Touching tribute to a colossus of the empire cruelly cut down by IRA
SO after all the waiting, all the hints and all the wouldbe clues, tradition ran out the winner in the royal baby name stakes.
In naming their son Louis Arthur Charles, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have settled a considerable royal heritage on the fifth in line to the throne.
And in choosing to give the infant prince a name that their eldest son George has as one of his middle names already, William and Kate have stuck firmly to the conventions of an eccentric royal parlour game.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was that, despite all the talk suggesting William would be honouring his paternal grandfather with his new son, the name Philip did not feature.
What we can be sure of is that both he and Kate really do like the three names they have chosen. For if there is one thing we have learned about this couple, it’s that they do things their way.
No one will be more moved by the choice of names than the Prince of Wales. His grandson will not only carry Charles as one of his middle names, but in choosing Louis, Prince William is honouring the memory of his father’s beloved great-uncle, Earl Mountbatten of Burma.
In picking Louis – pronounced Lou-ey not Lew-is – William and Kate appear to be following long-established royal custom. William himself has Louis as a middle name, as does Prince Edward.
But while Louis has a dashing and romantic ring to it, feelings towards Lord Mountbatten from within the Royal Family were mixed to say the least.
Prince William never knew the man whom his father referred to as ‘my honorary grandfather’.
He was murdered in 1979, three years before the prince’s birth, but William was brought up knowing the legend of his life and of his violent death at the hands of the IRA.
After seeing action as a midshipman in the First World War, he rose to become Admiral of the Fleet, First Sea Lord and last Viceroy of India.
And by the most judicious of marriages, he acquired the finances to support himself in a manner appropriate to his position. His wife, Edwina, was granddaughter of the financier Sir Ernest Cassel and probably the richest heiress in the whole of Europe.
HIS aggrandisement did not stop there. In 1947, he married off his nephew Philip to Princess Elizabeth, now our Queen – and had it not been for the last-minute intervention of Sir Winston Churchill, who vetoed the very suggestion, we would now be ruled not by the House of Windsor but by the House of Mountbatten.
But as the last Viceroy was fond of pointing out, it is his bloodline that flows through the royal veins.
His ambitions were blown to shreds by an IRA bomb on August 27, 1979. He was on holiday in Ireland with his family, and they had gone out to collect lobster pots. The bomb on his boat was detonated by remote control. Lord Mountbatten was killed instantly.
Also killed in the explosion was his 14-year-old grandson, Nicholas. The boy’s twin brother, Timothy, lost the sight in one eye.
Their mother – Mountbatten’s daughter Patricia, who inherited his title – required 120 stitches in her face.
Patricia’s mother- in- law, the Dowager Lady Brabourne, died of her injuries the following day. All the honours in the world could never compensate for this.
Lord Louis remained a controversial figure in British public life. In the Sixties and Seventies he was implicated in alleged military plots to overthrow former Labour prime minister Harold Wilson.
It is unlikely William knows much about this aspect of the man whose name he has chosen for his second son. Or that Mountbatten’s wife was a voracious sexual adventuress who was said to have had an affair with India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
The Queen Mother did not trust him. After her husband’s death, she resented the way he inserted himself into the life of the Queen and Prince Philip as a mentoring figure. It is ironic that the two pivotal influences in Prince Charles’s life, Mountbatten and the Queen Mother, did not get along. For William, Louis also represents a nod to his late mother’s Spencer family. In 1994 Princess Diana’s brother Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer, named his son and heir Louis.
The choice of the new prince’s second name, Arthur, is even more traditionally royal. One of the favourites with the bookies, it is a middle name for both William and Charles, and was also one of the names of the Queen’s father, King George VI. It was the first name of one of Queen Victoria’s sons, the Duke of Connaught, an archetypal and obscure minor royal who served as an Army officer for decades before ending up as Governor General of Canada.
By choosing a third name of Charles, William has ensured that his children’s paternal grandparents have both been recognised in their nuclear family.
Three-year- old Princess Charlotte has Diana as a middle name.
‘The names are a very charming choice, but there is a very Englishness to them,’ says historian Robert Lacey.
‘It’s surprising that there is no nod to Scotland, or particularly Wales, as William will one day become Prince of Wales.’
Perhaps most intriguing of all is the merry-go-round of names that feature. Louis shares two names with grandfather Charles, one with his father, one with his uncle Harry, one with his great uncle Edward and even one with his royal cousin David, Earl of Snowdon.
Again and again you see the same names bestowed on members of the royal family.
Prince Harry and Prince Andrew – both second sons – have Albert, for example.
There is one other question concerning the new prince, of course. The names of George and Charlotte were publicised within two days of their birth in 2013 and 2015 respectfully.
So the fact that with Louis it took William and Kate twice as long to issue them will doubtless fuel rumours that the couple may have been expecting a girl – and had not prepared male names.