Originally published in the Guardian on 25 May 1978
She was always known as Princess Margaret Rose as a girl, and that was the name to which she responded at her wedding, but surely the second name cannot have been used again until yesterday in court when Her Royal Highness The Princess Margaret Rose, Countess of Snowdon, was granted a divorce from Armstrong-Jones. ACR, Earl of Snowdon. The case number was 5684/78.
They were twentieth in a list of 28 couples whose names were recited in a string, one after the other without pause, by the Nigerian clerk of the court. Judge Willis, a circuit judge acting as a Judge of the High Court, then asked if any person present wished to show cause why decrees should not be pronounced.
Silence.
He then asked if anyone wanted to say anything about costs.
Silence.
Then he said: "Very well, then I pronounce the decrees."
All 28 marriages had been ended in one minute 52 seconds. It was all very decently done. It was all unutterably sad. The proceedings were in Court 44 of the Queen's Building, in the newest part of the law courts in the Strand, opened by the Queen in 1968. The floor appears to be marble, but is lino tiles. The seats in court are not wood or leather, but blue plastic. On the notice board outside the court, pinned up beside the day's cause list, was a notice by a Citizen's Advice Bureau saying: "If you have a problem, come and see us at the Royal Courts of Justice."
Before the proceedings started, at 10.30, groups of people, mostly reporters, gathered in the corridor. A woman whispered to her legal adviser, answering questions about where she had committed adultery. The whole thing, whatever its quality, was reduced to the word adultery spoken quietly in a corridor.
But that case was to be heard in another court, in chambers. In Court 44 all the cases were undefended. The grounds were that the marriage had irretrievably broken down. No evidence was given. The parties did not need to be present.
One who did come told reporters she was a chambermaid, but declined with dignity to say more. Others whose marriages were ended in the same breath as the Princess's were a man who was a courier at the time of his marriage, a former Queen's Dragoon Guardsman, and a cleaner.
The only Royal divorce before, and the only divorce this close to the throne, was when Henry VIII put aside Catherine of Aragon. That set aside the spiritual and temporal power of the Pope in England. Yesterday's divorce set aside only a marriage.
Terry Coleman