An overjoyed Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are the proud parents of a healthy baby boy, and the nation celebrates the birth of a future king.
The couple’s son weighed 8lb 6oz and was delivered at 4.24pm today at the private Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington with his proud father, Prince William, looking on.
Her Royal Highness and her child are both doing well and will remain in hospital overnight, said a spokesman for the palace.
The long-awaited baby will be given the title His Royal Highness and be known as Prince of Cambridge, after the Queen moved earlier this year to change almost a century of royal tradition.
She issued a formal proclamation in January to end a convention brought in by George V which meant that a royal title was restricted to the children of the sovereign and the children of the sovereign’s sons.
Fortunately for the Duchess, the birth of her baby boy was a much less crowded event that it has been in the past.
Historically the birth would have been attended by a slew of privy counsellors, government ministers and ladies-in-waiting, not least to ascertain there had been no switch of a prince at birth, a popular suspicion regarding James II’s son.
Queen Victoria formally banished the circus of attendants when the then Princess Mary gave birth to the future Edward VIII in 1894, declaring the presence of one cabinet minister would suffice.
Indeed when the Queen was born in her grandparents’ London home in Mayfair, only the then home secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks waited in the next room.
But by the time the Queen was due to give birth to her own son, Prince Charles, in 1948, she declared that the need to have any minister present was constitutionally unnecessary (making the 1936 birth of her cousin, Princess Alexandra, the last occasion this occurred).
The Home Secretary is now only required to notify certain officials including the Lord Mayor of London, while the Queen’s Private Secretary Sir Christopher Geidt will inform Governor Generals overseas.
It is believed that the Duchess fell pregnant last October, within days of returning home from the couple’s hugely successful Diamond Jubilee tour on behalf of the Queen to Asia and the South Pacific.
Sadly, however, the Duchess’s health was to take a turn for the worse less than eight weeks into her pregnancy when, on Monday December 3 last year, she was admitted to hospital suffering from a severe form of pregnancy-related sickness known as hyperemesis gravidarum.
The dramatic turn of events forced a reluctant St James’s Palace to make the news public far earlier than anyone – particularly William and Kate – would ever have wanted. At that early stage, even senior members of the royal family, including the Queen and Prince Charles, had not been informed.
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