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Now therefore I declare my Will and Pleasure… 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 female descendants who
marry and their descendants, shall bear the name Mountbatten-Windsor…
It concluded:
The Queen has always wanted, without changing the name of the Royal House established by her
grandfather, to associate the name of her husband with her own and his descendants. The Queen has had this
in mind for a long time and it is close to her heart…
The Mountbatten-Windsor name change episode is clouded in confusion. On 27
January 1960 Rab Butler, acting as Deputy Prime Minister as Macmillan was absent on
his ‘winds of change’ tour of southern Africa, telegraphed the Prime Minister reporting a
conversation he had had with Elizabeth:
I have this weekend apprehended what was on foot at the Palace. The Lord Chancellor rang me in
Gloucestershire on Saturday afternoon and from the parables I was able to understand that a change of name
was envisaged for the children… today the situation was made clear by a talk with the Queen… She clearly
indicated that the 1952 decisions [re keeping the family name of Windsor] had been reached, and that she
accepted them, but she did not indicate that she accepted them in spirit. She stressed that Prince Philip did
not know of the present decision, on which she absolutely set her heart. 23
Macmillan had been at Sandringham to see the Queen after Christmas and discussed
the subject with her then (although he had not seen fit to tell Butler anything about it).
According to his biographer, Alastair Home, Macmillan ‘liked to make a good story’ out
of meeting the Duke of Gloucester there: ‘greatly disturbed. “Thank Heavens you’ve
come, Prime Minister. The Queen’s in a terrible state; there’s a fellow called Jones in the
billiard room who wants to marry her sister, and Prince Philip’s in the library wanting
to change the family name to Mountbatten…”’ And, according to a source close to
Butler, at the time he said privately that when he discussed the question with Elizabeth,
‘it was the first time he had seen the Queen in tears’.
It seems likely that, whatever Elizabeth may have diplomatically told Butler, there
had been some heavy lobbying from Mountbatten and Philip, just as there had been in
1952. Elizabeth still stood by the original decision not to substitute ‘Mountbatten’ for
‘Windsor’. What she was prepared to do was not to change the name of the royal family
as such, which was to remain the House of Windsor, but only to give a surname to more
distant descendants who, not being Royal Highnesses, would need one. It was not
conceding what Mountbatten and Philip had wanted in 1952, but it was a symbolic
gesture in that direction and would mean that Philip’s name would appear as the name
of some at least of his descendants. Macmillan claimed the credit for the compromise
‘Mountbatten-Windsor’, predicting (wrongly as it turned out) that, as in the case of
Spencer-Churchill, the first part of the double barrel would quickly be dropped. One of
the royal aides at the time, however, remembers that the name was a solution put