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Queen feared 'slur' on family

This article is more than 25 years old
Alan Travis on a constitutional crisis driven by the monarch's name and cosmopolitan ancestry

The Queen changed the royal family's name days before the birth of Prince Andrew after an amateur expert on the monarchy pointed out that he would be born bearing 'the Badge of Bastardy', according to secret state papers deposited in the Public Record Office.

The papers show that a fierce battle over what the baby should be called raged in Whitehall in the winter of 1959 which engulfed the Prime Minister, the Lord Chancellor and Buckingham Palace.

The debate triggered an official inquiry into the history of the royal name and even suggested at one point that a family called Guelph had been occupying the British throne for the past 170 years. The previously unknown and artificial family names of Windsor and Mountbatten were only adopted at the height of anti-German feeling during the first world war.

The reaction in Whitehall when the amateur expert, Edward Iwi, first raised the 'Badge of Bastardy' question in private letters to Buckingham Palace and Downing Street was at first hostile: 'This is in very bad taste. Iwi must be silenced... he might go quietly,' the Lord Chancellor told Harold Macmillan.

Iwi, who already had proved himself to the authorities something of a constitutional expert, had written to Macmillan five months before Prince Andrew's arrival saying: 'When the new baby is born, as matters now stand it will bear the Badge of Bastardy namely, its mother's maiden name. As far as I know it will be the first legitimate child to be so born. You will recall that Windsor was the Queen's maiden name and on marriage she took her husband's surname of Mountbatten. Prince Charles and Princess Anne were born with the surname Mountbatten.'

What had changed by the time Andrew arrived was that in 1952 Churchill, outraged at the possibility of a House of Mountbatten ruling Britain, had blocked an attempt by the Queen to incorporate the Mountbatten name and had steamrollered her into a declaration that the royals would be known only as the House and Family of Windsor. Churchill had long regarded the Duke of Edinburgh's uncle, Dickie Mountbatten, as a dangerous and subversive rival who had sacrificed India. 'The Queen would have been the last of the House of Windsor if she had not made the change,' said the editor of Debrett's Peerage.

Iwi said that so strong was the social stigma of the 'Badge of Bastardy' at the time that many unmarried mothers assumed the surname of the putative father before the birth to avoid 'casting this slur upon their illegitimate children'.

Iwi's letter sent Downing Street and the Lord Chancellor into a fury. Sir George Coldstream, the private secretary to the Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, advised No 10: 'The trouble with Iwi is that he usually puts his finger on an awkward question...You will no doubt recall that Iwi has on several occasions proved right and on at least one of these occasions he could have caused the government great embarrassment - I refer to the unfortunate mistake by which Princess Arthur of Connaught was named as a Counsellor of State in 1944. Iwi spotted the error but was good enough to keep quiet about it.' He had also narrowly averted the creation of a British Regency in 1946. Coldstream advised the prime minister to tell Iwi 'in friendly terms to keep his mouth shut'.

Whitehall went into heavy denial mode. Macmillan's main line of argument was blunt. He had been wrong to suggest that the royal family had a surname. They had never needed one. It was true that the Tudors and Stuarts had surnames but their female sovereigns had not taken their husbands name on marriage: 'Mary Tudor remained Mary Tudor and neither Queen Anne nor her children bore the name Oldenburg," Macmillan told Iwi. 'You are quite wrong in stating that Windsor was the surname of Her Majesty before marriage or that Mountbatten was ever the surname of Prince Charles or Princess Anne. Moreover even if you were right about this. I could not think that the surname Windsor could be other than a distinction or that there is anything ignominious in bearing the name of a great house derived through a female ancestor.

But Iwi did not shut up. Indeed he had an ally, in the shape of the Bishop of Carlisle, who attracted some press coverage when one Sunday he said he did not like the idea of any child 'born in wedlock' being deprived of the right and privilege of every legitimate child. He refrained from mentioning the 'bastard' word. When Iwi returned to the attack he did it with style. 'No one is infallible,' was his gambit to Macmillan before adding there was no foundation for the suggestion that members of the royal family did not have a surname.

'If the royal family has never possessed a surname or a family name, then the Proclaimation of 1917 substituting Windsor for Guelph would never have been necessary...The 1952 Amendment changed the children's name from Mountbatten to Windsor and conferring on children as yet unborn what to the man on the Clapham Omnibus is a badge of bastardy, namely the mother's maiden name or family name.'

Iwi told Macmillan that he had 'strong conscientious feelings against allowing a legitimate child to be born with its mother's maiden surname or family name. I have reason to believe that many right thinking people share my view,' he wrote on November 17, 1959.

'One is sorely tempted to cane him for being so cheeky,' noted Sir George Coldstream. Macmillan and his advisers were not to know what other 'right thinking people' shared Iwi's view. In December two months before the prince's birth, he told Iwi that the royals did not have a family surname otherwise it would have been unnecessary for members of the House of Battenberg to adopt the previously unknown surname of 'Mountbatten' in 1917.

But the prime minister was soon to find out that Iwi's views had support in a surprising quarter. As the Queen's biographer, Ben Pimlott, puts it: 'Macmillan was in South Africa. At the end of January Rab Butler - as acting premier - sent him a telegram in Johannesburg saying that at his first audience the Queen had raised the 1952 decision (about the family name) and that she had 'absolutely set her heart' on a change. Lord Mountbatten ever interested in such matters, may possibly have had something to do with it.' The new papers show that the struggle had already been raging for three months before the Queen raised the matter.

The entire Whitehall machine suddenly went into reverse. On February 8, 1960, 11 days before the birth of Prince Andrew, the Queen made a new declaration saying that she had adopted Mountbatten-Windsor as the name for all her descendants who did not enjoy the title of His or Her Royal Highness. Iwi explained in an article in the Law Journal and elsewhere that it would remain a 'hidden' or 'latent' surname to be used by any of the Queen's children should they lose their titles, and passed on to their descendants and used by them when the use of a surname becomes necessary.

The Lord Chancellor even had to write to Lord Mountbatten and inform Prince Philip that Iwi had reached the right conclusion when they inquired about his Law Journal article. As for the Queen, Ben Pimlott records that when Mr Butler conveyed the news to her she told him to tell the prime minister that 'it took a great load off her mind.'

Not everyone took the issue seriously. One senior civil servant has added to the file: 'Not to be confused with the Browne-Windsors.'

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