Shortly before the end of the War, Beel was appointed as Minister of the Interior in the Gerbrandy III cabinet, the last government-in-exile taking office on 23 February 1945.

Beel left office following the installation of the Drees–Van Schaik cabinet on 7 August 1948 and continued to serve in the House of Representatives as a backbencher.

On 7 July 1956 Beel, resigned after his appointment to lead a special commission investigating a political crisis concerning the royal family.

Beel was granted the honorary title of minister of state on 21 November 1956 and continued to comment on political affairs as a statesman until he was diagnosed with leukemia in August 1976, dying six months later at the age of 74.

[2][3][4][5][6] Louis Joseph Maria Beel was born on 12 April 1902 in Roermond, a town with a bishop's see in the province of Limburg, in the very south of the Netherlands.

In addition to being a provincial civil servant, Beel accepted a part-time lectureship at an institute for professional training, Katholieke Leergangen, and he wrote his first articles on legal subjects.

Subsequently, he applied for a better job, and managed to find one as a clerk at the municipality of Eindhoven, also in the south of the Netherlands at that time a booming city as a result of the establishment of the Philips group.

He continued his part-time lecturing at the Katholieke Leergangen, he published regularly in the legal press and in 1935 he obtained his doctorate in law at the Radboud University Nijmegen.

Beel was urged to accept the function of adviser to the Military Administration (Militair Gezag), the temporary government in the liberated southern part of the Netherlands under Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force.

The Queen intuitively saw in Beel, a Roman Catholic from the South who ostentatiously had rejected Nazism, the prototype of the patriot and of the sort of "renewed" person she was looking for to replace the members of her war-cabinet, of whom she no longer wholeheartedly approved.

This cabinet resigned immediately after the end of the war, in May 1945, to free the path for a new one to be formed by two a liberal, Wim Schermerhorn, and social democrat, Willem Drees.

[9] In 1948 a parliamentary election was again required for a constitutional renewal, which was thought necessary to solve the problems emerging in the Dutch East Indies, where the nationalists led by Sukarno and Hatta had proclaimed the independence of their country immediately after the Japanese surrender.

He might again have become prime minister, but he failed to form the grand coalition of socialist, Catholic and liberal parties, which he deemed necessary to secure the corrections in the Constitution.

Drees appointed Beel High Commissioner of the Crown in the Dutch East Indies, as a successor to Lieutenant Governor General Hubertus van Mook, a man of proven managerial abilities, who had to resign unwillingly.

Beel, stationed in Batavia (now named Jakarta), was not in favour of such an agreement because of his suspicions - later proven to be right - that the new Republic did not want the establishment of a federal state, as was planned in the Dutch decolonisation policy.

Under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council an agreement was achieved in May 1949 to hold a Round Table Conference in The Hague in order to prepare the transfer of sovereignty.

Beel returned to his home at the end of May 1949 and a few months later he accepted a professorate in administrative law at his Alma Mater in Nijmegen, one of his early ambitions.

In July 1956 Beel asked that he be allowed to resign from government to become, as a private citizen, chairman of a committee of three "wise men" that was requested by Queen Juliana and the Consort Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld to help solve problems pertaining to the royal family.

The problems were related to faith healer Greet Hofmans, whom the Queen had invited to the royal palace in order to cure her youngest daughter, who had been born half blind in 1947.

In various affairs the royals faced, Beel's taciturn way of acting on behalf of the monarchy and his prudent pulling the strings behind the scene as Vice-President of the Dutch Council of State gave him the nickname "The Sphinx".