On claims

The family makes no claim to any former land, domain, property or office. Not as a concession, and not as a position taken up for the sake of appearances — simply because the countries those places belong to are the countries of the people who live in them now, and that is how it should be.

The map on this site is a record of where the story happened. It is not a claim to anything on it.

On Europe

The family’s interest in European peace and co-operation is not a policy position and it is not a modern graft onto an old name. It comes out of the history directly: a house whose own inheritance was multilingual, multi-legal and spread across half a continent learned early that the alternative to negotiating with people is fighting them, and it did plenty of both.

On this site, war and conflict are written about neutrally. We grieve all the victims, and we do not assign blame where the history does not force it on us. That holds for the sixteenth century and it holds for the present day.

On privacy

Living members of the family appear here by first name and year of birth, and by nothing else. No photographs, no surnames, no places, no dates beyond the year. This is a decision about privacy and about security, and it applies to everyone, including the head of the house.

No address, telephone number or email address of any member of the family appears anywhere on this site.

On languages

The site is written in British English. Dutch comes next, written and checked by the family, and further languages follow in stages: Spanish, French and German reviewed by the family; Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese machine-assisted, with every page in those four carrying a visible line saying so and the date it was last reviewed.