On 12 July, the King of Spain, Felipe VI, began a three-day State visit. There was comment in The Times about his family connections with our royals. A reader wrote in with some little-known details which were included in the paper’s Feedback column on 15 July, along with the following: ‘Lord Lexden, who is never wrong on matters royal, wrote with a novel suggestion. “You say the Spanish tradition is to translate the names of foreign royals [hence, el principe de Gales, Guillermo and Catalina]. It used to be our tradition too. Could we not have greeted the Spanish monarch as Philip VI? After all his forebear, King Consort of England from 1554 to 1558 as the husband of Mary Tudor, is in all our history books as Philip II”. And in the archive of The Times. In fact, until relatively recently, we anglicised more or less all foreign royals’. There was, however, no indication that there would be a return to that practice.