Short answers, pulled from the story.
Belgium officially declared independence on the 4th of October 1830, following the Belgian Revolution that began in August of that year. The first King of the Belgians, Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg, was inaugurated on the 21st of July 1831, which is now Belgium's national holiday. The Treaty of London of 1839 formally ended the state of conflict with the Netherlands and secured Belgian neutrality.
The Belgian Revolution broke out when a crowd attending a performance of Auber's opera La Muette de Portici at the Brussels opera house of La Monnaie spilled into the streets singing patriotic songs, sparking violent street fighting. Underlying grievances included political under-representation in the Netherlands, religious tensions between the Protestant king William I and the Catholic majority, and resentment among French-speaking Walloons at Dutch being imposed as the language of government.
Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg was the first King of the Belgians, inaugurated on the 21st of July 1831. He was the second choice of British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston, accepted by all the major European powers after the Prince of Orange was rejected by both William I of the Netherlands and France.
The Council of Blood was the popular name for the Council of Troubles, a special court established by Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the 3rd Duke of Alba, during his term as Governor-General of the Spanish Netherlands from 1567 to 1573. Alba boasted of burning or executing 18,600 persons in the Netherlands, with 8,000 burned or hanged in a single year, and his Flemish victims totalled at least 50,000.
Germany invaded neutral Belgium in 1914 as part of the Schlieffen Plan. The Belgian army, roughly a tenth the size of Germany's, held up the German offensive for nearly a month, helping Allied forces prepare the Marne counteroffensive. The German army executed between 5,500 and 6,500 French and Belgian civilians between August and November 1914. By 1919-80 percent of Belgium's workforce was unemployed and only 81 operable locomotives remained out of 3,470 available before the war.
Herbert Hoover organized an unprecedented international relief effort through the Commission for Relief in Belgium, which fed the entire Belgian nation for the duration of the war with the permission of both Germany and the Allies. At its peak, the American arm of the effort fed 10.5 million people daily on an $11-million-a-month budget, funded 78 percent by private donations and government grants.