(They rejected an alternative translation, "Battenhill".) Their cousin George V compensated the princes with British peerages. Due to anti-German feelings prevalent in Britain during World War I, Prince Louis, his children, and his nephews (the living sons of Prince Henry), renounced their German titles and changed their name to the more English sounding Mountbatten.
Prince Louis married Victoria's granddaughter, Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, and became the First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy. Prince Henry married The Princess Beatrice, the youngest daughter of Queen Victoria. Two of Alexander and Julia's sons, Prince Henry of Battenberg and Prince Louis of Battenberg, became associated with the British Royal Family. Julia was elevated in her title to Princess of Battenberg with the style Serene Highness (HSH) in 1858.
The first member of the House of Battenberg was Julia Hauke, whose brother-in-law Grand Duke Louis III of Hesse created her Countess of Battenberg with the style Illustrious Highness (HIllH) in 1851, on the occasion of her morganatic marriage to Grand Duke Louis' brother Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine. The Battenberg family was a morganatic branch of the House of Hesse-Darmstadt, rulers of the Grand Duchy of Hesse in Germany. The Mountbatten family are a branch of the German house of Battenberg. Lady Louise Mountbatten became Queen consort of Sweden after her husband King Gustaf VI Adolf ascended the Swedish throne 1950. The late Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, consort of Queen Elizabeth II, adopted the surname of Mountbatten from his mother's family in 1947, being a member of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg by patrilineal descent. The family includes the Marquesses of Milford Haven (and formerly the Marquesses of Carisbrooke), as well as the Earls Mountbatten of Burma. The titles of count and later prince of Battenberg had been granted in the mid-19th century to a morganatic branch of the House of Hesse-Darmstadt, itself a cadet branch of the House of Hesse. The name is a direct Anglicisation of the German Battenberg, or Batten mountain, the name of a small town in Hesse. The name was adopted on 14 July 1917, three days before the British royal family changed its name from " Saxe-Coburg and Gotha" to " Windsor", by members of the Battenberg family residing in the United Kingdom, due to rising anti-German sentiment among the British public during World War I. The Mountbatten family is a British dynasty that originated as a British branch of the German princely Battenberg family.