The Unofficial British Royal Family Pages

Sunday 7 March 2004

Little Lady Louise

The naming of the newest member of the royal family, Lady Louise Alice Elizabeth Mary Mountbatten-Windsor, started me thinking about the relationship between the British royal family and the Battenberg/Mountbatten family.  The January issue of Royal Insight (the online official royal magazine, available at http://www.royalinsight.gov.uk/) states that “Louise is taken from the Earl's great great paternal grandmother (Louise of Hesse-Cassel); Alice is taken from the Earl's paternal grandmother (Alice of Battenberg); Elizabeth is taken from the Earl's maternal grandmother (Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother); and Mary is the name of the Countess's mother.”  Several things about this struck me as interesting.

First, “Louise of Hesse-Cassel” was the queen consort of Denmark, and was Queen Alexandra’s mother.  The Queen and Prince Phillip are second cousins once removed through their mutual descent from her (as well as third cousins through Queen Victoria and fourth cousins once removed through Queen Mary’s descent from King George III).  Prince Edward, who is close to his father and will inherit his title of Duke of Edinburgh, clearly intends to claim Queen Louise as a Mountbatten ancestor, and perhaps wishes to downplay her role as an ancestor of the royal families of Denmark, Britain, and Greece, possibly to avoid getting people thinking about how closely related these families are!  I am somewhat surprised that no mention was made of a more recent Lady Louise Mountbatten, who was Prince Phillip’s aunt and married the King of Sweden.  However, the Wessexes decided to mention only one namesake for each name, and if they had not drawn that line, I’m sure they could have gone on naming past royals forever.

As for the other names, I like the use of Alice to honor Prince Phillip’s mother.  Hugo Vickers’ recent biography of her, Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece, is an excellent portrayal of her remarkable life.  Apparently she was close to Prince Edward during his childhood, when she had retired to Buckingham Palace.  With all due respect to the late Queen Mother, why was the use of Elizabeth only to honor her, with no mention of the Queen?  The final name is Mary, after the Countess’ mother.  The inclusion of a name honoring the non-royal side of the baby’s family is a step forward for the Windsors, who traditionally expect those who marry into the family to keep their own families in the background.  But no doubt it helped that Sophie’s mother and the Queen’s grandmother had the same name.

Lady Louise’s birth provides an opportunity to reflect on the events that resulted in her hyphenated surname.  The Battenberg family was established in 1851, when Prince Alexander of Hesse married Julie von Hauke.  As Julie was not royal, their marriage was considered morganatic, meaning that Julie and their children could not use Alexander’s Hessian title.  They were granted the lesser title of Princes and Princesses of Battenberg.  Many European royals looked down on them because of this, but not the down-to-earth Queen Victoria.  Prince Louis of Battenberg, their eldest son, married Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Victoria of Hesse, who was his first cousin once removed through the Hesse family.  A few months later, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, married Louis’ younger brother Henry (who was less than two years younger than she was). 

Thus the Battenbergs were closely linked to the British royal family during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When King George V changed the family name to Windsor during World War I, he granted the Battenbergs and some other German relatives living in England titles in the British peerage in exchange for renouncing their German titles.  The Battenbergs also anglicized their name to Mountbatten.  Louis and Victoria of Battenberg’s daughter Alice had married Prince Andrew of Greece.  When their son Phillip decided to become a British subject so that he could serve in the British navy, he took Mountbatten as his surname.  After he married Princess Elizabeth and she succeeded to the throne, Phillip’s uncle, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, began telling people that the House of Mountbatten sat upon the throne.  Queen Mary heard about this and told Winston Churchill that her husband had wished for the royal family to continue to be known as Windsor.  Churchill accordingly had the government issue a decree stating that the royal family was still named Windsor. 

Reportedly this angered Prince Phillip for years, and at the time of Prince Andrew’s birth in 1960, another statement was issued creating the name of Mountbatten-Windsor.  This name will be used by descendants of the Queen and Prince Phillip who do not hold the rank of royal highness.  (Nonetheless, Princess Anne used it when she signed the register at her first marriage.)  Therefore, before Lady Louise’s birth, no one used the name, as only Peter and Zara Phillips were not of the rank of royal highness.  Even now, the name can only continue through any descendants of Prince William who do not bear the rank of royal highness, through Prince Harry’s children, or through any children born out of wedlock to Lady Louise, Princess Beatrice or Princess Eugenie.  The past flexibility of the Mountbatten name suggests that one way or another, there will still be Mountbatten-Windsors around in the generations to come.

- Margaret Weatherford