On 21 July 1803, Nicolas-Jean Rouppe, the commissioner of the department of the Dyle, received Napoleon at the Palace of Laeken.

Napoleon stayed there with the Empress Joséphine in August 1804 on his way from awarding the first Légion d'honneur to his troops at Boulogne, to his progress along the Rhine, and later, during the Hundred Days in 1815, prematurely drafted a proclamation to be made from the palace: To the Belgians and the inhabitants of the left bank of the Rhine.

In my exile, upon a rock in the sea, I heard your complaint; the God of Battles has decided the fate of your beautiful provinces; Napoleon is among you; you are worthy to be Frenchmen.

Rise in a body; join my invincible phalanxes to exterminate the remainder of these barbarians, who are your enemies and mine: they fly with rage and despair in their hearts.Following Belgian independence in 1830, Rouppe, by then mayor of the City of Brussels, received the new King Leopold I at the Palace of Laeken on 21 July 1831, the day of Leopold's coronation.

The French architect Charles Girault gave it its present outline in 1902, with the addition of two new monumental wings forming a "U" shape with the main façade.

[1] The domain also contains the large Royal Greenhouses of Laeken,[5][1] a set of monumental dome-shaped constructions, accessible to the public only a few days a year.

However, upon their accession to the throne in 1993, King Albert II and Queen Paola preferred to remain living in the Belvédère Château on the grounds of the park surrounding the palace.

[7] The gardens of the Royal Domain are landscaped in English style; the vast park includes lakes, a golf course and artworks.

It is in these gardens that his only son, Prince Leopold, Duke of Brabant, fell in a pond, and died subsequently from pneumonia, aged only nine.

In the gardens live several colonies of wild Canada geese, hundreds of cormorants and other large birds.