The royals - Kitty Kelley [90]
The Queen Mother said Princess Margaret’s engagement announcement would not interfere with the national celebration planned for the birth of the Queen’s third child, expected in February. Ten years had passed since Princess Anne was born, and for the Queen, her current pregnancy would underscore the stability of her marriage and commitment to her family. Significantly, the birth was timed to coincide with changing the name of the House of Windsor to the House of Mountbatten-Windsor. The Queen had proposed the change the previous year and suggested the announcement to include her husband’s name be made shortly before the arrival of their third baby.
Despite his misgivings, the Prime Minister agreed to present the matter to his cabinet. The traditional monarchists objected when he broached the subject, but the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, pushed for the Queen’s position, saying how important it was to her that her husband’s name be validated. The Bishop of Carlisle cooperated by announcing that he did not like to think of any child born in wedlock being deprived of the father’s family name. “Why should Her Majesty be different from any other married woman in the realm?” the Prime Minister asked his cabinet.
“Why indeed,” snorted one Tory minister, who suspected the ambitions of “that Battenberg buggerer” (that is, Louis Mountbatten) had more to do with the name change than the Queen’s personal wishes.
The Deputy Prime Minister reported back to the Queen that several ministers suspected the strong hand of her unpopular husband. The Deputy then wrote a confidential memo to the Prime Minister about his meeting, saying: “The Queen stressed that Prince Philip did not know of the present decision, on which she had absolutely set her heart.”
So the Prime Minister went back to his cabinet and argued strenuously for the name change. The meeting was so acrimonious that papers dealing with the issue were not routinely released in 1990 under the thirty-year rule. The subject referred to within the cabinet as “the Queen’s Affair” was so sensitive that the government ordered all pertinent documents be kept sealed for an additional twenty years.
After months of discussion, the Macmillan* cabinet finally acceded to the Queen, and the new name was intricately fashioned by lawyers to accommodate her wishes without sacrificing historical continuity. The hyphenated hybrid was confusing, but at least it gave the Queen and Prince Philip, not to mention “Uncle Dickie,” some small measure of satisfaction. On February 8, 1960, eleven days before the birth of Prince Andrew,† Her Majesty announced:
While I and my children will continue to be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor, my descendants, other than descendants enjoying the style, title or attributes of Royal Highness and the titular dignity of Prince or Princess and the female descendants who marry, and their descendants shall bear the name Mountbatten-Windsor.
The reaction was immediate and scathing. “Only fifteen years after the second world war against Germany,” fumed a columnist for the Mirror, “we are abruptly informed that the name of Mountbatten, formerly Battenberg, is to be joined willy-nilly with the name of Windsor.”
Lord Beaverbrook, who owned the Daily Express, the Sunday Express, and the Evening Standard, blamed Mountbatten for pushing the Queen into a hyphenated name. “Small wonder that Lord Mountbatten, whose devotion to his heritage is little short of fanatical, has for many years nursed a secret ambition that one day, the name of the ruling house of Britain might be Mountbatten,” he wrote. “The Queen could never see the name of Windsor, chosen by her grandfather, abandoned by the royal house. On the other hand, she sympathizes with her husband’s feelings and more particularly with the overtures of his uncle.”
The pompous Mountbatten was unperturbed. He was too busy celebrating. “My greatest happiness,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “is that