By Richard Magat

Editor's note:  Richard Magat is a longtime columnist for MyhometownBronxville. His new beat is Manhattan, where he now lives.

Jun. 3, 2015:  Princess Charlotte of Cambridge, the latest addition to Britain's royal family, born May 2, will have to wait a long time before becoming head of the realm. The throne will go first to her grandfather, then to her father, Prince William, and thence to her older brother, Prince George, who was born two years earlier.

The House of Windsor, especially the Queen Mother, Elizabeth II, is enormously popular among the English and even among many Americans. It was not always thus. One of the new baby's predecessors, Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was married (1761) to the notorious King George III, the man (perhaps next to George Washington) responsible for the American Revolution.

The latest British birth of note eclipsed an earlier chapter in English history. Just two months earlier, in Leicester, a ceremony of remembrance was staged for the reburial of one of the most bloodstained medieval sovereigns, King Richard III, who was slain in battle seven years before Columbus sailed for the New World.

Thousands lined up to witness the removal of Richard's bones from the Leicester cathedral to what prelates called his final resting place. They had been tossed in an ignominious grave after his defeat in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. In an exercise of astonishing archaeology, his nearly complete skeleton was confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt. Despite the efforts of thousands who sought to rehabilitate Richard, he was vilified in history and dramatized by Shakespeare as the killer of two young brothers in a struggle for the throne. The reburial was an act of forgiveness by the current Archbishop of Canterbury.

I doubt that my parents, immigrants from Eastern Europe, knew of Bosworth Field when they named me Richard. Nonetheless, some Anglo-Saxon echoes must have sounded, because they named my younger brother Edmund, an artifact of Old English.  

My own opportunity for creative naming came with the birth of my daughter Claudia. Claudia is far from an uncommon name, but Juneau is, and that is what we gave her as a middle name, since she was born June 30, 1958, the day Alaska was admitted to the Union. When she was old enough to realize how we had afflicted her, she switched to Juno, the Greek goddess.

That should have ended the family's name-changing instincts, but one of my grandsons, Dylan Keenan, took up the challenge. Accepted to Yale Law School, he discovered that one of his classmates was a David Keenan. To avoid possible confusion, Dylan added "O" as his middle name. That was a further note of nomenclature, since he had been given the name Dylan because of my daughter's affection for the writing of Dylan Thomas.

Photo by N. Bower