal campaign that ended with the massacre of much of Jerusalem's population, and triumphal crusader statues read very differently now than they did in 1848 - but the figure has stood at the heart of the square ever since. Two bronze bas-reliefs by Guillaume de Groot were added to the pedestal in 1897. The statue's other job, less heroic but more practical, was to serve as a roundabout: from 1921 onward, north-south and east-west traffic flowed around Godfrey at full speed.

Standing at Godfrey's horse and turning slowly, you can see most of Brussels' main museum holdings without moving your feet. The BELvue Museum, telling the history of Belgium, occupies the former Hotel Belle-Vue at number 9. Through it you descend to the archaeological remains of the Coudenberg palace, hidden under the square itself. The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium - including the Oldmasters Museum - sit just off the square's southwest corner. The Musical Instruments Museum, housed in the spectacular Art Nouveau Old England department store, is two minutes' walk in another direction. The Magritte Museum dedicates itself to one of the country's strangest exports. The Court of Audit of Belgium occupies the former Hotel de Templeuve at number 4, where Prince Philippe, Count of Flanders - brother of King Leopold II - lived for nearly forty years. Around the square's edges, palaces became hotels, hotels became court offices, and now everything is a museum or a ministry.

For most of the twentieth century the Place Royale belonged to cars. About 80 per cent of its surface was given over to traffic; only 20 per cent to pedestrians. In a city that has spent the last two decades aggressively reclaiming its centre from automobiles, this was an obvious problem. In 2021, after public consultation, the City and the Brussels-Capital Region's heritage organisation Beliris announced a redevelopment that would reverse the ratio - 80 per cent pedestrian, traffic squeezed down to the minimum needed for trams and emergency vehicles. The original eighteenth-century blue stone paving would be preserved. Construction began in 2023. Visit the square today and you find it half-undone, the past and the future both partially visible: the matching facades from 1782, Godfrey on his horse from 1848, the church Leopold I climbed to take his oath, and below your feet the cellars of the palace that started the whole long story. The third statue is still there. The arguments over what kind of monument a city should be go on around it.