The intimate relationship between the Heineken family and the Dutch 'Royal Family' or 'House of Orange' dates back to the 1850s ChrE. It has known its ups and downs, among which a dramatic episode under William III. These days, the Holland Heineken House (HHH) at the Olympic Games is a clear example of the joint influence of the two families, an influence which is not at all equally clearly Harmless, Helpful and Healthy.
Whenever the Olympic Games are held, the so-called 'Holland Heineken House' is the place to meet for Dutch athletes, their supporters, the country's bobos and other visitors alike. Officially, the House is home to the NOC*NSF, the Netherlands Olympic Committee & Netherlands Sports Federation, but the Heineken company 'facilitates and organizes the location' with big shots such as a 'global activation director' (meanwhile using this top party spot conspicuously for the promotion of its own brand). It may be prosaic, even reprehensible, but among the Dutch and related peoples it is not at all unusual that a structure is called after the one who paid for it or a venue after its (main) sponsor. Nonetheless, the complete arrangement is at least rather odd; has a Faustian streak, to put it mildly. The point is, first of all, that Heineken is a commercial company. "People don't drink beer, they drink marketing," one of its top executives once declared. As a commercial company it is, in a thriving economy, a company with competitors. In Holland, the eight largest breweries produce about 99% of the beer, but somehow seven of these breweries do not deserve or receive any comparable attention from NOC*NSF, an organization which purports to be a national organization and is supposed to represent the whole country. More importantly, breweries are not the kind of companies specially known for building sports fields, swimming pools and skating rinks, nor for producing sports clothing and equipment; they are known for making an alcoholic beverage or in the case of Heineken, perhaps, 'marketings'. Alcohol is not the first thing sound reasoning will lead you to associate with sports and a wholesome life; and if sound reasoning has not played the role, something else must have played the role here. But, for now, that's a mere detail. (Mind you, i* am not a teetotaler. I do drink an occasional beer or wine myself.)
The website of the Holland Heineken House starts with the slogan LET'S CELEBRATE THE LEGENDARY ORANGE FEELING. During the Games, the guests, among whom the Dutch medalists in particular, are greeted in the House itself on an orange carpet. Even the athletes are dressed in orange outfits, but that is NOC*NSF's decision based on a tradition in which orange is used to distinguish Dutch sportspeople and teams from their non-Dutch adversaries. As the games at the Games and other events are not win-win but win-lose matches, orange is not only the color of the winners, when it evokes that 'legendary orange feeling' in the ones susceptible, but also —the other side of the coin— the color of the losers in these matches; orange losers who, at the end of a football match in particular do not always portray that legendary a behavior, especially not when having tossed down too many pints of lager already. Personally, i find pure orange a festive color, unlike the red-orange vermilion used by artists and architects, which to me has more depth; that is, a festive color anywhere in the world, except in the Northern Netherlands and in Northern Ireland, where it is too often too obtrusively linked to an Orangist ideology. Other world citizens may find the color clownish and may wonder where the Dutch or Dutch monarchists and the Ulster Protestants got it from. The official flag of what is now called 'the Kingdom of the Netherlands' does not provide the answer: it is a horizontal tricolor of red, white and blue. Zealous Orangists may give the upper band of the flag an orange color, yet this has not been official anymore since 1937. The explanation is that the original Prince's Flag was based on the livery of Willem van Nassau or 'William of Nassau', Prince of Orange, and did indeed have an orange upper bar, but that its dye just tended to turn red in the past. (A kind of natural process quite unlike the present-day cultural process in which red, while skipping vermilion, now tends to turn orange on Dutch soil.)
What underlies the role of the color orange in this part of Western Europe is that the monarchical skeleton of the region, the United Netherlands two hundred years ago, the Northern Netherlands today, is fleshed up with members of the so-called 'House of Orange' or 'House of Orange-Nassau', a group of individuals who are or claim to be descendants of William of Nassau or one of his known ancestors. (The William of Nassau concerned is also referred to as "William of Orange" or "William the Silent".) It is said, however, that William III, king of England and stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, was the last person with the historically justified title Prince of Orange in the Netherlands. (Legal arrangements whose sole purpose it is to regulate or fabricate the name and/or title of one individual for familially exclusivistic reasons are not at all uncommon in the Rhine Delta area. Take, for example, the special acts or articles in which the German surname of a monarch's consort is changed into a fake Dutch one.) What monarchists like to refer to as "the Royal House" (the smaller circle) or "the Royal Family" (the larger circle of contemporary members) has been the Zur Lippe family since 1948. (More about that surname later.) Members of this family may have been linked up or may have linked themselves up with the wrong regimes in Germany and Argentina, none of the later members of the House of Orange-Nassau went as far as William and his son Maurits van Nassau ('Maurice of Nassau'). With their troops they starved out and killed off the great majority of human beings —men, women and children as the cliché has it— in the Meierij of 's-Hertogenbosch, the northern part of the Duchy of Brabant at the time, because these miserable ones did not feel or could not show the need to be liberated from the Spanish by William and Maurice's troops. That's a merely local historical detail, not talked about anymore.
At the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, the Dutch delegation was headed by an Oranje (Orange), that is, a member of the House of Orange and in this case the Von Amsberg-zur Lippe family: Willem-Alexander von Amsberg (1967-; surname based on pre-1998 civil law), the new king for less than a year. From 1998 until 2013 Von Amsberg had been a member of the International Olympic Committee. As crown prince (until the same year) he was nicknamed "Prins Pils" ("Prince Pint") after his love of drinking pints of Pilsner. Even monarchists had noticed the more than due attention beer received from this Orange man in public and in the presence of the press. (The photos of the crown prince and the then prime minister visiting the Dutch peacekeepers force in the 'safe area' of Srebrenica just before the massacre, joyfully smiling with beers in their hands, would still be a national disgrace, if they had not been forgotten.)
One would not expect a country that purports to be democratic and to pay more than average attention to human rights in international relations, so long as it does not too adversely affect the interests of the shareholders of the Royal Dutch Shell company (in Brunei, for instance), to send the weightiest delegation possible to an event in a country where everything deviating from the majority's traditional ideas and (alcoholic) behavior may be ostracized, must be outlawed and will be more or less heavily penalized, if not collectively by the state, then privately by citizens operating in gangs. This, however, is precisely what the Kingdom of the Netherlands did, unlike the United States, France and Germany, who refused to send their heads of state, and all those other countries that did not boycott the Sochi Winter Games but made adjustments to their delegations. It is quite possible that the Dutch king (also) wanted to go, because Von Amsberg is Putin's neighbor in Greece, where the two of them have holiday homes. However, it does not make a great difference, for in matters which unequivocally concern the wishes and interests of the Orange monarch or the House of Orange in general the Dutch prime minister appears to be little more than a palace poodle anyhow. The regime of the Kingdom of the Netherlands could not care less, or not enough, about the good foreign examples, came with a cheap excuse about having a chat with Putin, with whom they had just been enthusiastically celebrating the historical and present-day economic ties between Holland and Russia for a year, and went. (The millions of Russians belonging to political, denominational and/or sexual minorities oppressed or discriminated against could not mollify the government in The Hague. It was the deaths of 193 Dutch citizens killed in an attack on the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine's pro-Russian rebel-held territory which did the trick: the relations between the two European administrations cooled down.) Details, details, but that's a detail.
And the close connection between the Zur Lippe and Heineken families? Nothing special at all: in any country, monarchy or republic, people with political power or influence will meet and mingle with the rich and those in positions of authority, if they are not the same or members of the same family. The more intimate all these connections the less transparent the system, of course, but in a country where the monarch is at once head of state and head of the government (instead of the prime minister), and where all communication between the monarch and the cabinet (the rest of the government) must remain entirely secret, political transparency is not at the top of the list. For the time being it will even remain at the bottom of the list, for with the support of the Oranje-grauw (the Orange rabble) the Orangist elite parades their polity as a paragon of diversity and justice for the whole world. (The Dutch system is so opaque that it even makes it impossible to prove or disprove that the monarch's poodle is a poodle. Mathematicians would, for that reason, have to resort to an extra axiom for such a system.)
Political transparency as an aspect of democracy over monarchy is not at the top of the list for a large part of the Dutch population, especially not after a few liters of heerlijk helder Heineken (alliterative Dutch for delicious clear Heineken beer). What is not at the top of their list either, rightly or wrongly so, is democracy with respect to an organization such as the International Olympic Committee, even not with respect to whom will represent the Kingdom of the Netherlands in such an organization. The way others are bypassed in favor of a member, or in favor of a favorite of a member, of the Zur Lippe family is the first thing you would expect from a monarchy and the last thing you would expect from a democracy. Just have a look, for example, at the private letter handwritten by the then crown prince, now king, Willem-Alexander von Amsberg to Anton Geesink, the eager beaver who made Samaranch, the then president of the IOC, settle on the queen's eldest son in 1998. If Orange had started with a (mute) H, the Dutch and their visitors would probably have met in the Horange Heineken House. Alas, only Holland could maintain Heineken's triple alliteration, but that is a trifle for a country which, after Norway and Canada, has won a relatively large number of medals during the 2014 Winter Games. (For an objective judgment you will, of course, have to take the size of the population, the gross domestic product per capita and the geographical location into account.)
There is, however, another connection between Heineken and the House of Orange, one which dates back to the person traditional history books simply name and number "King William III": Willem Alexander Paul van Oranje (1817-1890). (Yes, here one needs no fewer than three succesive given names to merely distinguish the father from one of his sons.) This Willem Alexander lived in a time that it was fashion in circles that consider themselves 'aristocratic' or 'noble' to marry one's first cousin, the most terrific example being Victoria von Hannover, queen of Great Britain and Ireland, who did so in 1840. That cousin was in Willem's case Sophie von Württemberg, whom he married in 1839, ten years before succeeding his father in the Northern Netherlands (as king) and Luxembourg (as grand duke). Sophie was a noble woman in the true sense of the word: intellectual, liberal and an animal lover, as such a very great deal different from her Orange husband, who was conservative, a hunter and an army lover. It is to Victoria's credit, i must admit, that she described her royal colleague as a boor. Being in a position to say Sophie nay Willem Alexander forbade all acts of an intellectual nature, not in public, as you might suppose, but at home! Women, his own 'femme philosophe' included, were no more than jupons (skirts) for this 'King Gorilla', as he was nicknamed by the Dutch populace. Because her marriage was —surprise, surprise— unhappy, the queen sought diversion and affection elsewhere; not in alcoholic drinks but nonetheless with a Heineken forefather, which, you should not forget, she was not aware of at the time. And it was not her only liaison: she had at least one more with Lord Clarendon before she died at Huis ten Bosch, The Hague, in 1877, 58 years old. (See, for example, her biography Sophie, koningin der Nederlanden by Dianne Hamer, 2011.)
The forefather i am referring to was Willem Frederik Tindal (1816-1882), who married Maria van der Vliet in 1843. Their first child was a girl, Mary Tindal. And it was Mary Tindal who married Gerard Heineken, the founder of the brewery. This information can hardly be duller you may think. Yet, what may not be too dull a piece of information is that Willem Frederik, this forefather, was discharged from the army with ignominy and dismissed from his job as chamberlain by the king in 1865. After this he left the country for Mexico, which you may interpret as he had to leave the country for a place far away. Why was he fired by King Gorilla, who went fucking all over the Veluwe, a beautiful large forested area where he was said to go hunting? (In 1897 The New York Times called this 'dissolute and lustful' King of the Netherlands "the greatest debauchee of the age".) Tindal was fired because he had too intimate a relationship with Willem Alexander's wife Sophie. You may still remember, albeit not from the history books at school, how William the Silent (for a Reason?), with his four wives and many more extramarital affairs —Historische (rand)figuren will give you an example— reacted when he found out that his then wife, Anna von Sachsen ('Anna of Saxony'), Maurice of Nassau's mother, had touched one man too much: she was never in her life allowed to see her son back again. (Her last child during her marriage with William was not even acknowledged by him.) Now, after all these years Victoria's boor was not much more enlightened. Sophie wanted to divorce him, but he refused because 'royal families' have to keep up appearances. So, they only separated, setting up different households in 1855.
Willem Alexander and Sophie had three children, biological or not — i will return to this question later. Willem Frederik and Maria had three children too: Leonard Jan (1845-1866), Mary/Marie/Maria (1849-1932) and Hendrik Pieter (1852-1902). These Tindals went thru a difficult time after their father's double dismissal. Leonard resigned from the army voluntarily and accompanied his father to Mexico, where he died the next year. Hendrik fared much better: he later founded De Telegraaf, the major right-wing and, apart from explicitly Christianistic ones, the most monarchistic newspaper of the Netherlands, in spite of the founder's father's extraordinary personal experiences, you might say. And Mary, meanwhile not much richer than a churchmouse, was so lucky (and pretty) to make the acquaintance of the founder of a brewery which bore his name: Heineken. That founder may (also) have been seduced by the fact that the Tindal family belonged, since 1815, to the Dutch peerage. Mary and Gerard Adriaan (1841-1893) married in 1871, but they had no children together, well, genetically speaking.
I can very well imagine that many a reader will still find this kind of information little interesting. In itself it is little interesting, for what is so special about having a bad marriage (or no marriage at all, for that matter) and looking for affection and/or sexual gratification elsewhere (provided that cause and effect are not turned around here)? What is so special about having three biological children or none at all? What is so special about a husband getting his wife's lover out of his household? Certainly, the last thing is nothing special either, except, perhaps, when you have or are given the power to fire or have fired him from a national institution, such as the army, as well. Indeed, it is not special for a husband to send his wife's lover out of the house; special it would be to keep him in the house. Yet, that is exactly what happened to the 12 years younger Julius Daniël Petersen (1853-1904), friend of the Heineken-Tindal couple; or, perhaps, it was this salonvloo (salon flea) who managed to stay in spite of a few little objections. There is, as far as i know, no reason to assume that the three of them had a triangular relationship, in which case the two men would have to be bisexual, but it was certainly a case of two line segments having a common end; and that end was Mary's corner. When her son Henry Pierre was born Gerard had already stopped being the possible source of insemination, if he ever was one, and the father of the child was Julius Petersen. Nonetheless, Henry got his surname from the brewery — sorry, his mother's legal husband. This story was already a public secret in Gerard Heineken's own days, but it is being retold in a biography about him which has just been published. (Gerard Heineken. De man, de stad en het bier by Annejet van der Zijl, 2014.)
As if it were a completely new discovery, it was recently shouted from the rooftops of several, if not all, Dutch newspaper mills: "Freddy Heineken was geen Heineken" (De Telegraaf and AD; Freddy was Henry's child, geen means no), "Freddy Heineken was geen echte Heineken" (De Volkskrant; echte means real) or "Biermagnaat Freddy was geen echte Heineken" (NRC; biermagnaat means beer baron). Was the Holland Heineken House in Sochi or will the Holland Heineken House at the following location of the Olympic Games be any less a Heineken House for this reason? Should it be rechristened "Petersens Pilsjes Paleis", "The Pils(e)ner Petersen Palace" or something? That would be sheer nonsense, of course, if only because at this moment hardly anyone of us can be entirely sure that he or she really is the biological child of his or her legal parent, unless both your and your parent's DNA have been taken and checked, which is, again, at this moment not normally done. And what difference does it make if you are only your parent's or parents' adopted child, but adopted with the greatest of love? No, apart from its physical appearance and possible hereditary strengths and weaknesses, the difference does not lie in the child. Clearly, no blame attaches to the innocent child.
Perhaps, no-one is to blame where a state-sanctioned line segment is met by a non-state-sanctioned one creating a more or less sharp, acute angle. Yet, this is not to say that such arrangements or occurrences do not have their own problems and opportunities. The relation may be purely or predominantly sexual, it may also be financial or much more intimate in a social, even intellectual sense. If the latter, the extra lover or substitute lover, as the case may be, will get to know the other's marriage and family affairs many times better than any other nonmember of the family could. After all, he or she is not just a friend and not just a sexual partner either. And, who knows, the lover not married to him or her may not keep all information to him- or herself. If not his or her legal spouse, his or her legal (and biological) children may, in the course of time, share a smaller or larger part of that information. Now, where it concerns the Heineken-Tindal couple, Petersen was not married himself. On the contrary, he married Mary Tindal two years after Heineken's death. But Gerard Heineken's father-in-law had a wife and children himself and this extramarital relationship with the charming and engaging (in the eyes of some others snobby) Sophie von Württemberg, called "Queen Sophie" in traditional history books.
It was relatively easy for Willem van Oranje (not to be confused with the Silent One above) to deliver himself from his chamberlain and military subject Willem Tindal. Any form of public punishment would only draw unwished-for attention to the sordid affair (in which the king could be derided as a cuckold), so banishment to a country far away from Europe was the next best thing. It is quite possible he ordered Tindal to be arrested and executed, as he did with a mayor of The Hague. Orders like these, however, were quietly disregarded by those close to the king, because if you relish the collateral amenities for yourself and ignore the collateral damage done to others, it is nice to be a monarchist but not when there is no monarchy anymore. The years of war with Sophie went on until nature delivered Willem, the Willem Alexander Paul, from Sophie when she died in 1877.
At the time, Willem and Sophie's eldest son, Willem Nicolaas (1840-1879), nicknamed "Wiwill", was heir to the throne. His relation with his parents was not much better than the one between his parents, in point of fact, it had become very problematic four years earlier, when he had wanted to marry a young Dutch countess, for such an unequal marriage was regarded a gross mésalliance. At least, this is the official version. Another version is that he could not marry the countess because she was one of Willem Alexander's illegitimate children and Wiwill would therefore in truth be marrying his half-sister. (The degree of consanguinity between a half-brother and a half-sister is no different from the one between two first cousins, but Willem Alexander was not of the type to be reminded of that.) Wiwill banished himself to Paris, where he, when he was about 20 years old, had often visited the luxurious brothels with his father and shared the same women. Despite his current hatred of his father he showed himself a real chip off the old block, judging by the reputation he aquired under his new nickname le Prince de Citron (the Prince of Lemon). Edward, the eldest son of Victoria von Hannover and Albert von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha ('of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha'), was his fellow-debauchee. At the time of his consort's death the Dutch king must have known already that Wiwill was not a crown prince to be counted on, and rightly so, for he died two years later at the age of 38.
Willem and Sophie's second son died when he was only 6 years old but their third son, Willem Alexander Karel (1851-1884), was still alive. (For him you need no fewer than three given names again before he is distinguished from the rest of the lot.) It is said that he was intellectual and well-read, a most peculiar thing in the family for someone who was not married into it, because until today the native Oranges may be caught at drinking a beer, they are seldom or never caught at reading a book. The fact that he was also homosexual, as rumor had it, could not have been that peculiar, because Willem Alexander Karel's grandfather, King William Bi —sorry— II, was bisexual. But the grandfather married and sired legitimate and illegitimate children, whereas the grandson, as once his illustrious namesake Alexander the Great, had not even proposed an unacceptable bride yet. So, with his two children estranged from Willem Alexander Paul and not willing or not suitable to succeed him, there was de facto no heir to the throne, especially when one takes into account, albeit with hindsight, that also Willem Alexander Karel predeceased his father seven years later. The crown prince died without legal issue and, as far as is publicly known, without biological issue.
If the House of Orange did not produce an heir to the Dutch throne, that throne would fall into German, probably Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, hands, and the Kingdom of the Netherlands might then be swallowed up by the German Reich. (Which, incidentally, shows how dangerous a system can be in which a whole country is servilely entrusted to one family.) To save the monarchy from a German take-over or from being abolished after his death, Willem Alexander Paul had to start the whole thing afresh. Already in the year of Sophie's death he intended to marry a French opera singer whom he had created a countess, without government consent. The king could be persuaded to abandon the plan, if only because two of his sons were still alive at the time. But the king knew how little he could count on these sons and kept on searching desperately. After several other attempts failed, he was quickly married to Emma zu Waldeck und Pyrmont, two years after Sophie's death. The new jupon was 41 years his junior, young and fertile, and would no doubt be able to bear him healthy children.
Probably unbeknownst to Willem Alexander Paul himself the question was only: Whose children? For Gorilla Rex had enjoyed his sexual escapades at a cost, both to himself and to society at large: he suffered from syphilis at a time when it could not be adequately treated yet. It was nothing exceptional for a royal member to have contracted it, but an untreated syphilis is not only contagious for others in its early stages, it leads to central nervous system disorders in the tertiary stage. No wonder, most people in Willem's surroundings, people who should in principle be well-disposed towards him, agreed that he was insane! Syphilis can also lead to infertility because of testicular atrophy; and while it is not known specifically to cause impotence its many symptoms can lead to this inconvenience too. Willem was already 62 years old anyhow when he married Emma, who bore him a daughter: Wilhelmina Helena Pauline van Oranje (1880-1962). The first couple of months to four years she was called "Paulientje" ("Little Pauline") by her parents and "Her Royal Highness Pauline" officially . The change of her name into Wilhelmina became significant after the demise of her legal half-brother Willem Alexander Karel, the crown prince, who is said to have mentioned a 'Wilhelmina' in his last will and testament. The person in question is not likely to be the child of his father's new wife, whom the crown prince loathed; it may have been Wiwill's daughter, his niece.
Legally speaking, Wilhelmina Helena Pauline certainly was Willem Alexander Paul's daughter, but biologically speaking? This time, perhaps, it was not a man who cheated on Willem Alexander but one who helped him, that is, one who was asked to perform his duty as a loyal servant to save the Dutch and Luxembourg thrones from falling into unadulterated German or, worse, republican hands. It was rumored that the most likely father was the then about 33-year-old Sebastiaan de Ranitz (1846-1916). At the time he was a mere orderly of the king, but in the year after Pauline's birth he was made the king's private secretary, another four years later his adjutant-secretary and another three years later he was created a jonkheer (esquire) as well. He would later also become Queen Wilhelmina's, that is, Pauline's, kamerheer i.b.d. (a chamberlain) and her Officer of the Royal Household. In addition to all these social intimacies, the king's orderly and his daughter had at least one other thing in common: both of them suffered from tone-deafness, a hereditary disease. Cees Fasseur, an Orangist historian who was given exclusive access to the Royal House Archives, denies that Sebastiaan de Ranitz would be Pauline's father, a denial which is no more than that: the father could be one of Sebastiaan's (tone-deaf) relatives instead. It could also be that the 21-year-old Emma was impregnated, if not by, then with the sperm of, the 28-year-old crown prince. (When i mention someone's age in this article, it is usually based on calendar years and the person concerned may therefore have been 1 year younger or older.) Perhaps, it was this secret De Ranitz knew about. Perhaps, the Wilhelmina mentioned in Willem Alexander Karel's will was his own biological daughter, rather than his half-sister. At any rate, whether Van Oranje or De Ranitz or something, there is no further intimate connection at this point between the House of Orange and the Heinekens, or it must be that in the near future some very brave and, if the news is true, noble newspaper will shout it from the rooftops: "Oranjes geen echte Oranjes" (Oranges Not Real Oranges, Members of the House of Orange Not Genuine Members), just as the Dutch newspapers recently cried out the same sort of thing about the nonroyal Heineken family.
Some kinds of doubt, existential doubt for one, need not grow at all, other kinds of doubt tend to grow exponentially. You question one axiom in Euclidean geometry, for instance, and nothing in geometry, even logics, seems to be safe anymore. Naive monarchists like to believe that their system is as solid as Euclidean geometry once was, with equally self-evident axioms, but that solidity too is breaking down with the advent of biological science and information technology. Once you have learned that the one prince or princess in the monarchist limelight who was married and swore in church or another such temple to remain faithful was no different from or even much more promiscuous (with men and/or women) than any human being not belonging to their class, you start to doubt the purportedly chaste or monogamous status of the other prince or princess in that limelight. Soon it will concern those princes and princesses who they, as state-religionists, like to officially call "King" and "Queen by the grace of God". A little later it will even concern the past and/or present of those kings and queens who combine the position of head of state with that of the established religion. Once you have learned that because of unprotected extramarital relations princes and nonprinces alike (the Oranges and the Petersens, for instance) may have children born out of wedlock, and that nonprincesses, such as Mary Tindal, may have biological children who are not their husband's, you start to doubt the consanguinity status of the children of the husbands of queens and princesses (the Oranges again). Once you have learned that the one prince or princess in the monarchist limelight had been so unfortunate or carelessly promiscuous as to contract syphilis, while she, but usually he, was said to have died from typhus, you start to doubt the health status and cause(s) of death of the other prince or princess in that contemporary or historical limelight. The lies are still for sale, they may become cheaper and cheaper, but the number of people who do not buy them anymore becomes larger and larger, however imposing or impressive the political, religious and/or economic apparatus behind them may be.
Talking about doubt: there is one doubt with regard to the Van Oranje-von Württemberg family i have not yet discussed and which may deserve our attention in the present context. It is the story told by some that Willem Alexander Paul is not even the biological father of his first three children, that these children were fathered by either William III's father, William II, or by Sophie's doctor, W. Hendriksz. This suspicion is in itself not of any interest here. The question which may be of interest, however, is whether one or more of the children could have been sired by Willem Frederik Tindal instead! Let's first have a look at the elementary data. (Again, the age given is based on calendar years.) Willem Frederik Tindal himself was born in 1816, married in 1843 and left for Mexico in 1865. Sophie's first son, Willem (Nicolaas) was born in 1840, one year after his parents' wedding. Tindal was 23 years old at the time of Sophie's impregnation and not yet married himself. Sophie's second son, (Willem Frederik) Maurits was born in 1843. Tindal was 26 years old at the time of Sophie's impregnation and not yet married himself. Sophie's third son, (Willem) Alexander (Karel) was born in 1851, one year after his brother Maurits's death. Tindal was 34 years old at the time of Sophie's impregnation and had married about 8 years before. I find the suggestion that the first two children were not William III's own children highly unlikely, if not preposterous. Like Tindal, who was one year his senior, Van Oranje was in his early and mid-twenties. Even if he did already have syphilis in those days, it would not have made him infertile at that stage. If he was infertile nevertheless and needed a donor for his wife, he would first have had to find this out for himself, and not considered a substitute father until five or so years after the wedding.
Van Oranje's third son was born when he was 33 years old, 8 years after his second son. This may look odd, but definitely not for a bad marriage, especially not since there seems to have been a short reconciliation between the two spouses during the illness and death of their second son, still a little child. I do not know when Tindal entered into the service of the couple, but what is, perhaps, more important is that Willem and Sophie did not actually separate and start to live apart until 1855, when the third son was already four years old: she stayed at Huis ten Bosch in The Hague, he at the Loo Palace in Apeldoorn during the summer. (It was there on the Veluwe, away from his wife, where William the Gorilla tried to outstrip William the Conqueror in the erotic field ... and forest. Judging by the reputation his bouts of royal fornication acquired in the area, he did indeed manage to.) While Willem had his splendid adventures in Apeldoorn and surroundings, Sophie will have started her much simpler and subtler adventures in 1855 or one of the years following. If this is correct, Tindal was just not in the picture, in the procreative picture at least, at the time that her three children were born. So anyone doubting William III's biological parentage vis-à-vis his three sons should stop doubting. It would have tremendously embellished my story, but the plain truth is almost certainly that there is no Heineken ancestor involved in the making of these children.
The Heinekens' roots are not orange in that members of this family definitely have a ('bastard') child or known ancestor (m/f) in common with members of the House of Orange. Yet, while the connection between the two families has not been so intimate as to share their genes, intimate it was, and the friendship continued with the Zur Lippe family, of which the Von Amsberg family forms a contemporary part. This does not mean that all of them have always been as thick as thieves, or, if as thick as thieves, the thief was not Mary Tindal's grandson, Alfred ('Freddy') Henry Heineken (1923-2002), but positively the first Zur Lippe in the House of Orange: Bernhard Friedrich Eberhard Leopold zur Lippe, later Bernhard Leopold Friedrich Eberhard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld (1911-2004). (As Bernhard went thru several birthday and name changes, it is hard to determine what his name really was or should be free from both fraud and familial state exclusivism. So i may also use the surname construction Zur Lippe sive zur Lippe-Biesterfeld, in which sive means or.) The character in question 'never paid' in the words of Freddy Heineken, who was the owner of Hotel de l'Europe in Amsterdam. When Zur Lippe would go there for a lunch, sometimes with guests, he would always leave without paying, to Heineken's chagrin. (In the same vein, the Zur Lippe family did not feel obliged —rumor has it— to pay the Albert Heijn supermarket for the groceries they received from them. In the same vein, they never paid Annie M. G. Schmidt for the one-acter this immensely popular Dutch author wrote for Juliana's women's amateur theater club, and which Annie delivered in person, after plodding down the streets thru the snow from the Baarn railway station to a back exit of the Soestdijk Palace. And in the same vein, they never paid off the 86% remainder for the Swiss-made ermine mantle which Queen Juliana, Queen Beatrix and King Willem-Alexander wore at their investitures, at least not until after the last of these events —it has been proved— no less than 65 years later, when it was found out.)
Freddy was once very close to Beatrix, Bernhard's eldest daughter, and her husband Claus von Amsberg, a former member of the Hitler Jugend but more sympathetic a person than his compatriot, who was a former member of the Waffen SS to boot. They stayed at his villa in Cap d' Antibes in France, and joined him on his yacht Something Cool for Mediterranean trips. Claus was just Claus, but the crown princess, half-naked in bathing suit or not, had to be called "Royal Highness", definitely on the upper deck of the boat, where they could be overheard. Once a queen, she insisted on being addressed with "Majesty" by the fifteen years older Freddy, but Heineken —i could have hugged him for this one— replied, "Ik ken wintertijd, ik ken zomertijd, maar geen majesteit". (Literally, "I know standard time, i know daylight saving time, but no majesty", which rimes in Dutch and sounds more like "I know lusty, i know busty, but no majesty".) No wonder Heineken stopped his outings with the dame!
Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken, 'the Queen of Beer', Would Rather Not Pay Taxes — NRC (www.nrc.nl), news (in Dutch), 4 April 2024 Richest Dutch Citizen, De Carvalho-Heineken, Evades Tax Dutch Internal Revenue Service Is Going to Figure Out How Many People Are Using the 'Heineken Construction' 'Heineken Construction' Could Have Been Prevented, Measure Was Dropped — NOS (nos.nl), news (in Dutch), 4, 5 and 8 April 2024
Almost ten years after i* wrote this article, Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken, the richest person with Dutch citizenship on Earth (where she lives in Switzerland in theory, but in Great Britain in practice) is suddenly stealing the limelight with the same old news in a new guise. Anyone who has not been living under a rock, or, more appropriately and equally escapist, under a very thick layer of froth, for decades must have heard of both the Heineken bonus grabbers (bonusgraaiers) and the tax privileges of and evasions by current or recent members of that family the Heineken-Tindals have been intimately socializing with since the 1850s of their Era. This month, it was discovered, too, that and how De Carvalho-Heineken, whose present wealth is estimated at more than 16 billion euros, has joined the whole lot in this pecuniary respect as well. Unwilling to pay only a 15 percent tax on the hundreds of millions of dividends earned on Heineken shares this person used a mailing address in Luxembourg to get the money to Jersey, a tax haven familiar to those whose legendary aversion to participating in paying fair taxes is far stronger than their publicly displayed Orange feeling. By means of this so-called 'Heineken Construction' the treasury of the Kingdom of the Netherlands never received the about 30 million euros due each year from the Queen of Beer. True, it is not only De Carvalho-Heineken who is to blame for this state [sic] of affairs. Also the Dutch government and parliament failed miserably: it was their blunder which made, and still makes, the tax dodging possible. As usual there is a cheap excuse which creates the impression that the people in the government and/or parliament who knew most cared least. For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that no citizen was hurt personally, because there was no Heineken who traveled around with a big bag for a year and who literally stole three to four euros from all households across the whole country in order to collect those 30 million. Good gracious, there was a much more convenient, and more legal, way. The only one hurt personally seems to be Gerard Heineken, the founder of the brewery. I do not know whether Gerard was in favor of tax evasion, but have no reason whatsoever to believe he was. On the contrary, poor Gerard Heineken may be turning in his grave right now thinking of Henry and his two other children with Mary Tindal. He most probably always accepted that it was the twelve years younger Julius Petersen that was their biological father, and that the children got the Heineken family name, he being their legal father. But that was then: also this bloody tax dodging scheme is now carrying his name! I can very well imagine Gerard shouting it out: "No, no, it's the Petersen Construction, the Petersen ... ."
79.MNW
When Freddy Heineken died in 2002 his daughter Charlene Lucille Heineken (1954-) inherited her father's block of shares, 3.7 billion, that is thousand million, euros at the time. She is also known as Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken, because she is married to Michel de Carvalho, a film actor turned financier and former Olympic luger. Nowadays her controlling interest in the world's third-largest brewery is estimated at 11 billion, and she has become the richest person with a Dutch citizenship. Also in this respect there is a connection with the House of Orange, starting with Wilhelmina Helena Pauline van Oranje (Queen Wilhelmina), who according to articles in the American press had the commercial insight —and the state-given time and opportunities, one should add— to increase the family's fortune to the first billion dollars. Around 1910 of the Christianist Era Paulientje owned 25% of the shares of Royal Dutch Shell. By the time she died, in 1962, her estate may have been smaller or larger but she had only one legal child, Juliana Louise zu Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1909-2004; surname based on pre-1998 civil law), who later reigned as 'Queen Juliana'. Juliana was one of the richest women of the Netherlands, one of the richest women, even the richest woman, of the world it was rumored, rightly or wrongly so. After Juliana and her husband Bernhard's deaths the estate of some 1 to 5 billion euros was divided over four children, among whom Beatrix Wilhelmina zur Lippe sive zur Lippe-Biesterfeld (1938-; surname based on pre-1998 civil law), who had succeeded her mother as 'Queen Beatrix'. Nowadays, she and her relatives own less than 5% of the shares of Royal Dutch Shell or any other company, including Heineken International, privately and individually. (This, of course, does not tell us anything about what they own collectively or about how much money they may have hidden in special, opaque constructions.)
Charlene de Carvalho is an executive director at Heineken, her husband a member of the supervisory board. The De Carvalho-Heineken couple have five children. One of them, Alexander de Carvalho, became a member of the Board of Directors of Heineken Holding in 2013. This De Carvalho intends to go by the surname of Heineken in the near future, a possibility Freddy Heineken would have expressly left open for his grandson. (The new Dutch Civil Code of 1998 allows parents to choose between the father's and the mother's family name, so long as all their children are given the same family name.) The Von Amsbergs are among the friends of the De Carvalhos. Not only were the latter at the wedding when Willem-Alexander von Amsberg married Máxima Zorreguieta (1971-), they even put their maximum-security accommodation in St Moritz, Switzerland, at the disposal of the future King of the Netherlands and his wife, nowadays called "Queen" instead of "Princess" by obsequious monarchists who would 'never even think of discriminating between men and women'. (Whereas the rule that children born in wedlock could only be given the father's surname was abolished in 1998, the sexist rule that the consort of a female monarch is called "Prince" and the consort of a male monarch "Queen" is still maintained in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The excuse given, equally bureaucratic as cheap, is that by calling the male consort "King" there would be two 'kings'. If this reasoning deserved to be taken seriously at all, the solution would simply be not to call any consort "king" or "queen" any longer, regardless of sex or gender. If Prince is exclusive enough a title for a male consort, Princess should be exclusive enough a title for a female consort, you would say.)
It is not too farfetched to claim that at present the best, and also most concrete, symbol of the intimate ties between the De Carvalho-Petersen-Heineken-Tindal family and the Von Amsberg-zur Lippe-zu Mecklenburg-Schwerin-van Oranje family is the Holland Heineken House at the Olympic Summer and Winter Games. The celebration of 'the legendary Orange feeling' in the Holland Heineken House started in Barcelona in 1992, then as 'a modest cocktail party'. Twenty years later, in London, England, it had grown into a mega-event opened by Charlene Heineken, while an athlete who won a gold medal at the Barcelona Games handed the key of the House to the president of the NOC*NSF, the big boss of Dutch sports. The Holland Heineken House —one may still be tempted to call it "Petersens Pilsjes Paleis"— is not only a symbol of the strong Orange-Heineken connection but as home to the NOC*NSF also a symbol of how a national organization may, for the sake of money and monarchy, be willing to give up even the appearance of representing all citizens and businesses in the country equally, without fear or favor.
Holland Heineken House wordt/to become TeamNL Huis — https://www.teamnl.org/van-holland-heineken-house-naar-teamnl-huis
Maybe this article, which i started on ten years ago, did it. Maybe Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken's Petersen Construction did it. Or, maybe, it was just a streak of moral, or less moral, insight that suddenly hit the NOC*NSF. Whatever it was and wherever it came from, it made the national sports organization of Holland the Netherlands decide to change the name of their meeting center at the 2024 Olympic Games from Holland Heineken House to TeamNL Huis or House. (As i have explained in Holland or The Netherlands? neither Holland nor The Netherlands properly designate the country in question: the former name is a pars pro toto, whereas the latter, with the abbreviation NL, is a totum pro parte.) Basically, the change means a replacement of Heineken with Team. A great improvement, isn't it? Yes, it's a sportshumanlike achievement — too bad, it came at least ten years too late! But, as the saying goes, better late than never.
79.MSE
69.LNE-MSW
