American Crown

From Revolutionaries to Royalty: The Story of Prince William's American Ancestors

Stephanie Green

The fascinating story of Prince William’s American ancestors, and how this often-rebellious lineage will help shape the future King of Great Britain.

In this fresh and perspective-shifting narrative, American Crown is an absorbing blend of American history and royal biography that brings to life the past generations who will shape the Prince of Wales’s role in the future of Britain, America and the world. For the first time, Britain will have a monarch whose ancestors fought against the very crown he bears.

It all goes back to the roots of Diana, Princess of Wales whose Spencer family has a friendship with the Washington clan of Sulgrave Manor that produced the founding father of America, but more fascinating is Diana’s maternal side whose American ancestors fought in the Revolution in New England, became successful in the new nation, and then (like many Gilded Age families) sent a daughter across the ocean to marry into the British elite. Other Spencers on the British side had bucked social trends in the 1770s even raised funds for the American rebels themselves. Embodying more interconnected history than any of his predecessors, William’s sense of his own role in the world is markedly different from anyone who’s ever held the throne.

With sweeping locations from battlefields to Buckingham Palace and featuring grand personalities like Nathan Hale, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Winston Churchill, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II, Stephanie Green’s American Crown tells the story of a very new kind of royal family—one with the potential to bring two countries closer together in times of turmoil and bring the “special relationship” into next century.

Stephanie Green is a cultural journalist and features writer. A longtime contributor to The Washington Post, she is a former reporter for Bloomberg News and The Washington Times. Her  freelance work has appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair, WWD, and a wide variety of print and online publications. She lives in Washington, DC. 

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