One of three names the Ledger carries — and the only one with a living corroborator
Recalled but not checked against any source. Treat everything here as a first draft awaiting correction.
The Ledger records descent from Prince William of Orange. Jonathan Hare's father transmitted three names from it: Cromwell, Prince William of Orange, and Charlemagne. No further detail came with them.
Two things widely attached to this claim in family retelling are not from the Ledger and are marked as such here. The association with Queen Mary is Hare's own inference, formed in high school when the College of William & Mary recruited him heavily and sent him an enormous purple hardback dictionary. And the characterization of the Prince as a womanizer came from the chalet conversation, not from any record.
S-086 completes the identification and the trail: the ledger's William is William of Orange the Silent — leader of the revolt against Spain that became the Eighty Years' War, founder of the Dutch Republic (the dictation says 'Dutch Empire'; the Republic is the correction, published per convention), and one of the sixteenth century's genuine practitioners of tolerance: a Catholic-raised prince leading a Protestant revolt who kept insisting, against both sides, that conscience could not be compelled — assassinated for it in 1584, the first head of state killed with a handgun. The descent is direct albeit illegitimate, and the record publishes the illegitimacy because it publishes its provenance uncomfortable parts and all. His war is the second of the two that Westphalia ended — which places both of that treaty's wars in this family's tree, and hands the essay's chapter ten its most personal footnote: the man who died for coexistence-without-convergence, and the descendant who built the substrate that makes it structural.
Correction per S-146: the family line runs to Prince William of Orange the Silent — the father of the Dutch Republic, assassinated 1584 — not the later William-and-Mary pairing an earlier rendering implied. Family grade, on the four lineage books.
Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
Removing the Mary association changes the candidate materially, so the options are set out rather than resolved.
William III is the William associated with Mary, and is almost certainly the wrong one: he had a single reputed mistress, Elizabeth Villiers, that relationship produced no children, his marriage was childless, and contemporaries remarked on his general lack of interest in women.
William the Silent — Willem van Oranje, Father of the Fatherland — is the man Dutch usage means by Prince William of Orange. Four marriages, fifteen-plus legitimate children, and a dynasty. A descendant using our ancestor of a shared forebear, under a period portrait, is most plausibly speaking of him.
Maurice of Nassau, his son, never married and had several acknowledged illegitimate children — which fits the specific claim of an illegitimate line, and the chronology for a descendant reaching the Chesapeake by the 1660s.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
A fundraising stop, a fifteen-foot portrait, and the best claim to royalty Hare has
Open →which records itA distributed provenance record, maintained by a community, versioned every twenty years
Open →his war ended by1648: modern diplomacy's birth certificate, the essay's chapter-ten hinge — the empire of one ancestor, the republic of another
Open →the conversation with a prince of Luxembourg, November 2024San Francisco with UC Berkeley, November 2024; Miami, 5 December 2025; Doha next — the sustainability-finance room the record's Sustainable Markets work runs through
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-086The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-104The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-106The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-146The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-188The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
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