When Queen Victoria died in 1901, Edward VII took his father Prince Albert’s dynastic name, and Britain’s royal house became Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. In March 1917 that name became a liability twice over: German Gotha G.IV bombers began crossing the Channel to bomb London, and on March 15 George V’s cousin Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. On July 17, 1917, George V proclaimed his family the House of Windsor, a name proposed by his private secretary Arthur Bigge, Lord Stamfordham, and in 1919 the Titles Deprivation Act stripped three German relatives of their British titles.
The surname fight returned after Princess Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten, born a prince of Greece and Denmark, whose adopted name was itself a 1917 anglicization of Battenberg. When Lord Mountbatten boasted in 1952 that the House of Mountbatten now reigned, Queen Mary and Winston Churchill pressed Elizabeth II to declare on April 9, 1952 that her house would remain Windsor. In 1960, after constitutional expert Edward Iwi warned of a badge of bastardy, she created the surname Mountbatten-Windsor for descendants without royal styles.
- Kaiser Wilhelm II joked that he looked forward to The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
- Windsor was taken from Windsor Castle in Berkshire for its thousand-year link to the monarchy.
- Philip complained he was nothing but a bloody amoeba, the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children.
- The 1960 decree came on February 8, 11 days before Prince Andrew was born.
- The Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster of 1931 turned empire into a Commonwealth sharing one monarch.
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