Recently I was reading an article about something and I noted a reference to “Prince Harry and Meghan Markle”. And I thought to myself: “What happened to Harry’s last name, especially as to how he and Meghan have decided to ‘step back as senior royals’ and become financially independent, not to mention abandoning their titles?” By way of clarification, the two are not facing penury. While they are giving up the Sovereign Grant, they will continue to receive income from the Duchy of Cornwall, Prince Charles’ massive portfolio of property and other assets, which makes up 95% of their income anyway. As to the titles, apparently Harry and Meghan are no longer to be referred to as His and Her Royal Highness. But “prince” is still ok, or so it seems.
Which brings us back to the start. What IS Harry’s last name? I looked it up and the first answer I found was: Harry HAS no last name (unless you count Harry, as in Prince Harry). Instead, he has four first names—Henry Charles Albert David. I thought that was rather excessive, but it turns out, I was quite wrong; four first names is on the low end for royals.
I should probably give you some context here. I have really never been interested in the British royal family or royalty in general, which to me is sensible because I am not interested in genealogy, and royalty is basically the institutionalization of genealogy. Actually, that’s not quite true. I went through a short period delving into the background of my maternal grandfather Milton Musbach, but for only one limited reason. To me, his name always sounded pretty Jewish, and having married into a Jewish family, I figured if I could prove my grandfather was Jewish, I might be able to avoid the nuisance of converting to Judaism, which is a fairly inconvenient process for an atheist, even if he is lucky enough to have been circumcised at birth. I quickly convinced myself that Milton, like a lot of German immigrants, was a God-fearing Lutheran, so that was that.
But, back to Harry and his family. Somehow this name quandary rekindled my interest in family history, or at least one family’s history, so I started mucking about in the history of the House of Windsor (that’s the current Royal Family, if you don’t know). I recently read a biography of Woodrow Wilson, which mentioned that the royals changed their family name during World War I. It seems the family name at the time was “Saxe-Coburg and Gotha”, which was not only hard to fit onto a business card, but also sounded more than a little like it might be the same as Kaiser Wilhelm’s. Which was more or less true; apparently all the European royal families are interrelated, which might explain why they are always fighting among themselves. In any case, despite the fact that even then, the royals were pretty shy about admitting to a last name, King George V figured it would improve their image to adopt a more English-sounding name. No doubt they cast about, trying and then discarding names like “Heath” (too Scottish), “Chamberlain” (too weak), and “Jagger” (too racy). Finally, someone pointed out, “We already have a peachy castle with a mellifluous English name, why not use that?” And so the House of Windsor was born.
Reading about King George V, I noticed his wife was named Mary. Mary of Teck, to be specific, Teck being a principality in the Kingdom of Wurttemburg, which I am pretty sure you could find somewhere in today’s Germany (a fact not highlighted in her royal biography, I bet). So I got to wondering, as you probably are, is she the very Queen after whom the famous oceanliner-cum-Long Beach hotel was named? As you probably guessed, answering that question brought me to my friend Mr. Wikipedia (yes, I donated the $2.37 Jimmy kept annoyingly asking for), which gave her full name as Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes—yep, EIGHT first names, but no surname. Sidelight: Mary used to sign official papers like her driver’s license “Victoria Mary”, the British DMV being way more flexible than ours apparently, but when George ascended to the throne, he asked her to drop Victoria. I don’t know how or when the other six names got lost. And, yes, the boat/hotel was named after her.
About this time I started reading about King George VI, probably because I got confused about the Roman numerals, same as with the Super Bowl, and I noticed his wife was called Elizabeth. Despite being clueless about monarchy, I was aware of a small asymmetry about titles in England: if the ruling monarch is a queen, her consort (I know it sounds tawdry, but that is the way they say it) is called “prince”, but if the reigning monarch is a king, his consort is “queen”.
You are probably already saying, “Wait, there are only TWO Queen Elizabeths, one who hung out with Shakespeare and one who is (last I checked) still alive. What the heck is going on? Was this person Queen Elizabeth I.V?” [that’s Roman numeral for 1 ½] The answer is: I don’t know. As far as I can tell, during her husband’s reign they just called her “you” or “queen”. Fortunately, so long as she stayed away from monarch conventions and family reunions (remember, the Saxe-Coburn-Gotha clan are related to all the other European royals), there weren’t any other queens around to say, “Are you talking to me?”
But when Queen You’s husband died and their daughter became Queen Elizabeth II, the Windsors were suddenly faced with a probably-unprecedented surfeit of queens. So to avoid confusion, the old lady got a new moniker: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, or Queen Mother for short, which served for the remaining 50 years of her life.
By the way, further exploration in the bowels of the internet (well, actually the bowels of Wikipedia—maybe I should send Jimmy another $2.37) reveals that Harry and his ilk do use a surname when they need one, which is Mountbatten-Windsor, to incorporate the name taken by their grandfather Prince Philip when his wife ascended to the throne 69 years ago. Philip is also still around at age 99—you got to hand it to these Windsors, they have staying power. Prince Charles has been waiting his turn for decades, and I think there is a pretty good chance he will die before his mom.
So now you know everything I do about the House of Windsor. If you want to look into another as-yet unexplored mystery of the royals, find out why the sainted Diana was a princess while Meghan and her sister-in-law Kate have to make do with surnames.
DADDY'S GUIDE 