November 2, 2026

Excerpt from Finest Hour, issue 214

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Stephanie Green, American Crown: From Revolutionaries to Royalty—The Story of Prince William’s American Heritage,Pegasus Books, 2026, 288 pages, $29.95. ISBN 979–8897101054

Review by Nikki Lafferty

There is an appealing historical irony at the center of Stephanie Green’s American Crown: a future British monarch is descended from Americans who once took up arms against the Crown he will inherit. Green traces the American ancestry of William, Prince of Wales, largely through the family of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. In doing so, she constructs something considerably more entertaining than a conventional family tree. American Crown moves from the American Revolution through the rise of the new republic, the Gilded Age, the transatlantic marriages that connected American fortunes with British titles, and ultimately into the modern House of Windsor.

Prince William is, through Diana’s maternal ancestry, one-sixteenth American—a detail that provides Green with the premise for a broader exploration of the families and personalities who connected Britain and America long before the phrase “special relationship” entered the political vocabulary.

The story begins in Revolutionary America, where Green introduces readers to the Strong family of Connecticut and to Nathan Hale, the young American officer and spy executed by the British in 1776. Hale himself is not William’s direct ancestor, but his family provides an early connection to the line Green follows. From there, the narrative advances across generations and social worlds, moving from revolutionary patriots to prosperous nineteenth-century Americans and eventually to the wealthy families who inhabited the drawing rooms and ballrooms of Gilded Age society.

Green is particularly at home in this social world. The book features names familiar to anyone interested in the intertwined histories of money, society, and politics—the Astors, Vanderbilts, Spencers, Churchills, and others whose lives crossed the Atlantic with remarkable frequency. The journey eventually arrives at Frances “Fanny” Work, Diana’s American great-grandmother, whose marriage to James Boothby Burke Roche brought an American family line firmly into the British aristocratic world. Green follows that lineage forward to Diana and then to William. . .

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