NEED TO KNOW
- Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis are back in the classroom, but they don’t go by their royal titles at school
- The siblings follow an informal tradition within the royal family when it comes to what they’re called in the classroom
- Prince William used the same last name when he was in school and the military
Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis are off to a new school year, but they won’t be using their royal titles in the classroom.
Prince William and Kate Middleton‘s three children are known to their teachers and friends at school as George Wales, Charlotte Wales and Louis Wales, with the surname taken from their parents’ titles as the Prince and Princess of Wales.
Though the children all received prince or princess titles and His or Her Royal Highness styling at birth, going by their first name and the surname of Wales is a more informal address that allows them to blend in with the student body.
When a last name is necessary, it’s tradition within the royal family for children to use their parents’ titles as the basis for their last name. Prince William and Prince Harry were similarly called William Wales and Harry Wales while at school and in the military, as their father, the future King Charles, was then the Prince of Wales.
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Mark Cuthbert/UK Press via Getty
However, Prince George, 12, Princess Charlotte, 10, and Prince Louis, 7, didn’t always go by the last name of Wales in the classroom. Queen Elizabeth made William and Kate the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge when they wed in 2011, and the couple’s children were previously called George Cambridge, Charlotte Cambridge and Louis Cambridge at school.
When Prince George started school at Thomas’s Battersea in September 2017, a close look at the name tag on his backpack showed said “George Cambridge.”
They adopted the Wales name upon King Charles’ accession to the throne in 2022, when William became the Prince of Wales as the new heir.
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RICHARD POHLE/AFP/Getty Images
Last names are a bit tricky within the British royal family, and in 1960, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip decided that their direct descendants would have the last name of Mountbatten-Windsor. The royal couple tacked “Mountbatten” onto the British royal family’s official surname of Windsor, which was adopted by King George V in 1917.
However, it became a custom within the family for later generations of children with royal titles to use their parents’ titles as the inspiration for their surname. As Prince William was called William Wales, his cousins, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, used York as their last name as their father, Prince Andrew, is the Duke of York.
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Similarly, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are using their Duke and Duchess of Sussex titles as the inspiration for the surname of their children, Prince Archie, 6, and Princess Lilibet, 4.
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Meghan Markle /Instagram
PEOPLE confirmed in 2024 that Prince Harry and Meghan were using Sussex for Archie and Lilibet’s last name.
“It’s our shared name as a family, and I guess I hadn’t recognized how meaningful that would be to me until we had children,” the Duchess of Sussex told PEOPLE in an exclusive interview this year.
“I love that that is something that Archie, Lili, H and I all have together. It means a lot to me,” she said.
