The incident was first shared to the public when Prince Harry released his memoir, Spare.
In the book, Harry recalled a conversation prior to William and Kate’s 2011 wedding, in which Charles and Camilla allegedly suggested changing the spelling of Kate’s full name, Catherine, to start with a K instead of a C.
The reason for this was said to be that there were already too many royal monograms using the letter C.
“There were already two royal cyphers with a C and a crown above: Charles and Camilla. It would be too confusing to have another. Make it Katherine with a K, they suggested,” the Prince of Sussex penned.
“I turned to Willy, gave him a look that said ‘You listening to this?’ His face was blank.”
A royal showdown
The alleged incident was recently brought into the spotlight once again, following the release of royal biographer Christopher Andersen’s new book, Kate! The Courage, Grace and Power of the Woman Who Will Be Queen.
After speaking to palace sources, Andersen provided a lot more detail around both William and Kate’s reactions to the bizarre request.
Much like Harry’s account, the author writes that the issue came up in the months leading to William and Kate’s wedding, with Charles and Camilla suggesting that three senior royals with the same royal cypher might be ‘overkill’.
The book claims that the suggestion was put forward from a practical point of view given that Kate was already known by her nickname and therefore changing her formal name wouldn’t make too much difference.
“‘Would Kate mind if she changed the spelling of her full name from Catherine to Katherine?’ Camilla pointed out that such a change also made sense on the grounds that, to most of the world, she was known simply as Kate,” it reads.
However, it seems Kate did not feel it was a practical move and in fact felt ‘offended’ by being asked to change something so deeply personal, Andersen claims.
William, meanwhile, was said to be ‘fuming’ at the suggestion and said it was ‘insulting, not only to Kate but to her entire family’.
Andersen wrote: “Offended by yet another command essentially aimed at placating Camilla, a fuming William replied on his wife’s behalf.
“The request was nothing less than ‘insulting,’ he told his father, not only to Kate but to her entire family. The bizarre suggestion that ‘Catherine’ become ‘Katherine’ simply to make Charles and Camilla happy was summarily dropped.”
Rift between Camilla and Kate
Many royal biographies claim Kate and Camilla’s relationship started on the back foot, after the Queen Consort allegedly opposed their romance due to Kate not coming from an aristocratic background.
“In the beginning, Camilla was one of Kate’s fiercest critics,” Andersen told Fox News. “She did not think she was up to snuff, as it were. She was below the salt. She had no aristocratic blood.”
He continued: “Camilla always saw herself as the mistress of a king, not a queen. And she picked Diana to be Charles’ bride.
“So, she was very cognizant of the fact that a future king of England should have, she believed, a marriage to a royal personage, or at least a British aristocrat.
“Kate was none of those things, but she quickly became popular.”
People have often questioned whether it was this criticism that led to William’s delay in proposing to Kate, which earned her the unfortunate nickname ‘Waity Katie’ among the British press.
However, many believe that Kate and Camilla were able to finally put any possible tensions between them to bed in 2022, when the Princess of Wales photographed the Queen Consort for the cover of Country Life magazine to mark her 75th birthday.