Queen Elizabeth II Reportedly Furious Over Harry and Meghan ...

Shakespeare famously asked, “What's in a name?” a phrase so famous, it's practically a cliché. But to his fellow Britons, it's apparently still a worthy question, as the years-long controversy over how Prince Harry and Meghan Markle named their daughter continues to prove. Though Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor was born in 2021, arguments over her name continue, specifically if Queen Elizabeth II gave her blessing to the choice.

When Harry and Meghan announced the birth of Lilibet—nicknamed Lili—on June 4, 2021, they told the world that she was "named after her great-grandmother, Her Majesty The Queen, whose family nickname is Lilibet. Her middle name, Diana, was chosen to honor her beloved late grandmother, The Princess of Wales.” 

By then, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had broken with the royal family: as you might recall, the couple first announced that Meghan was pregnant with a girl during their bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey earlier that year. Despite that rift, Harry reached out to the monarch to request her permission to name the child after her, it was reported at the time. 

Her royal highness agreed and gave her blessing, royal sources said, though even then the name raised questions. “Harry and Meghan could have paid the Queen a far more dignified tribute by calling their daughter her great-grandmother’s proper name, Elizabeth,” the Queen’s biographer, Sally Bedell Smith, said then. 

“They would have been even better off calling the baby Diana Elizabeth. Nobody could possibly have objected to that. In fact, paying tribute to the baby’s late grandmother that way would have been widely applauded. I would expect the choice has not gone down well in royal circles. It’s lucky Harry and Meghan have said at the outset they will call their daughter ‘Lili.’”

However, luck is in the eye of the beholder. Days after the birth, “palace sources” told the BBC that neither Harry nor Meghan asked the queen for permission to name their daughter as they did. The Sussexes responded swiftly, saying via an attorney that "The duke spoke with his family in advance of the announcement—in fact, his grandmother was the first family member he called. During that conversation, he shared their hope of naming their daughter Lilibet in her honour. Had she not been supportive, they would not have used the name."

Any claims otherwise were “false and defamatory and should not be repeated,” the attorney's letter read. 

But despite that legal threat, the argument has continued. Though the royal website was updated in 2023 to include the child's name (“Princess Lilibet of Sussex," the be exact), author Robert Hardman says that staff inside the palace continue to chafe at the “blessing” claims.

In his new book, Charles III: New King. New Court. The Inside Story, Hardman writes (per Newsweek) that a staff member close to the late queen “recalled that Elizabeth II had been 'as angry as I'd ever seen her' in 2021 after the Sussexes announced that she had given them her blessing to call their baby daughter 'Lilibet', the Queen's childhood nickname.”

Like so many tense conversations between family members, it all seems to come down to how things were phrased. If both sides agree that there was, indeed, a phone call between Harry and the queen, one wonders: in that call, did Harry ask permission, or simply convey the information and wait for an objection? If so, perhaps that's where the confusion lies. 

According to Hardman, however, that confusion was cleared up within the family when the controversy first raged. “When the Sussexes tried to co-opt the Palace into propping up their version of events, they were rebuffed.

“Once again, it was a case of 'recollections may vary'—the late Queen's reaction to the Oprah Winfrey interview—as far as Her Majesty was concerned.”

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