Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor. This may be a bit of a mouthful, but the first name—already shortened by some to Arch—has already earned the newborn a reasonable share of online fame
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but a prince? Well, he would still be royal, presumably. If he is the son of Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle and Britain’s Prince Harry, then he might grow up having to contend with images popping into people’s minds of a red-haired teenager in a love triangle with a blonde and a brunette and with no help on matters of romance from a gender-agnostic buddy who’d rather chomp hamburgers than chase girls. That, it would seem, is what the baby born to the royal couple is destined for, going by the global twitterati’s response to the little fella’s name: Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor. This may be a bit of a mouthful, but the first name—already shortened by some to Arch—has already earned the newborn a reasonable share of online fame.
Meghan, of course, was born and brought up American, so few expected her son’s name to be too British, at least not in the stuff upper-lip sense. With Archie, the House of Windsor appears to have thrown its lot in with the sort of Californian coolness we associate with Riverdale, a mythical town that characters in Archie Comics inhabit. This, no doubt, is not just good trans-Atlantic public relations, it also sets the child up for potential popularity in places such as India, where Archie’s grandfather Prince Charles stock has never been too high, thanks in part to an air of superciliousness on visits here. Not everyone has forgotten Charles’s rude-if-not-baseless deduction about a jumble of wires looking like an Indian job.
Some Britons want the British crown to bypass Charles and land on Harry’s head. Indians might want to cheer for that honour—if that’s what it is—going straight to little Archie instead. With or without a Jughead as his best friend, he can’t possibly be an uptight sort of lad with a name like that, can he?
