Buckingham Palace is reconsidering how to style ex-Prince Andrew’s name, and he may get a hyphen between Mountbatten and Windsor in accordance with the late Queen Elizabeth’s wishes.
Currently known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, a hyphen will be no consolation for all the titles he’s had to give up because of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein: the Duke of York, the Earl of Inverness, the Baron Killyleagh—not to mention the His Royal Highness styling—and a whole tray of glittering extras besides: Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, Honorary Air Commodore of RAF Lossiemouth, Commodore-in-Chief of the Fleet Air Arm, and a small library of once-coveted patronages now filed under “former.”
Although he wanted the non-hyphenated version of his mysterious new title known as a “surname,” insiders have told the London Times that the Palace is having second thoughts after realizing that Elizabeth II decreed her family surname be written “Mountbatten-Windsor.”
Two weeks before Andrew’s birth, Elizabeth published a notice in The London Gazette which read: “Now therefore I declare My Will and Pleasure that, while I and My children shall continue to be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor, My descendants other than descendants enjoying the style, title or attribute of Royal Highness and the titular dignity of Prince or Princess and female descendants who marry and their descendants shall bear the name of Mountbatten-Windsor.”
The name was designed to placate Elizabeth’s Greek-born husband Prince Philip, who had taken the name Mountbatten from his mother’s family and apparently complained that he was “the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children,” which made him “nothing but a bloody amoeba.”
The 1960 declaration made Andrew the first royal baby officially filed under the surname Mountbatten-Windsor. Now that he’s shed both “Prince” and his HRH, some experts say it’s time to follow his mother’s decree to the letter—and the hyphen.
Ian Lloyd, a royal historian, told the Times he was surprised the Palace ever printed Andrew’s name without that tiny dash, given both precedent and the late queen’s precise wording.
The hyphen isn’t rare in royal paperwork. Princess Anne’s 1973 marriage certificate spells her out in full—Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise Mountbatten-Windsor, a Princess of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor got the same treatment on his 2019 birth certificate.
Punctuation, however, is not always a courtly virtue. Even among the aristocracy, hyphens tend to flit in and out like footmen at a far door—subject to tradition, taste, or the cruel margins of a form. The late Queen Mother was Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon on formal documents, yet newspapers often ditched the hyphen. Andrew Parker Bowles and Helena Bonham Carter skip it altogether, and Andrew Lloyd Webber never invited one in the first place.
Mountbatten-Windsor is different: it’s not a branding choice but a royal instruction. Palace sources suggest Buckingham Palace may now settle the matter by using the hyphenated form for Andrew henceforth—proof that sometimes paperwork shouldn’t be done in too much of a dash.
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