Prince William’s Promise to Restore Diana’s Royal Title

Prince William was just 14 years old when his parents' marriage finally ended.

It was an extremely difficult time for any teenager, but going through it with the eyes of the world following every single development must have been unimaginably hard.

As well as all the normal divorce settlement business, Prince Charles and Diana had to work out what would happen with her royal titles.

The Queen was happy for her to keep the Her Royal Highness title, but Charles had other ideas and insisted she was stripped of it.

So she was.

This pushed Diana even further away from the family, and meant she had to courtesy to them, including her own sons.

But Prince William, who was studying at Eton College at the time, was there to support his mum through this difficult time.

He even made her a very sweet promise.

In his book A Royal Duty, Diana's butler and close friend Paul Burrell reveals the young William vowed to restore her title, saying “Don't worry Mummy, I will give it back to you one day when I am king.”

According to Burrell, the conversation left Diana in tears.

However, he will never have the chance to fulfill his promise as his mum died just a few years later.

After the divorce, Diana became Diana, Princess of Wales.

On July 15, 1996, in a shabby little room at Court No.

1, Somerset House, it took all of three minutes to dissolve a marriage of the century.

His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and Her Royal Highness 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 taff for the wedding dress.

The divorce deal had been sealed mainly on the terms Diana had asked for.

Those terms included a lump sum of £17 million, £400,000 annually for Diana's office, and Diana to be known as Diana, Princess of Wales.

Without the designation Her Royal Highness, Diana had made one last attempt to salvage the HRH before the decree, appealing to Sir Robert Fellows, 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.