A London historian of nineteenth-century Indian politics reads about Prince William’s three number plates and remembers when a royal title was ordered like a registration
Saturday, 17 October 2026. Hampstead. My study, which is also my spare room, which is also where the laundry dries, a stack of books on the Raj and a cup of masala chai, 10.00am.
A Royal Who Wanted A New Label
I spent my doctorate on the politics of British India in the second half of the nineteenth century, which means I have read more parliamentary debates about royal titles than any person should. So when I read the London Prat report on Prince William’s three personalised number plates, I recognised the genre immediately. NOTYET on an Aston Martin. NOTHARRY on a Range Rover. DISTASTEFUL on a Bentley. A royal deciding how he would like to be labelled, in public, by everyone who passes.
Queen Victoria did exactly this in 1876, though she used Parliament rather than the DVLA. She wanted a new title. Specifically, she wanted to be Empress of India. Disraeli, who understood her better than anyone, steered the Royal Titles Act through Parliament that year. The debate was fierce. Critics complained the word Empress was foreign, flashy and un-English. Victoria did not care. On the first day of 1877, at a vast assembly at Delhi organised by the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, she was proclaimed Empress of India in absentia, with princes, elephants and a great deal of very expensive tent.
A Title Is A Number Plate With An Army
The report says palace officials held a seven-month consultation involving twelve courtiers, four constitutional historians, two psychologists and a man who once washed Prince Philip’s Land Rover before approving the plates. That is, in fairness, a shorter process than the Royal Titles Act. But the principle is identical. A royal wants the world to read their personality from a label. Victoria’s label was EMPRESS. William’s is DISTASTEFUL. Victoria’s came with an army. William’s comes with heated seats.
What fascinates me, as a historian of Indian politics, is how differently the label was read in India. In London, the title was argued about as vanity. In India, many of the educated professionals who would go on to found nationalist politics read it as a statement about power: whose country this was, and who had decided. Labels are never just labels. They are claims. NOTYET is a claim too, about patience and inheritance. Every title tells you who is waiting for what.
The Nineteenth-Century Range Rover
The Range Rover in the report, with its satnav that excludes Montecito and its radio that changes station whenever anyone mentions Harry and Meghan, reminded me of the way Victorian officials in India travelled. A Viceroy’s progress through the country was an enormous procession of carriages, horses, servants and tents, carefully routed to avoid anything inconvenient: famine districts, angry towns, newspaper editors in Calcutta. The satnav, in other words, is an old imperial technology. It just used to be a man on a horse riding ahead to tell everyone to look cheerful.
The Queen’s Private Joke
The detail in the report I found most charming was the late Queen’s private motoring joke, MYT 1, which a former royal butler believes nodded to the Most Mighty in her title. I like this because it shows a monarch with a sense of humour about her own grandeur. Victoria, by contrast, was not known for jokes about her titles. She took Empress very seriously and signed herself with the letters R and I, Regina et Imperatrix, Queen and Empress, until the end of her life. Elizabeth put Most Mighty on a number plate and kept it for the family. That is the difference between the nineteenth century and the twentieth in a single registration.
My Own Diary, And What I Write About
For anyone who has wandered in, my diary pages are where I write about Indian political history, current affairs and the royal family, often all three in the same paragraph, because the past has a habit of turning up in the present wearing a different coat. This week, it turned up wearing a Bentley.
There is one more parallel worth noting. Victoria never once visited India. She ruled it as Empress for twenty-four years, learned some Hindustani late in life from her Indian secretary, Abdul Karim, and filled Osborne House with Indian design, including a Durbar Room built in the 1890s. But she never went. Her title travelled. She did not. In that sense, she was the original NOTYET. A monarch forever about to arrive somewhere, in a carriage that never left the island. William, at least, has an Aston Martin that leaves the garage. That is progress of a kind.
A Fourth Plate
The report lists further plates the Prince might consider: MYTURN, ASKDAD, NOJAM, STILLMAD, WRONGTIE. I would like to propose one from the archive: RANDI, short for Regina et Imperatrix, which would be historically accurate, royally precise and, I have just realised, completely unprintable on a modern car. That is perhaps the most important lesson of nineteenth-century history. Every grand title eventually becomes something nobody can say out loud.
The chai is cold. The laundry is dry. The books on the Raj are open at the Delhi assembly of 1877, with its elephants and princes. Somewhere on the M4, a man is waiting in an Aston Martin. Some things, it turns out, have changed a great deal. The waiting has not.