It’s also a place. The Prince of Wales is, on some formal level, the feudal lord of the Principality of Wales.
In medieval and renaissance literature royals and nobles are often referred to by their fiefs.
“York and Scotland played cards in the kitchen, while France got drunk and passed out in the corner, and Sweden made a pass at Poland’s wife.”
This is contentious. The last native Prince of Wales was killed in the 13th century; the title was re-created, but none of the post-conquest princes of Wales have had any real role as a feudal lord over the whole principality. They do have property there, and earn income from it, so there is a sense in which they are Welsh feudal lords (and the last few have been positive presences in Wales), but feudal lords of Wales is more difficult to argue.
And early modern fiction. In the original Dracula, novel, after Arthur Holmwood’s father dies, he inherits his father’s peerage and Stoker switches to referring to him as Lord Godalming.
You see this in Shakespeare, as well. In Hamlet, they talk about “old Norway,” which means the elderly King of Norway.
Sorta akin to referring to the US government as “Washington” or the UK government as “London”. E.g. London today issued an urgent plea to halt the fighting in Slobovistan.
“Metonym” is the term of art.
Yeah, sorta. But it’s a highly qualified sorta in England. The further you go forward in history the less tied titles are to property and rights in said place. Sometimes this happened very early - when Aubrey de Vere was granted the title of Earl of Oxford in 12th century England he owned not a single acre of land in the county and had zero real rights there other than the one small administrative boon. The right to the ‘third penny’ was supposed to be one third of the judicial revenue of the shire, which in practice didn’t amount to much. Rather than bother to calculate it out to the penny, instead it was soon just converted into a set payment from the exchequer each year - usually standardized at the the munificent sum of £15/yr (£20 for a huge county like Lincolnshire). The title was the goal as a token of prestige. Otherwise it was pretty meaningless in of itself unless you held a palatinate like Cheshire or later Lancashire.
Less silly when the whole English tradition is using “last name” as the identifier. Even at my declasse Australian lower-middle class high school, all of my friends, and many of the others, used our ‘last name’. So if your current name is “Fred, Duke of Kalamazoo”, then of course your friends are just going to call you “Kalamazoo”
(And it’s not an immortal personification any more than any other family name is. It’s just a name.)
Trump is apparently planning to tell HRH that he shouldn’t have control of the Falklands.
I’m sure HRH and the UK government have something appropriate prepared to deliver with their patented withering contempt.
And rightly so.
Trump really doesn’t know what the King does, does he? Here’s a hint, Mr. Trump: the King does not govern, much less “have control” of any of his realms and territories.
Probably not.