Calling him “Andrew Mountbatten Windsor” is not exactly hiding him in plain sight. It’s still pretty much an attention-seeking handle, not one of those “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch your name” kind of names, such as Clive Bland or Sue Twea. In these glorious days of DEI, he could have chosen either. The real point about the “Mountbatten Windsor” confection is that it is still a royal title, not a proper name.
Nobody in the world was called Mountbatten Windsor before the Great Unpleasantess, 1914-18. However, it was only in 1917 that Windsor was concocted as a cover for the British royal famiy’s territorial title, Haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha. (It is as fake as “Eamon de Valera”: real name, George Coll). But possibly George V chose it because it sounded so quintessential to his throne: just four Shakespeare plays have placenames in their titles, and “Windsor” is the only English one, as in The Merry Wives of….” Also, the removal of that last bit of Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha was a way of disassociating the inhabitants of Buckingham Palace from the Gotha bombers that were nightly blowing the bejasus out of London.
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