Princess Charlotte could still define herself as a Diana
Like Victoria, the baby Princess could take up another of her names – perhaps as Queen
Queen Diana?: The Duchess of Cambridge cradles the new Princess outside the Lindo Wing Photo: PA
By
Christopher Howse
06 May 2015
The Telegraph
24 Comments
One of the sillier suggestions for a name for the Cambridges’ baby was Fatima. It was meant to be a cross-cultural gesture to the Muslim world, since the Princess, like the Queen, counts Mohammed and his daughter among their ancestors.
The lines of descent from Fatima have their hiccups, but a closer Fatima is found among little
Charlotte’s collateral ancestry. Fatima was the name by which Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King George III and Queen Charlotte, was known in the family. One fears the sobriquet was unkindly chosen because the princess was stout.
She managed to make a marriage only at the age of 48 to an unprepossessing German, Prince Friedrich of Hesse-Homburg. But the marriage turned out happily, the couple having a lovely time rebuilding their castles.
Fatty Fatima was sandwiched between three Charlottes, her mother, sister and niece. There is much to be said about Queen Charlotte,
some of it marshalled by the estimable Tom Rowley. But there is no reason why little Charlotte need use her first name when she gets bigger. After all, Queen Charlotte’s first baptismal name was Sophie.
But before turning to the baby’s other names, it is worth noting that the claim that Charlotte means “little” in French is misleading. It means “sun hat” if anything, though that is a later development, just as apple Charlotte is in English.
No, Charlotte is a feminine diminutive, rather than meaning “diminutive”, and comes from Charles, which in its Germanic root means “free man”, related to churl (which has changed meaning from a man who is not a noble to a man who is ignoble). Mary Queen of Scots brought the name to Britain, with a second wave of popularity among sympathisers for the Jacobites’ darling Charlies.
As for Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, the world, aching to be told the new baby’s name, did not in fact have to wait all that long – a couple of days. By comparison, the future Queen Victoria’s names had not been decided even at her christening, a full month after her birth. Her parents wanted her to be called Victoire Georgiana Alexandrina Charlotte Augusta, but her uncle the Prince Regent (shortly to become King George IV) was having none of it. He vetoed Georgiana the night before the christening, and next day, as the Archbishop of Canterbury stood at the golden font in Kensington Palace, babe in his arms, the Prince Regent growled Alexandrina. Prompted next with the name Charlotte, the Prince shook his head – his own daughter Charlotte had died but 18 months earlier. “Let her be called after her mother,” he barked. So Alexandrina Victoria it was, and Drina, for short, she was called for the next nine years.
Alexandrina was Victoria's Christian name, but she decided to use her middle name Victoria as her regnal name when she ascended the throne in 1837
Uncontroversially, Elizabeth is deeply rooted in royal tradition. The Queen’s mother was Elizabeth, and it was a name borne by her paternal grandmother Queen Mary’s mother. When the present Queen acceded to the throne, there was talk of a New Elizabethan Age, harking back to the cultural triumphs of Elizabeth I’s reign. The name is biblical, of course (spelled Elisabeth in the Authorised Version), but I’m not sure how widely its meaning is realised: “God is my oath.”
By contrast, Diana, apart from its unmissable reference to Diana, Princess of Wales, is not notable for its royal associations and is not a biblical name. Its pagan status (as the name of Diana of the Ephesians, for example, St Paul’s enemy) made some clergymen of former times resist it as a baptismal name. But in England, Diana became popular in the late 19th century.
If Princess Charlotte one day becomes Queen, she would either be Queen Charlotte; Queen Elizabeth III; or Queen Diana
It gained a spur in 1885 from George Meredith, who made it the name of the heroine of his novel Diana of the Crossways. Of marriage, she declared: “We women are the verbs passive of the alliance; we have to learn, and if we take to activity, with the best intentions, we conjugate a frightful disturbance.” This she proceeded to do, causing a scandal and alienating her husband. It is not a novel much read now.
If not among royalty, in the aristocracy Diana figured proudly. Lady Diana Cooper, born 1892, the putative daughter of the Marquess of Granby, lived up to the image of a goddess of the Moon and huntress of the night. Diana Mitford, born 1910, a daughter of Lord Redesdale, a beauty and a wit, if an admirer of Hitler, settled at last in exile in a classical château called La Temple de la Gloire.
Only if her brother George has no children will Princess Charlotte become Queen. Queen Charlotte, Queen Elizabeth III or Queen Diana? Could the classical name Diana make it after all? We forget that the classical, pagan name Victoria seemed odd for a queen, until its holder imposed it on a whole era. What would it be like to live in the Dianan era taking us into the 22nd century?
Princess Charlotte could still define herself as a Diana - Telegraph
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