Charles and Camilla Asked Kate to Change the Spelling of Her Name Because They Thought Too Many Royal C’s Was “Overkill”

The request came before the 2011 wedding, and it left Prince William fuming. He called it “insulting” to Kate and her whole family, and refused on her behalf.

Her legal first name is Catherine Elizabeth Middleton. The nickname everyone has used her whole life, including the press and the public, is Kate. After marrying William she became Catherine, Princess of Wales, which is the formal style the palace uses on official documents, stationery, and royal cyphers.

That formal Catherine is what Charles and Camilla asked her to respell as Katherine before the 2011 wedding, so the royal cypher wouldn’t add a third C to the family’s monograms, according to Christopher Andersen’s new biography Kate! The Courage, Grace, and Power of the Woman Who Will Be Queen.

Charles and Camilla each already had an interlocking-C monogram beneath a crown, and Andersen writes they saw a third C cypher as “overkill.” William, Andersen says, took it as “yet another command from on high essentially aimed at placating Camilla” and pushed back to his father directly.

The nickname Kate was never the issue, because it’s not what the palace puts on cyphers and stationery. The formal Catherine was, and broadcaster Helena Chard called the concern a “nonstarter” and a “lost cause” that “wasn’t important enough to cause a fight.” Catherine stuck. Her official cypher is still a C beneath a coronet.

Andersen traces the fight back to William’s protectiveness, which he says started when the two met as students at Scotland’s University of St Andrews in the early 2000s. William proposed in 2010 and they married in 2011. Andersen also points to 2012, when topless photos of Kate sunbathing were published in France and William “angrily ordered Palace lawyers to sue.”

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