Baby Sussex has been named Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, and there might be a hidden meaning to the royal name.
It’s a boy! Okay, we’ve known it to be a boy for a few days now, but what we didn’t know was the new royal’s name. That was just disclosed yesterday on the official Windsor Instagram page, and thanks to a black-and-white photo with Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth, and both the Prince and Princess of Sussex, we now know that Harry and Meghan’s bouncing baby boy is named Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, long may he reign.
Although the odds of him actually reigning are pretty darned slim. Archie is seventh in line for the throne, which means there would have to be a royal massacre for him to even come close. This actually meant that Harry and Meghan had a lot more freedom when choosing Archie’s name than Prince William had with his progeny.
This might sound strange, but Archie is the 18th most popular name in England right now. In America, Archie is 1,182nd, which might be why the name sounds so bizarre to you, but it’d be the equivalent of picking “Oscar” or “Finn” for your own baby (although weird names are kinda “in” right now, so maybe that’s a bad example).
The point is that Archie is actually a trendy name in Britain, which tells us a lot about how Harry and Meghan plan to raise their child. "I take this name as a polite statement that royal trappings come second" for Harry and Meghan,” said Laura Wattenberg, author of The Baby Name Wizard: A Magical Method for Finding the Perfect Name for Your Baby, while speaking to LiveScience.
Consider Prince William and Kate Middleton’s children. Their firstborn, George Alexander Louis, shares a name with no less than six monarchs since the year 1714. Their second, Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, shares a name with Queen Elizabeth (and the current Elizabeth II), the late Princess Diana, and the current Prince Charles (since Charlotte as the feminine version of Charles).
Since Prince William’s children are far closer to the throne, there was quite a lot of pressure to choose names from the Windsor lineage. Harry and Meghan don’t have nearly as much pressure, so it was fine to pick a name that was a little more fashionable. We can safely assume that Harry and Meghan won’t let the trappings of royalty hold their little boy back from whoever he wants to be when he grows up.