On July 15, 1996, in a shabby little room at Court Number One, Somerset House, it took all of three minutes to dissolve the marriage of the century. H.R.H. the Prince of Wales and H.R.H. the Princess of Wales, neither of whom was present, were listed as Couple No. 31. Somerset House is less than a mile from St. Paul's Cathedral, where, on another July day, a dashing prince had waited at the altar for the shyly smiling 20-year-old bride in the billowing ivory taffeta wedding dress.
The divorce deal had been sealed mainly on the terms Diana had asked for. Those terms included: the lump sum of £17 million ($26 million), £400,000 ($625,000) annually for Diana's office, and Diana to be known as Diana, Princess of Wales, without the designation H.R.H. Diana had made one last attempt to salvage the H.R.H. before the decree, appealing to Sir Robert Fellowes, her brother-in-law, who was Queen Elizabeth's private secretary. On behalf of the sovereign, he declined the request. For Diana, her son William's response was the one that mattered. "Don't worry, Mummy," he told her when he learned that she was upset that she no longer had the title. "I will give it back to you one day, when I am king."
Diana got to keep her residence and have her office at Kensington Palace. She was not prohibited from a public role—that would be "for her to decide"—though her foreign trips, unless they were private holidays, would have to be signed off on by the Foreign Office and the Queen.
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