queen elizabeth ii biography in english

Queen Elizabeth II

Queen Elizabeth II was the longest-reigning monarch in British history, sitting on the throne for 71 years. She was succeeded by King Charles III in 2022.

Who Was Queen Elizabeth II?

Quick facts, early life and family tree, ascension to the crown and coronation, husband prince philip, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, family scandals and losses, death and funeral, latest news: one year since her death.

On the first anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s death, King Charles shared an unreleased photo of the late queen. “In marking the first anniversary of Her late Majesty’s death and my Accession, we recall with great affection her long life, devoted service and all she meant to so many of us,” he said in a statement. Additionally, Prince William and Princess Kate attended a private church service in Wales to commemorate her life, and Prince Harry visited the chapel at Windsor Castle , where the queen is buried. Planning for a memorial to Elizabeth is underway. The targeted unveiling is 2026, the year she would have turned 100.

Queen Elizabeth II became queen of the United Kingdom on February 6, 1952, at age 25 and was crowned on June 2, 1953. She was the mother of Prince Charles , who ascended to the throne after her death, as well as the grandmother of Princes William and Harry . As the longest-serving monarch in British history, she tried to make her reign more modern and sensitive to a changing public while maintaining traditions associated with the crown. Elizabeth died on September 8, 2022, at age 96.

FULL NAME: Elizabeth Alexandra Mary BORN: April 21, 1926 DIED: September 8, 2022 BIRTHPLACE: London, England, United Kingdom PARENTS: King George VI and Queen Mother Elizabeth SPOUSE: Prince Philip CHILDREN: King Charles III , Princess Anne , Prince Andrew , and Prince Edward ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus

Queen Elizabeth II was born Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary on April 21, 1926, in London. Her parents were then known as the Duke and Duchess of York. Prince Albert—later known as King George VI —was the second son of Queen Mary and King George V . Her mother was Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon .

Elizabeth had ties with most of the monarchs in Europe. Her British ancestors include Queen Victoria (ruled 1837 to 1901) and King George III (ruled 1760 to 1820).

At the time of her birth, most people didn’t realize Elizabeth would someday become the queen of the United Kingdom. Nicknamed Lilibet, she got to enjoy the first decade of her life with all the privileges of being a royal without the pressures of being the heir apparent.

Elizabeth’s father and mother divided their time between a home in London and Royal Lodge, the family’s home on the grounds of Windsor Great Park. Elizabeth and her younger sister, Margaret , were educated at home by tutors. Academic courses included French, mathematics, and history, along with dancing, singing, and art lessons.

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Elizabeth and her sister largely stayed out of London, having been relocated to Windsor Castle. From there she made the first of her famous radio broadcasts in 1940, with this particular speech reassuring the children of Britain who had been evacuated from their homes and families. The 14-year-old princess, showing her calm and firm personality, told them “that in the end, all will be well; for God will care for us and give us victory and peace.”

Elizabeth soon started taking on other public duties. Appointed colonel-in-chief of the Grenadier Guards by her father, Elizabeth made her first public appearance inspecting the troops in 1942. She also began to accompany her parents on official visits within Britain.

In 1945, Elizabeth joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service to help in the war effort. She trained side-by-side with other British women to be an expert driver and mechanic. While her volunteer work only lasted a few months, it offered Elizabeth a glimpse into a different, non-royal world. She had another vivid experience outside of the monarchy when she and Margaret were allowed to mingle anonymously among the citizenry on Victory in Europe Day .

When Elizabeth’s grandfather King George V died in 1936, his eldest son (Elizabeth’s uncle) became King Edward VIII . Edward, however, was in love with American divorcée Wallis Simpson and had to choose between the crown and his heart . In the end, Edward chose Simpson and abdicated the crown.

The event changed the course of Elizabeth’s life, making her the heir presumptive to the British crown. Her father was crowned King George VI in 1937, taking on the name George to emphasize continuity with his father. Her mother became Queen Elizabeth.

Fifteen years later, the monarchy changed hands again when King George died. The younger Elizabeth assumed the responsibilities of the ruling monarch on February 6, 1952. At that point, the 25-year-old became Queen Elizabeth II, and her mother became Queen Mother.

Elizabeth was crowned on June 2, 1953, in Westminster Abbey, at the age of 27. For the first time ever, the coronation ceremony was broadcast on television, allowing people from across the globe to witness the pomp and spectacle of the event.

Elizabeth married her distant cousin Philip Mountbatten (a surname adopted from his mother’s side) on November 20, 1947, at London’s Westminster Abbey.

Elizabeth first met Philip, son of Prince Andrew of Greece, when she was only 13. She was smitten with him from the start. The two kept in touch over the years and eventually fell in love.

They made an unusual pair. Elizabeth was quiet and reserved, while Philip was boisterous and outspoken. Her father, King George, was hesitant about the match because, while Mountbatten had ties to both the Danish and Greek royal families, he didn’t possess great wealth and was considered by some to have a rough personality.

At the time of their wedding, Great Britain was still recovering from the ravages of World War II, and Elizabeth collected clothing coupons to get fabric for her gown.

The family took on the name Windsor, a move pushed by her mother and Prime Minister Winston Churchill that caused tension with her husband. In 1960, she reversed course, issuing orders that her descendants who didn’t carry royal titles (or needed last names for legal purposes such as weddings) would use the surname Mountbatten-Windsor. Over the years, Philip inspired numerous public relations headaches with his off-the-cuff, controversial comments and rumors of possible infidelities.

Philip died on April 9, 2021, at age 99. Days later, Prince Andrew told the media Queen Elizabeth described his death “as having left a huge void in her life.” She had previously said he was her “strength and stay.”

Elizabeth and Philip wasted no time in producing an heir: Their son Charles was born in 1948, the year after their wedding, and their daughter, Anne , arrived in 1950. As queen, Elizabeth had two more children—sons Andrew and Edward —in 1960 and 1964, respectively.

King Charles III

In 1969, Elizabeth officially made Charles her successor by granting him the title of Prince of Wales. Hundreds of millions of people tuned in to see the ceremony on television.

In 1981, Charles, then 32, wed 19-year-old Diana Spencer, who became known as Princess Diana . The wedding drew enormous crowds in the streets of London, and millions watched the proceedings on television. Public opinion of the monarchy was especially strong at that time. Later, rumors surfaced that he was pressured into the marriage by his family.

Now King Charles III, he is married to Queen Camilla .

Princess Anne

Princess Anne began working as a member of the royal family when she was 18 in 1969 and continues today. She is also heavily involved in charity work. A noted equestrian, Anne competed in the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. Her mother opened the Games that year, and the rest of the royal family traveled to support Anne.

Previously married to Captain Mark Phillips, she and her current husband, Timothy Laurence, wed in 1992.

Prince Andrew

Andrew was the first child born to a reigning monarch in more than 100 years. In 1979, he joined the British Royal Navy, became a helicopter pilot, and served during the Falkland War in the early 1980s. He became the Duke of York after marrying Sarah Ferguson , though the couple later divorced. Following scandal, Andrew stepped back from public duties in his royal capacity in 2019, a decision that was made permanent in 2022.

Prince Edward

The queen’s youngest child, Edward, worked in theater and television production for many years, at one point through his own production company. Since 2002, he has worked full-time supporting his mother and now brother. Edward is married to Sophie Rhys-Jones. He became the Duke of Edinburgh—a title previously held by his father—in March 2023.

Queen Elizabeth had eight grandchildren and was great-grandmother to 12 in her lifetime.

Her most well-known grandchildren are Charles and Diana’s sons, Prince William , who became second-in-line to the throne at his birth in 1982, and Prince Harry , born in 1984. Elizabeth emerged as a devoted grandmother to her grandsons. Prince William has said that she offered invaluable support and guidance as he and Kate Middleton planned their 2011 wedding.

In addition to Princes William and Harry, the queen’s other grandchildren are: Peter Phillips and Zara Tindall, born to Princess Anne; Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie of York, born to Prince Andrew; and Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn, born to Prince Edward. Peter is Elizabeth’s oldest grandchild; he was born in 1977, four years before his sister and five years before Prince William.

William and Kate have three children, who are Elizabeth’s great-grandchildren. The Prince and Princess of Wales welcomed Prince George Alexander Louis in July 2013, Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana in May 2015, and Prince Louis Arthur Charles in April 2018. All three are currently in the line of succession directly after their father.

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and his wife, Meghan Markle gave the queen two more great-grandchildren with the birth of their son, Prince Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor , and daughter, Princess Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor , in May 2019 and June 2021, respectively.

Elizabeth’s other great-grandchildren include Savannah Phillips, Isla Phillips, Mia Tindall, Lena Tindall, August Brooksbank, Lucas Tindall, and Sienna Mozzi.

Elizabeth’s long and mainly peaceful reign was marked by vast changes in her people’s lives, in her country’s power, how Britain is viewed abroad, and how the monarchy is regarded and portrayed. As a constitutional monarch, Elizabeth didn’t weigh in on political matters, nor did she reveal her political views. However, she conferred regularly with her prime ministers.

When Elizabeth became queen, post-war Britain still had a substantial empire, dominions, and dependencies. However, during the 1950s and 1960s, many of these countries achieved independence, and the British Empire evolved into the Commonwealth of Nations. Elizabeth II thus made visits to other countries as head of the Commonwealth and a representative of Britain, including a groundbreaking trip to Germany in 1965. She became the first British monarch to make a state visit there in more than five decades.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Elizabeth continued to travel extensively. In 1973, she attended the Commonwealth Conference in Ottawa, Canada and, in 1976, traveled to the United States for the 200 th anniversary celebration of America’s independence from Britain. More than a week later, she was in Montreal to open the Summer Olympics. In 1979, she traveled to Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, which garnered international attention and widespread respect.

In 1982, Elizabeth worried about her second son, Prince Andrew , who served as a helicopter pilot in the British Royal Navy during the Falklands War. Britain went to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, a clash that lasted for several weeks. While more than 250 British soldiers died in the conflict, Prince Andrew returned home safe and well, much to his mother’s relief.

In 2011, Elizabeth showed that the crown still had symbolic and diplomatic power when she became the first British monarch to visit the Republic of Ireland since 1911 (when all of Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom).

As queen, Elizabeth modernized the monarchy, dropping some of its formalities and making certain sites and treasures more accessible to the public. As Britain and other nations struggled financially, Britain abolished the Civil List in 2012, which was a public funding system of the monarchy dating back roughly 250 years. The royal family continues to receive some government support, but the queen cut back on spending.

Also in 2012, Elizabeth celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, marking 60 years as queen. As part of the jubilee festivities, a special BBC concert was held on June 4 featuring the likes of Shirley Bassey , Paul McCartney , Tom Jones , Stevie Wonder , and Kylie Minogue. Elizabeth was surrounded by family at this historic event, including her husband Philip, son Charles, and grandsons Harry and William.

On September 9, 2015, she surpassed her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria as Britain’s longest-ruling monarch, who reigned for 63 years.

Despite the occasional call to step aside for Charles, Elizabeth remained steadfast in her royal obligations as she passed her 90 th birthday in 2016. She continued making more than 400 engagements per year, maintaining her support of hundreds of charitable organizations and programs.

On February 6, 2017, the queen celebrated 65 years on the throne, the only British monarch to ever celebrate her Sapphire Jubilee. The date also marks the anniversary of the death of her father. The queen chose to spend the day quietly at Sandringham, her country estate north of London, where she attended a church service. In London, there were royal gun salutes at Green Park and at the Tower of London to mark the occasion. The Royal Mint also issued eight new commemorative coins in honor of the queen’s Sapphire Jubilee.

Later that year, the monarchy took what was considered a major step toward transitioning to the next generation: On November 12, Charles handled the traditional Remembrance Sunday duty of placing a wreath at the Cenotaph war memorial, as the queen watched from a nearby balcony.

In August 2019, Elizabeth made a rare intrusion into political matters when she agreed to a request by Prime Minister Boris Johnson to suspend Parliament until October 14, less than three weeks before Britain’s planned departure from the European Union.

In 2022, the nation celebrated Elizabeth’s platinum jubilee year. Another milestone for the monarchy, it marked her 70 years on the throne.

Relationship With Prime Ministers

Elizabeth had 15 prime ministers placed into power during her reign, with the queen and PM having a weekly, confidential meeting. (Elizabeth also met about a quarter of all the U.S. presidents in history, most recently receiving Joe Biden for a state visit in June 2021.)

She enjoyed a father-figure relationship with the iconic Winston Churchill and was later able to loosen up a bit and be somewhat informal with Labour leaders Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. In contrast, she and Margaret Thatcher had a very formal, distant relationship, with the PM tending to be a grating lecturer to the queen on a variety of issues.

Tony Blair saw certain concepts around the monarchy as somewhat outdated, though he did appreciate Elizabeth making a public statement after the death of Princess Diana .

Later, Conservative leader David Cameron, who was Elizabeth’s fifth cousin removed, enjoyed a warm rapport with the queen. He apologized in 2014 for revealing in a conversation that she was against the Scottish referendum to seek independence from Great Britain.

Theresa May was described as being tight-lipped about Brexit plans to leave the European Union, with a rumor circulating that Elizabeth was perturbed over not being informed about future exit strategies.

Two days before her death, Elizabeth welcomed her final prime minister, Liz Truss , at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. The September 6, 2022, meeting was her final act as monarch.

Threats to Queen Elizabeth and the Royal Family

Elizabeth worked tirelessly to protect the image of the monarchy and to prepare for its future. But she saw the monarchy come under attack during her lifetime. The once-revered institution weathered a number of storms, including death threats against the royal family.

In 1979, Elizabeth suffered a significant personal loss when Lord Mountbatten, her husband’s uncle, died in a terrorist bombing. Mountbatten and several members of his family were aboard his boat off the west coast of Ireland when the vessel exploded on August 27. He and three others, including one of his grandsons, were killed. The Irish Republican Army, which opposed British rule in Northern Ireland, took responsibility for the attack.

In June 1981, Elizabeth herself had a dangerous encounter. She was riding in the Trooping the Colour, a special military parade to celebrate her official birthday when a man in the crowd pointed a gun at her. He fired, but fortunately, the gun was loaded with blanks. Other than receiving a good scare, the queen wasn’t hurt.

Elizabeth had an even closer call the following year when an intruder broke into Buckingham Palace and confronted her in her bedroom. When the press got wind of the fact that Prince Philip was nowhere to be seen during this incident, they speculated about the state of the royal marriage.

The marriage of Elizabeth’s son Charles to Diana made headlines for years before the couple announced their separation in 1992, followed by their formal divorce in 1996. In the wake of Diana’s death in a Paris car crash on August 31, 1997, Elizabeth experienced intense media scrutiny. Her incredibly popular ex-daughter-in-law had been called the “People’s Princess.”

The queen was at her Balmoral estate in Scotland with Charles and his sons with Diana, Prince William and Prince Harry, at the time. For days, Elizabeth remained silent while the country mourned Diana’s passing, and she was sharply criticized for her lack of response.

Stories circulated that the queen didn’t want to give Diana a royal funeral, which only fueled public sentiment against the monarch. Nearly a week after Diana’s death, Elizabeth returned to London and issued a statement on the late princess.

Elizabeth also initially objected to the relationship between her son Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles . Charles and Camilla had dated years before he met his family, but the relationship ended under family pressure, only to resume during Charles and Diana’s marriage. Known to be a stickler for ceremony and tradition, she eventually showed signs of softening her stance over the years. When Charles and Camilla wed in 2005, Elizabeth and Prince Philip didn’t attend the civil ceremony but attended a religious blessing and held a reception in their honor at Windsor Castle.

In 1992, another of Elizabeth’s children, Prince Andrew, ended up in the tabloids after photos emerged of his wife, Sarah Ferguson , and another man engaged in romantic activity. The couple divorced soon after. Along with the dissolution of Charles’ and Andrew’s marriages, Princess Anne divorced her husband Mark Phillips that year. More bad news came when a fire broke out at Windsor Castle in November. The 15-hour blaze destroyed 115 rooms, though it only consumed two pieces of art from the queen’s valuable private collection. The year became known as her “annus horribilis.”

After the start of the 21 st century, Elizabeth experienced two great losses. She said goodbye to both her sister, Margaret, and her mother in 2002, the same year she celebrated her Golden Jubilee that marked her 50 th year on the throne. Margaret, known for being more of an adventurous soul than other royals and who was barred from marrying an early love, died in February after suffering a stroke. Only a few weeks later, Elizabeth’s mother died at Royal Lodge on March 30 at the age of 101.

In November 2017, the media reported the queen had some $13 million invested in offshore accounts. The news came following the leak of the so-called “Paradise Papers” to a German newspaper, which shared the documents with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The Duchy of Lancaster, which holds assets for the queen, confirmed that some of its investments were overseas accounts but insisted they were all legitimate.

Also in 2017, the former owner of the lingerie company Rigby & Peller, which had serviced Elizabeth for more than 50 years, wrote a tell-all autobiography that included some of her experiences with the royal family. Although the author insisted that “the book doesn’t contain anything naughty,” the queen responded in early 2018 by revoking Rigby & Peller’s royal warrant.

In 2019, Prince Andrew was forced to step down from public duties, following a media firestorm. Andrew had courted years of scandal surrounding his controversial business pursuits and friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein ,

Just weeks later, in January 2020, the family again found themselves in the spotlight, following the bombshell decision by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle , the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, to step away from their roles as senior royals.

For much of her life, the queen surrounded herself with dogs. She was especially known for her love of corgis, owning more than 30 descendants of the first corgi she received as a teenager, until the death of the final one, Willow, in 2018.

Elizabeth was also a horse enthusiast who bred thoroughbreds and attended racing events for many years.

Not one for the spotlight, Elizabeth liked quiet pastimes. She enjoyed reading mysteries, working on crossword puzzles, and reportedly, even watching wrestling on television.

Queen Elizabeth II died peacefully at her Balmoral estate in Scotland on September 8, 2022, at 3:10 p.m. local time. She was 96 years old. Her official cause of death was old age, according to her death certificate.

The public was first aware of the queen’s ill health earlier that day when Buckingham Palace issued at statement around 12:30 p.m. that said, “Following further evaluation this morning, the queen’s doctors are concerned for Her Majesty’s health and have recommended she remain under medical supervision.”

Soon, members of the royal family began traveling to see the queen. At the time of her death, Prince Charles and Camilla, as well as Princess Anne were at the castle. William, Harry, Andrew, Edward, and Sophie arrived later in the evening. Kate Middleton didn’t travel to say her final goodbyes, citing the recent start of the school year for her children. Meghan Markle was also absent.

Her death was publicly announced at 6:30 p.m. After, newly minted King Charles issued a statement that said:

The death of my beloved Mother, Her Majesty The Queen, is a moment of the greatest sadness for me and all members of my family. We mourn profoundly the passing of a cherished Sovereign and a much-loved Mother. I know her loss will be deeply felt throughout the country, the Realms and the Commonwealth, and by countless people around the world. During this period of mourning and change, my family and I will be comforted and sustained by our knowledge of the respect and deep affection in which The Queen was so widely held.

On September 14, Elizabeth’s coffin traveled from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall by horse-drawn carriage and lay in state for four days. The day of her state funeral, September 19, was declared a bank holiday. The funeral was held at Westminster Abbey and ended with two minutes of silence, observed there and throughout the United Kingdom.

President Joe Biden , First Lady Jill Biden , French President Emmanuel Macron , and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were among the dozens of world leaders and 2,000 total people in attendance. Millions more watched or listened in; the funeral was broadcast on TV and radio and streamed on YouTube. Elizabeth’s pony and her corgis, Muick and Sandy, watched the procession, as did tens of thousands of people.

A private burial came later that day. Elizabeth was buried with Prince Philip at the King George VI Memorial Chapel.

• I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.
• 1992 is not a year I shall look back on with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an “annus horribilis.”
• When life seems hard, the courageous do not lie down and accept defeat; instead, they are all the more determined to struggle for a better future.
• Discrimination still exists. Some people feel that their own beliefs are being threatened. Some are unhappy about unfamiliar cultures. They all need to be reassured that there is so much to be gained by reaching out to others; that diversity is indeed a strength and not a threat.
• Grief is the price we pay for love.
• I cannot lead you into battle, I do not give you laws or administer justice, but I can do something else, I can give you my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.
• In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognize how precious is the peace we have built in Europe since 1945.
• We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.

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Queen Elizabeth II

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 25, 2023 | Original: May 23, 2018

Queen Elizabeth II served from 1952 to 2022 as reigning monarch of the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) and numerous other realms and territories, as well as head of the Commonwealth, the group of 53 sovereign nations that includes many former British territories. Extremely popular for nearly all of her long reign, the queen was known for taking a serious interest in government and political affairs, apart from her ceremonial duties, and was credited with modernizing many aspects of the monarchy.

Childhood and Education of a Princess

When Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, the elder daughter of Prince Albert, Duke of York, and his wife, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, was born on April 21, 1926, she apparently had little chance of assuming the throne, as her father was a younger son of King George V.

But in late 1936, her uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated to marry an American divorcée, Wallis Simpson. As a result, her father became King George VI, and 10-year-old “Lilibet” (as she was known within the family) became the heir presumptive to the throne.

Though she spent much of her childhood with nannies, Princess Elizabeth was influenced greatly by her mother, who instilled in her a devout Christian faith as well as a keen understanding of the demands of royal life. Her grandmother, Queen Mary, consort of King George V, also instructed Elizabeth and her younger sister Margaret in the finer points of royal etiquette.

Educated by private tutors, with an emphasis on British history and law, the princess also studied music and learned to speak fluent French. She trained as a Girl Guide (the British equivalent of the Girl Scouts) and developed a lifelong passion for horses.

As queen, she kept many thoroughbred racehorses and frequently attended racing and breeding events. Elizabeth’s famous attachment to Pembroke Welsh corgis also began in childhood, and she owned more than 30 corgis over the course of her reign.

Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth

Elizabeth and Margaret spent much of World War II living apart from their parents in the Royal Lodge at Windsor Castle, a medieval fortress outside London. In 1942, the king made Elizabeth an honorary colonel in the 500 Grenadier Guards, a Royal Army regiment.

Two years later, he named her as a member of the Privy Council and the Council of State, enabling her to act on his behalf when he was out of the country.

In 1947, soon after the royal family returned from an official visit to South Africa and Rhodesia, they announced Elizabeth’s engagement to Prince Philip of Greece, her third cousin (both were great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert) and a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. She had set her sights on him when she was only 13, and their relationship developed through visits and correspondence during the war.

Though many in the royal circle viewed Philip as an unwise match due to his lack of money and foreign (German) blood, Elizabeth was determined and very much in love. She and Philip wed on November 20, 1947 , at Westminster Abbey .

Their first son, Charles (Prince of Wales, then King Charles III ) was born in 1948; a daughter, Anne (Princess Royal) arrived two years later. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip's third child and second son, Prince Andrew, was born in 1960 and the couple's youngest child, Prince Edward, was born in 1964.

Elizabeth and Phillip were married for an extraordinary 73 years, until the Prince died in April 2021 at the age of 99.

Queen Elizabeth's Coronation

With her father’s health declining in 1951, Elizabeth stepped in for him at various state functions. After spending that Christmas with the royal family, Elizabeth and Philip left on a tour of Australia and New Zealand, making a stopover in Kenya en route.

They were in Kenya on February 6, 1952, when King George VI succumbed to lung cancer at the age of 56, and his 25-year-old daughter became the sixth woman in history to ascend to the British throne. Her formal coronation as Queen Elizabeth II took place on June 2, 1953, in Westminster Abbey.

In the first decade of her reign, Elizabeth settled into her role as queen, developing a close bond with Prime Minister Winston Churchill (the first of 15 prime ministers she would work with during her reign), weathering a foreign affairs disaster in the Suez Crisis of 1956 and making numerous state trips abroad.

In response to pointed criticism in the press, the queen embraced steps to modernize her own image and that of the monarchy, including televising her annual Christmas broadcast for the first time in 1957.

Elizabeth and Philip had two more children, Andrew (born 1960) and Edward (born 1964). In 1968, Charles was formally invested as the Prince of Wales , marking his coming of age and the beginning of what would be a long period as king-in-waiting.

Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, marking her 25 years on the throne, proved a bright spot in an era of economic struggles. Always a vigorous traveler, she kept a punishing schedule to mark the occasion, traveling some 56,000 miles around the Commonwealth, including the island nations Fiji and Tonga, New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea, the British West Indies and Canada.

Royal Scandals

In 1981, all eyes were on the royal family once again as Prince Charles wed Lady Diana Spencer at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Though the couple soon welcomed two sons, William and Harry , their marriage quickly imploded, causing considerable public embarrassment for the queen and the entire royal family.

In 1992, Elizabeth’s 40th year on the throne and her family’s “Annus Horribilis” (according to a speech she gave that November) both Charles and Diana and Prince Andrew and his wife, Sarah Ferguson, separated, while Princess Anne and her husband, Mark Phillips, divorced.

A fire also broke out at Windsor Castle that same year, and amid public outcry over the use of government funds to restore the royal residence, Queen Elizabeth agreed to pay taxes on her private income. This was not required by British law, though some earlier monarchs had done so as well.

At the time, her personal fortune was estimated at $11.7 billion. In another modernizing measure, she also agreed to open the state rooms at Buckingham Palace to the public for an admission fee when she was not in residence.

Response to Lady Diana's Death

After Charles and Diana divorced in 1996, Diana remained incredibly popular with the British (and international) public. Her tragic death the following year triggered a tremendous outpouring of shock and grief, as well as outrage at the royal family for what the public saw as its ill treatment of the “People’s Princess.”

Though Queen Elizabeth initially kept the family (including Princes William and Harry) out of the public eye at Balmoral, the unprecedented public response to Diana’s death convinced her to return to London, make a televised speech about Diana, greet mourners and allow the Union Jack to fly at half-mast above Buckingham Palace.

A Modern Monarchy

The queen’s popularity, and that of the entire royal family, rebounded during the first decade of the 21st century. Though 2002 marked Queen Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee—50 years on the throne—the death of her mother (the beloved Queen Mum) and sister early that year cast a pall on the celebrations.

In 2005, the queen enjoyed public support when she gave her assent to Prince Charles’ once-unthinkable marriage to his longtime love Camilla Parker Bowles.

In her seventh decade on the throne, Queen Elizabeth presided over the pomp and circumstance of another royal wedding at Westminster Abbey, that of Prince William to Catherine Middleton in April 2011. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who are in line to become Britain’s next king and queen, continued the line of succession with their children, Prince George (born 2013), Princess Charlotte (born 2015) and Prince Louis (born 2018).

In September 2015, Elizabeth surpassed the record of 63 years and 216 days on the throne set by Queen Victoria (her great-great-grandmother) to become the longest-reigning British monarch in history. A consistent presence by his wife’s side and one of Britain’s busiest royals for much of her reign, Prince Philip stepped down from his royal duties in 2017, at the age of 96. That same year, the royal couple celebrated 70 years of marriage, making theirs the longest union in the history of the British monarchy. Philip died in 2021, at the age of 99. 

In May 2018, Prince Harry wed the American actress Meghan Markle , a biracial divorcée. The couple had a son, Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, in 2019, and a daughter, Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor, in 2021. Harry and Meghan announced they would be stepping back from senior royal duties in January 2020 and subsequently relocated to Los Angeles.

Rumors swirled at various times that Queen Elizabeth would step aside and let Prince Charles take the throne. In 2017, she delegated some of her royal obligations, such as the official Remembrance Day ceremony, to him, fueling speculation that she was preparing to bequeath the throne to her eldest son. Instead, she remained a consistent, stable presence at the head of Britain’s reigning family until her peaceful death on September 8, 2022 at her beloved country residence, Balmoral Castle. 

In the final years of her reign, she continued many of her official duties, public appearances and spent plenty of time outside with her beloved dogs and horses. Two days before her death, she officially installed a new prime minister, Liz Truss.

HISTORY Vault: Profiles: Queen Elizabeth II

Chart the unexpected rise and record-breaking reign of Queen Elizabeth II, which unfolded in the turbulent modern history of the English monarchy.

Her Majesty the Queen, The Royal Household website . Sally Bedell Smith, Elizabeth the Queen ( Penguin Random House, 2012 ). Queen Elizabeth II – Fast Facts, CNN . “Will Queen Elizabeth Give Prince Charles the Throne in 2018?” Newsweek .

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Biography Online

Queen Elizabeth II Biography

She served as the longest-serving British monarch for over 70 years presiding over continual change both within the Royal Family, Great Britain and the Commonwealth.

Elizabeth was the eldest child of Prince Albert, the Duke of York (later George VI) and his wife Elizabeth (later known as the Queen Mother). Her father Prince Albert was second in line to the throne until his elder brother Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 – pushing the shy Prince Albert into an unexpected role of King. King George VI rose to the challenge though he died early in 1952.

Elizabeth was educated at home, along with her sister Princess Margaret. During the Second World War, they were evacuated to Balmoral and later Windsor Castle. Towards the end of the war in 1945, Elizabeth joined the Women’s Royal Auxiliary Territorial Service, where she served as a driver and mechanic. After the war, she increasingly stepped into her role of performing public service and made her first overseas trip to South Africa in 1947. Shortly before her 21st birthday, she said:

“I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”

Yet, there were still high points for the Royal Family, such as her ‘Silver Jubilee’ in 1977 and the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana in 1981. By the 1990s, the media had a widespread fascination with Princess Diana , but as their marriage broke down, the Queen was increasingly perceived as being out of touch. In 1992, she famously declared the year to be her ‘ annus horribilus ‘ The year saw media headlines dominated by the marriage breakup of Charles and Diana, a fire in Windsor, and other criticisms of the Royal Family.

“1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘ Annus Horribilis ‘.” (Christmas address, 1992)

In 1996, Princess Diana died in a car crash, and temporarily there was public dismay as the Queen appeared distant and refused to fly the flag at half-mast. But, after the Queen later expressed admiration for Princess Diana the hostility evaporated. Nevertheless, the relationship between Princess Diana and the Queen was best described as being ‘cool’.

“In tomorrow’s world we must all work together as hard as ever, if we’re truly to be United Nations.”

After the difficulties of the 1990s, the 2000s saw a resurgence in her popularity as the Royal Family put many difficulties behind them, and they were able to celebrate good news. If 1992 was her annus horribilus , 2012, was perhaps her annus mirabilis . Firstly, in April, Prince William married Kate Middleton to widespread public enthusiasm. Then in summer, her Golden Jubilee was widely celebrated and popular despite the wet weather. Finally, in July 2012, she took part in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics – which was a huge global success.

During her time as Head of State, Queen Elizabeth has sought to refrain from interfering in political issues and provide a moderating influence on the nation.

“We are a moderate, pragmatic people, more comfortable with practice than theory.” (30 April 2002)

She is a committed Christian and often mentions her religious beliefs in her Christmas addresses. However, in her role as Head of the Church of England, she has stated that she is committed to protecting the rights of all different faiths.

“The concept of our established Church is occasionally misunderstood and, I believe, commonly under-appreciated. Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.”

– During a speech at Lambeth Palace, 15/02/2012.

Despite passing 90 years, she remained in relatively good health and continued to serve.

Elizabeth II passed away on 8 September 2022 causing an outpouring of love and good wishes for her unique reign and life of duty and service. Her funeral at Westminster Abbey on 19 September attracted heads of state from around the world. It was the first state funeral since Winston Churchill and huge crowds came to see her final journey to Windsor Castle where she was buried next to her husband Prince Phillip.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Queen Elizabeth II”, Oxford, UK  www.biographyonline.net , 30/01/2013. Updated 20 September 2022.

Queen Elizabeth II and the Royal Family

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The life and legacy of Britain’s longest-serving monarch

LONDON — She was born a royal but with little hope of wearing the crown. 

Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, known by her family as Lilibet , was born April 21, 1926 — third in line to the throne after her uncle and her father. But a scandalous royal love affair changed the course of Lilibet’s life and paved the way for her to become the United Kingdom’s longest-serving monarch, a much-admired symbol of comfort and continuity and arguably the most famous woman in the world. 

Elizabeth’s reign lasted from the industrial age to the internet age — 70 years of endurance and stoicism in which she met generations of legendary, mostly male, global leaders and helped steer Britain through the loss of its empire and its emergence as a midsized multicultural nation.

Follow NBC News’ live coverage here

From a young queen to the grandmother of the nation, decade after decade she smiled, waved, shook hands and chatted with a vast number of her subjects and admirers, despite family scandals and the tragedy of a dead princess.  

Her cool, reliable cheerfulness made her overwhelmingly popular with the British public.

Queen Elizabeth II died Thursday . Her eldest son, Charles, is now king.

On the eve of World War II, her uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated in 1936 after his marriage proposal to an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, erupted in a scandal that engulfed the royal family and embroiled the country’s politicians. 

Elizabeth’s father became a reluctant King George VI, making Elizabeth the direct heir to the crown. 

Elizabeth assumed the throne in 1952 at the age of 25 after the sudden death of her father in his sleep at 56. In the 70 years since, she worked with 15 British prime ministers and met every U.S. president during her time as queen except Lyndon Johnson. The vast majority of Britons have never known another monarch, and she remained overwhelmingly popular until her death.

She reigned against the backdrop of vast cultural and political transformations — the end of Britain’s age of deference and its empire, and the advent of globalization and the multimedia age. Throughout, she and her family experienced unprecedented levels of public exposure and, at times, a fractious relationship with the media.

Elizabeth also oversaw the monarchy’s evolution into a champion of a diminished United Kingdom at home and abroad, and she worked tirelessly to keep the crown relevant in a changing world. A source of unending fascination to many, she’s been the subject of movies, plays and TV series, including “The Crown,” “The Queen,” and “The Royal House of Windsor.”

“She has throughout her reign managed to make people feel that she is the spirit and the soul of the country,” said Clive Irving, the author of “The Last Queen: How Queen Elizabeth II Saved the Monarchy.” “She gives over a maternal feeling. She’s a safe pair of hands at the top. No one else has ever been able to convey that as she did.”

That was evident most recently during the pandemic, when early on the queen addressed the U.K. in a rare broadcast to urge her subjects to show the same “self-discipline” and “quiet good-humored resolve” that characterized previous generations.

The queen, whose image adorns stamps, money and mailboxes, is more than a mere figurehead: She played an essential role in the functioning of the U.K. as a constitutional monarchy. After an election, it is the U.K.’s monarch who calls on the political parties to form a government. The monarch also must give assent to all legislation passed by Parliament, and meets weekly with the prime minister to discuss government matters. They are legally allowed to “advise and warn” the government’s ministers.

Crucial to what is widely seen as a successful reign was Elizabeth’s ability to appear ubiquitous and at the same time remain an enigma. She accomplished this by avoiding expressing her political views or making controversial statements in public — no mean feat for someone constantly in the limelight. This meant keeping her own counsel during thousands of events, appearances and speeches, according to Philip Murphy, the director of history and policy at the University of London.

“She has an incredible capacity for repeating the same sorts of rather dull official events which clearly mean an awful lot to other people,” said Murphy. “So much of being a constitutional monarch is the repetition of boring regimes, and there’s something about her that has never rebelled against that. She would call that a sense of duty.”

During the war, Elizabeth and her sister went to live in Windsor, while their parents stayed in London despite the heavy bombardment from German bombers. She made her first radio address in 1940, speaking to other children who had been separated from their families to keep them safe. 

Toward the end of the conflict, the princess joined the all-female Auxiliary Territorial Service and trained as a mechanic. 

It was during the war that the young royal began to date her future husband.  

Philip , her third cousin, was a Greek prince but had spent most of his childhood in the U.K. His family fled Greece after a revolution and were largely penniless. The couple first crossed paths in 1934 at a family wedding and then met again in 1939 when she was 13 and he was 18. While he was stationed abroad during the war, they wrote letters to each other, but his background and her youth were a cause of concern to other members of the royal family. 

During their courtship, Philip and Elizabeth would go out driving in Philip’s tiny MG sports car, as well as dancing at London nightclubs. The couple announced their engagement in July 1947 after Elizabeth returned from her first trip abroad to South Africa. They wed that November, and Philip renounced his Greek title and became a British citizen.

Two years later, they moved to Malta, where Philip was stationed with the British Navy and she lived as an officer’s wife, far from the public eye. Royal observers have speculated that these were some of the happiest years of Elizabeth’s life, a time when she was able to drive her own car and mingle with other officers’ wives without the layers of security and protocol that have defined her reign. 

Their relative freedom was cut short when King George, who’s health had long been precarious, suddenly deteriorated. At the time of his death in February 1952, Elizabeth was in Kenya on a royal tour with Philip. After word reached an aide, Philip broke the news to Elizabeth during a walk.

Royal experts say it was Elizabeth’s husband, five years her senior, who helped guide the young queen in the early years.

“She was so young when she ascended the throne,” royal biographer Ingrid Seward said, adding that Elizabeth followed much of the tradition her father had established. “Everything was completely archaic. It was so old-fashioned. I think more than anyone, Prince Philip helped move the monarchy up.”

That was particularly evident in the way he helped revamp the royal estates — the land and holdings belonging to the crown — making their operations profitable, she said.

Philip’s influence on the monarchy as an institution was mirrored in their personal lives, as well.

In one of her more revealing speeches about her husband on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary in 1997, the queen referred to his “constant love and help” and said, “He has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years.”

Philip, who retired from his official royal duties in 2017, died in April 2021 at the age of 99. He and Elizabeth were married for 73 years.

In addition to Prince Charles, Elizabeth is survived by two sons, Princes Andrew and Edward; a daughter, Princess Anne; four grandsons; four granddaughters; and 12 great-grandchildren.

Over her 70-year reign , the queen eased the U.K. into its new post-World War II role, which had been diminished after the loss of its colonies around the world.

The queen placed a strong emphasis on her position as the head of the Commonwealth , a loose alliance of more than 50 countries, many of which are former British colonies.

“The queen had to work out how to manage decline — the dissolution of the empire, coming to terms with diminished power — but she also understood that diminished power does not have to mean diminished quality,” Irving said.

Her extensive travels around the globe, many on her beloved royal yacht Britannia, helped raise the profile of the U.K. and brought a dose of glamor to the places she visited. In 1961, she visited the former British colony of Ghana, which had gained independence just a few years earlier in 1957. During that trip, a charm offensive in one of the first members of the Commonwealth , she was filmed dancing with the country’s leader, Kwame Nkrumah, at a time when segregation still existed in the U.S.

Like with so much else that the queen does, it was her actions and not her words that carried weight. 

“A man could not have done it,” historian Nat Nunoo Amarteifio said in the BBC documentary “The Queen: Her Commonwealth Story.” “Here is our president, being respected enough by the queen of England for her to put her arms around him.”

While she was lauded for her work abroad, she was also praised for opening up the royal household and giving the public a glimpse of the family’s life at home.

A 1969 documentary, “Royal Family,” revealed the royal couple’s private life for the first time, showing Elizabeth and Philip having dinnertime conversations and engaging in other regular activities, including barbecuing.

“People realized they weren’t gods. They were real people,” Seward said. “A lot of people said this was a turning point.”

While the queen’s steady consistency was largely considered a boon for the monarchy, her children and grandchildren’s lives have occasionally been a thorn in the side of monarchists. 

Most recently, her grandson Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan , accused an unnamed member of the royal family of asking how dark the skin of their children would be. The couple gave up their royal duties and left the U.K. in 2020. 

Just before their departure, the queen was faced with a growing scandal around her son Prince Andrew’s friendship with the accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew stepped down from his public duties in support of the queen in November 2019, and she stayed largely silent on the topic.  

Despite the recent challenges facing the monarchy, its popularity has remained high. That hasn’t always been the case. 

In the early 1990s, Charles’ rocky marriage to Princess Diana was all over the news, eventually ending in divorce in 1992. In one of the queen’s most famous speeches marking the 40th anniversary of her ascension, she referred to 1992 as an “annus horribilis,” or disastrous year. Speaking just days after a blaze destroyed a large part of her Windsor Castle residence, the queen made a plea for understanding, saying that “most people try to do their jobs as best they can, even if the result is not always entirely successful.”  

Five years later, when Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris and the world mourned, Elizabeth was criticized for staying silent for days and hunkering down at her home in Scotland with Charles and Diana’s sons, her grandsons Princes William and Harry. Satisfaction with the way she was doing her job dipped to 66 percent after that, according to the U.K. polling company Ipsos Mori. (At the time of her 60th anniversary on the throne in 2012, her popularity had risen to 90 percent.)

“I think that was an extremely challenging time for the monarchy, because people couldn’t understand why the royal family weren’t responding as they wanted to,” Seward said of Diana’s death. “In times of great tragedy, they just always lock down. ... They don’t grieve in public. And people wanted more than that.”

When the queen finally returned to London nearly a week later, she paid tribute to Diana . “I for one believe there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death,” Elizabeth said.

She acknowledged in a 1997 speech that the monarchy “exists only with the support and consent of the people.” 

In September 2015, she became the longest-serving monarch in British history, surpassing her great-great-grandmother Victoria’s record of 63 years, 216 days.

“Inevitably a long life can pass by many milestones. My own is no exception,” the queen noted at the time.

While she carried on working until the end, meeting foreign dignitaries, visiting cities around the U.K., supporting charities and promoting her kingdom at home and abroad, she had canceled a number of appearances and events toward the end. 

Perhaps the greatest measure of Elizabeth’s success in carrying the House of Windsor into the future will be how it continues on in her absence. Charles, 73, now becomes king , a role he’s been groomed for since birth. 

At his 70th birthday celebration, in November 2018, Elizabeth called him “a dedicated and respected heir to the throne to stand comparison with any in history — and a wonderful father.”

Yet his popularity is nowhere near as high as his mother’s, coming in sixth on YouGov’s royal popularity ranking, behind his sister, Anne.

While most Britons “love” the queen, Irving said, “the question is how relevant does the monarchy remain after the queen.”

Rachel Elbaum is a London-based editor, producer and writer. 

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The life of Queen Elizabeth II – a timeline

Key dates in the life of the Queen, from her birth in April 1926 to her death in September 2022

21 April 1926

Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor is born at 2.40am at 17 Bruton Street, London, her maternal grandparents’ house. It was home to her parents, Elizabeth (née Bowes-Lyon), and Albert, Duke of York, the second son of King George V and Queen Mary. She was third in line to the throne behind her father and Edward, Prince of Wales.

21 August 1930

Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret Rose , is born.

20 January 1936

George V dies. Edward VIII becomes king .

10 December 1936

Edward VIII abdicates so that he can marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

11 December 1936

Bertie, the Duke of York, is formally proclaimed King George VI. Princess Elizabeth is now heiress presumptive.

Elizabeth becomes a Girl Guide at the age of 11.

12 May 1937

Coronation of George VI at Westminster Abbey.

21 April 1939

Elizabeth celebrates her 13th birthday , and begins a course of study at home under the vice-provost of Eton College.

22 July 1939

Princess Elizabeth meets Cadet Capt Philip of Greece at the Royal Dartmouth naval college.

3 September 1939

Britain declares war on Germany.

7 September 1940

The blitz on London begins. While the King and Queen stay in the city, Elizabeth and Margaret are evacuated to Windsor.

13 October 1940

Elizabeth makes her first broadcast to the nation.

21 April 1942

On her 16th birthday, Elizabeth carries out her first public engagement when she inspects the Grenadier Guards, of which she had been appointed colonel-in-chief.

21 April 1944

Elizabeth receives her first corgi , Susan, as an 18th birthday present.

4 March 1945

Elizabeth joins the Auxiliary Territorial Service , learning how to drive and maintain vehicles.

Elizabeth makes her first overseas visit, to South Africa , and gives a speech dedicating herself to the Commonwealth.

10 July 1947

Buckingham Palace announces the engagement of Princess Elizabeth to Lt Philip Mountbatten , her third cousin.

20 November 1947

The couple marry at Westminster Abbey. He is thenceforth known as the Duke of Edinburgh.

14 November 1948

Prince Charles is born.

15 August 1950

Princess Anne, now the Princess Royal, is born.

31 January 1950

Elizabeth and Philip leave for a tour of east Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

6 February 1952

George VI dies and Elizabeth II succeeds to the throne. She is in Kenya when her father dies – the first British monarch since George I to be out of the country at the time of succession.

15 February 1952

Funeral of George VI takes place at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.

7 April 1952

Proclamation issued declaring the family’s dynastic surname will remain Windsor.

2 June 1953

Coronation of Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey in the first televised coronation service.

24 November 1953

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh embark on a tour of the Commonwealth.

15 May 1954

The royal couple return to England after six months abroad.

31 October 1955

Princess Margaret releases a statement confirming she will not marry Gp Capt Peter Townsend. Her relationship with him had been controversial because he was divorced, and her request to marry him – with its echoes of the abdication crisis – had been opposed by large sections of the establishment.

November 1956

Britain and France invade Egypt in a botched attempt to seize control of the Suez canal. Lord Mountbatten later claimed the Queen disapproved of the venture.

21 October 1957

The Queen visits New York and addresses the UN general assembly.

19 February 1960

Prince Andrew, now the Duke of York, is born.

Princess Margaret marries the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones.

10 March 1964

Prince Edward, now the Earl of Wessex, is born.

The Queen visits West Germany, the first British monarch to do so since the first world war.

20 September 1967

The Queen launches the Cunard cruise liner the Queen Elizabeth II (popularly known as the QE2).

21 June 1969

First broadcast of Royal Family , a documentary with unprecedented access to the family’s daily life.

1 July 1969

Prince Charles is invested Prince of Wales. Lord Snowdon designs a new coronet for the occasion as the Duke of Windsor took the previous one with him to Paris.

First walkabout during a state visit of Australia and New Zealand.

20 October 1973

The Queen opens Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House in Australia.

14 November 1973

Princess Anne marries Capt Mark Phillips.

February 1974

The Queen’s tour of Australia and Polynesia is interrupted after the prime minister Edward Heath calls a snap general election. She flies back to Britain.

November 1975

The Queen refuses to intervene in an Australian constitutional crisis when the prime minister Gough Whitlam is dismissed by the governor general Sir John Kerr.

7 June 1977

Queen’s silver jubilee. More than a million people line the streets of London, and a chain of beacons is lit across the country.

27 August 1979

Lord Mountbatten, Prince Philip’s uncle, is killed by an IRA bomb off the coast of Sligo in the west of Ireland.

November 1979

Sir Anthony Blunt, the former surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, is exposed as a communist spy.

24 February 1981

Prince Charles announces his engagement to Lady Diana Spencer.

29 July 1981

Charles and Diana marry in St Paul’s Cathedral, London.

13 June 1981

Shots are fired at the Queen as she attends Trooping the Colour. Marcus Serjeant, a 17-year-old air cadet from Folkestone, Kent, pleads guilty under the 1842 Treason Act and is jailed for five years. The shots were blanks.

21 June 1982

Diana gives birth to Prince William.

9 July 1982

Michael Fagan breaks into the Queen’s bedroom during the early hours, evading alarms, guards and police. He sits on the edge of her bed, talking for 10 minutes, before being led away by footman Paul Whybrew, given a whisky and arrested.

15 September 1984

Diana gives birth to Prince Harry.

23 July 1986

Andrew marries publishing executive Sarah Ferguson , known as Fergie.

7 June 1992

The first instalment of the serialisation of Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story, appears in the Sunday Times , revealing that Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles continued to have an affair during his marriage to Diana, that Diana tried to kill herself and had bulimia. It later emerges that much of the information had been supplied by Diana herself.

20 November 1992

Windsor Castle is partly destroyed by fire.

24 November 1992

The Queen gives a speech at Guildhall to mark the 40th anniversary of her accession. In it, she refers to recent events as part of an “annus horribilis”.

9 December 1992

The prime minister John Major announces in the House of Commons that Charles and Diana are to separate.

Buckingham Palace is opened to the general public for the first time to help fund the restoration of Windsor Castle.

The Queen and the French president François Mitterrand open the Channel Tunnel.

28 August 1996

Charles and Diana’s marriage is dissolved

31 August 1997

Diana dies in a car crash in Paris. The Queen stays in seclusion for several days, and is heavily criticised in the press for her silence. Then, on the eve of Diana’s funeral, she does a walkabout to meet mourners outside Buckingham Palace and gives a televised address, speaking “as your Queen and as a grandmother” and paying tribute to Diana. “She was an exceptional and gifted human being,” she said. “In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness.”

11 December 1997

Her Majesty’s yacht Britannia is decommissioned; the government decides against funding a replacement.

24 November 1998

The Queen’s speech at the opening of parliament announces plans to abolish the traditional rights of 700 hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords.

26 May 1999

The Queen opens the national assembly in Wales.

1 July 1999

The Queen opens the Scottish parliament.

Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret, dies .

30 March 2002

Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, dies .

30 April 2002

Elizabeth launches her golden jubilee celebrations with a speech to both houses of parliament.

9 April 2005

Prince Charles marries Camilla Parker Bowles in a civil ceremony at Windsor’s Guildhall. The Queen attends the service of blessing held for the couple at St George’s Chapel.

21 April 2006

The Queen celebrates her 80th birthday.

19 Nov 2007

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh mark their 60th wedding anniversary.

22 December 2007

Elizabeth II surpasses Victoria to become the UK’s oldest reigning monarch.

14 Oct 2010

The Queen cancels a planned Christmas party at Buckingham Palace after deciding it would be inappropriate to celebrate as Britons feel the effects of the economic crisis.

29 April 2011

Prince William, second in line to the throne , marries Catherine Middleton at Westminster Abbey.

17-20 May 2011

The Queen visits Ireland , becoming the first British monarch to do so since its independence in 1921. She expresses sympathy to those who suffered during hundreds of years of conflict between the two neighbours.

The 60th anniversary of the death of George VI and of Elizabeth’s accession to the throne.

2-5 June 2012

Events take place throughout the country to celebrate Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee , including a pageant of 670 boats sailing along the Thames in London.

27 July 2012

The Queen opens the London Olympics . In her first acting role, a film shows her leaving Buckingham Palace with James Bond, played by Daniel Craig, and appearing to parachute into the stadium in Stratford, east London.

25 April 2013

The Succession to the Crown Act 2013 receives royal assent , so that the eldest child inherits the throne regardless of gender. The act also ends the disqualification from the line of succession of a person married to a Catholic.

4 June 2013

The Queen joins 2,000 guests for a service at Westminster Abbey to mark 60 years since her coronation.

22 July 2013

The Duchess of Cambridge gives birth to a son at 4.24pm. Prince George is third in line to the throne.

The Duchess of Cambridge gives birth to a daughter at 8.34am. Princess Charlotte is fourth in line to the throne.

9 September 2015

The Queen surpasses her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, and becomes Britain’s longest ever reigning monarch.

21 April 2016

The Queen celebrates her 90th birthday.

2 August 2017

Prince Philip, aged 96, retires from his official royal duties as the Queen’s consort, having completed 22,219 solo engagements and 5,493 speeches since 1952.

6 February 2017

The Queen becomes the first British monarch to commemorate a sapphire jubilee.

20 November 2017

The Queen and Prince Philip celebrate their platinum wedding anniversary after 70 years of marriage. She is the first British monarch to do so.

23 April 2018

The Duchess of Cambridge gives birth to a second son at 11.01am. Prince Louis is fifth in line to the throne.

19 May 2018

Prince Harry, sixth in line to the throne, marries Meghan Markle at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.

The Duchess of Sussex gives birth to a son at 5.26am. Archie Mountbatten-Windsor is seventh in line to the throne.

20 November 2019

The Queen in effect suspends Prince Andrew from duties by giving him permission to “step back from public duties for the foreseeable future” after intense public reaction to a BBC Newsnight interview about his friendship with the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

8 January 2020

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex announce they will step back from their roles in public life as senior members of the royal family, and will divide their time between the UK and North America. The couple confirm they will become financially independent and cease to represent the Queen. They retain their HRH stylings but are not permitted to use them.

19 March 2020

The Queen and Prince Philip move to Windsor Castle and sequester there as a precaution as the coronavirus hits the UK. Public engagements are cancelled and Windsor Castle follows a strict sanitary protocol nicknamed HMS Bubble.

5 April 2020

The Queen gives a rare televised address to the nation , the fifth in her 68-year reign, as an unprecedented lockdown is enforced. The monarch thanks her subjects for following government rules to stay at home, praises key workers, and asks people to “take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return”. She adds: “We will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.” The broadcast is watched by an estimated 24 million viewers.

7 March 2021

In a hotly anticipated interview with Oprah Winfrey , the Duchess of Sussex claims members of the royal family had openly expressed concerns about how dark her son Archie’s skin would be and says they had tried to deny him a royal title. Both Meghan and Prince Harry make a point of praising the Queen and instead direct their criticism at the royal household. Two days later, the Queen issues a statement saying “the issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning” and that “some recollections may vary”.

9 April 2021

Prince Philip dies “peacefully” at the age of 99 at Windsor Castle, two months before his 100th birthday. The Queen, who was at his bedside, describes his death as leaving “a huge void” in her life. Philip is the longest-serving royal consort in history.

17 April 2021

Funeral of Prince Philip at Windsor. He had indicated wishes for a smaller funeral, though amendments were still made to bring his service in line with Covid regulations, including quarantine for members of his family travelling from abroad.

4 June 2021

The Duchess of Sussex gives birth to a daughter. Lilibet Mountbatten-Windsor is eighth in line to the throne.

20 October 2021

The Queen reluctantly cancels a planned two-day visit to Northern Ireland after advice from her doctors that she should rest.

The Queen spends a night at King Edward VII’s hospital after being admitted for “preliminary investigations” having cancelled a two-day trip to Northern Ireland on the advice of doctors that she should rest for a few days. A palace source said a “cautious approach” had been taken by the medical team aiding the monarch and the overnight stay was for practical reasons, adding that she returned to Windsor and was undertaking “light duties” the next day. It was her first overnight stay in hospital since 2013, when she was treated for gastroenteritis.

13 Jan 2022

The Queen further distances the monarchy from the Duke of York by stripping him of his military affiliations and royal patronages. The palace also says he will not use the style His Royal Highness in any official capacity. The move means Prince Andrew is completely removed from royal life.

15 February 2022

Prince Andrew settles the sexual assault case filed against him by Virginia Giuffre for an undisclosed sum, avoiding having to give evidence in a trial and protecting the royal family from further reputational damage.

2-5 June 2022

The Queen celebrates her platinum jubilee after a record 70 years on the throne. She crowns the historic celebrations with a last-minute appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, bringing to a close four days of festivities over a bumper bank holiday weekend. In a written message, she says she is “humbled and deeply touched that so many people have taken to the streets to celebrate”.

6 September 2022

In a break from tradition as a result of her ongoing mobility issues, the Queen appoints the 15th prime minister of her reign , Liz Truss, at Balmoral Castle rather than Buckingham Palace. The outgoing prime minister, Boris Johnson, also travels to Scotland to offer his resignation to the Queen. The following day she postpones a privy council meeting, which she was due to attend virtually, under doctors’ advice to rest.

This article was amended on 14 September 2022 because an earlier version incorrectly referred to Mitterrand as the prime minister of France. He was the president.

• Queen Elizabeth II

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Queen Elizabeth II: A lifetime of devotion and service

The funeral of Britain's longest-ruling monarch concludes a life exemplified by a personal motto of "I serve."

Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest-reigning monarch died on September 8, setting off a series of well-planned events to mark her passing. The culmination of these events is the state funeral at Westminster Abbey on Monday and her subsequent interment at King George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle. The people of the United Kingdom and leaders from around the world will gather in London to pay their respects to the late queen and bid a final farewell.

The beginning of an era

Queen Elizabeth II sat at her desk, undertaking her first duties as monarch. Just hours before, she had been Elizabeth Windsor; now she was queen of the United Kingdom, head of the Commonwealth of Nations, and sovereign of the Commonwealth realms.

It was 1952, and she was in mourning. But despite her grief, the young queen shouldered her new responsibility with grace—and her signature stiff upper lip. “She was sitting erect, fully accepting her destiny,” her private secretary later recalled. When he asked her which name she would reign under, she said “My own, of course.”

Over the seven decades that followed, Queen Elizabeth II would leave an unmistakable impression on her nation and the rest of the world. Her road to the throne was a twisted one; her reign beset by crises and social cataclysms. But her destiny was to rule through triumph and sorrow, conflict and almost unthinkable change. Along the way, she would become the longest-ruling British monarch—linking past and present and emerging as an indelible figure on the world stage.

A twist of royal fate

Born in London on April 21, 1926, Elizabeth was the granddaughter of a king and daughter of a duke—the newest member of the House of Windsor. Despite her royal pedigree, Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary didn’t seem destined to the British throne. She was third in line to the monarchy, but it was widely assumed that her uncle Edward would become king, marry, and produce royal heirs of his own. History had other plans for Elizabeth.

When she was nine years old, her uncle took the throne as Edward VIII according to plan. Less than a year later he abdicated, abandoning the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American socialite. Elizabeth’s father would become king, and suddenly Elizabeth was next in line to helm Britain’s hereditary monarchy.

The lonely princess

Elizabeth had been raised quietly along with her younger sister, Princess Margaret. But when she became heir to the throne, her future reign indelibly shaped young Elizabeth’s life. Privately educated in Buckingham Palace and overseen by a beloved governess, she was tutored in her future duties by leading scholars and in religion by the archbishop of Canterbury. She learned from her father, too: Shy, stuttering George VI nonetheless addressed his people regularly and insisted on staying in London during the Blitz of World War II.

Elizabeth was a lonely but dutiful young girl—one biographer noted that her loud cries during her christening as a baby were “the last recorded instance of her surrendering to anything like a tantrum.” But the war opened up her horizons.

In 1940, she made her first public speech at age 14, addressing children who had been separated from their parents during the war. “We children at home are full of cheerfulness and courage,” she said. “We are trying . . . to bear our own share of the danger and sadness of war.”

Love and war

The teenage princess took part in the war effort in another way, too. In 1945, Elizabeth made history when she became the first woman in the royal family to serve full-time in Britain’s military as a truck driver and mechanic. When the war ended later that year, she wore her uniform and slipped into the celebrating crowds, blending in with the revelers as she basked in the joy and relief of peace.

By then, the seeds of what would become a seven-decade romance had been sown. Elizabeth and Margaret spent much of World War II at Windsor Castle. Elizabeth’s third cousin, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark often stayed there when he was on leave from the Royal Navy. After the war, their relationship bloomed.

The dashing, blunt prince—who was exiled to England as an infant amid political strife in Greece and became naturalized as Philip Mountbatten in 1947—was an unlikely match for the reserved queen-to-be. He was relatively poor and seemingly rootless, his childhood marked by instability and trauma. But Elizabeth was captivated, reportedly falling in love at age 13. “She had a protective shell around her, and he brought her out of it,” said one observer. They married in Westminster Abbey on November 20, 1947.

The young queen

As a young wife and mother—Charles III was born in 1948 and Princess Anne followed in 1950—Elizabeth began to step into her aging father’s shoes. In 1952, she undertook a world tour in King George VI’s stead. During a brief getaway with Philip in Kenya, word arrived that her father had died. The 25-year-old was now a queen.

Elizabeth II, Britain’s 61st monarch, would reign over a vast empire and serve as head of the Church of England. At the time of her accession, Britain had more than 70 territories overseas. She was sovereign and head of state of the Commonwealth realms, including Canada and Australia, and the second Head of the Commonwealth of the Commonwealth of Nations, an association of sovereign states mostly linked to the United Kingdom through a history of British colonial rule. But her role was mostly symbolic: Though technically head of state and church, under the United Kingdom’s constitutional monarchy she possessed no ability to pass or enforce laws and was responsible for serving as a national figurehead, not a politician.

Elizabeth considered her responsibility as monarch a sacred duty. “I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong,” she said in a radio address on her 21st birthday, when her father was still king. She would spend the rest of her life living up to that promise.

A glittering coronation

As she mourned her father and acclimated to life as queen, Elizabeth prepared for perhaps the most memorable of the many royal appearances she was to make during her long life: Her coronation, held in Westminster Abbey in June 1953, hewed to time-honored tradition.

The day of the ceremony, the demure young queen, wearing an elaborate white satin dress, took a carriage from Buckingham Palace to the abbey. Inside the abbey, she was blessed and anointed with oil, decked with royal robes, and given a scepter and an orb.

Finally, after a nearly five-pound crown studded with jewels was placed on her head, she received the homage of the royal family and the peerage. Prince Philip was the first to kneel before her, pledging to be her “liege man of life and limb.”

Admiring subjects lined the streets of London to celebrate. They weren’t the only ones to take in the grandeur—at the queen’s insistence, television cameras were allowed inside the church for the first time, and the coronation was broadcast live. An estimated three-quarters of the population of Britain, more than 20 million people, tuned in for the ceremony, and millions more watched from other countries. Her coronation was the world’s first must-see television event and ushered in a new, modern monarchy.

Her changing empire

The British Empire of the queen’s forebears was changing rapidly as countries asserted their independence in the postwar years. Elizabeth continued to serve as constitutional monarch of a growing number of Commonwealth realms. And as head of the Commonwealth of Nations, she presided over a loose group of mostly former British colonies that had abandoned their colonial relationships with Britain.

After the coronation, Elizabeth and Philip embarked on an unprecedented tour of the Commonwealth. During the trip, the pair traveled more than 40,000 miles and visited 13 countries. It was the first time a reigning monarch had visited either Australia or New Zealand.

The Commonwealth would become one of Elizabeth’s most enduring projects. She embraced the association’s diversity and fostered close relationships with its leaders. The Commonwealth “bears no resemblance to the Empires of the past,” she said. “It is an entirely new conception, built on the highest qualities of the spirit of man: friendship, loyalty, and the desire for freedom and peace. To that new conception of an equal partnership of nations and races I shall give myself heart and soul every day of my life.”

Royal duties

A busy travel schedule made up just part of the queen’s royal duties. Though the British sovereign must remain externally neutral on matters of state, they retain the right to appoint prime ministers and call a general election. Although those duties are usually no more than ceremonial, they remain a key part of protocol. Monarchs can also advise—or be advised by—their prime ministers.

During her weekly visits with Prime Minister Winston Churchill in her first years as queen, Elizabeth received his tutelage and shared in his notorious sense of fun. Her private secretary recalled hearing “peals of laughter” during their audiences, and the queen wrote that she was “profoundly grateful” for his guidance during her first years as sovereign.

A “priggish schoolgirl”

Despite her outward neutrality, the queen had her detractors—and soon learned that, in times of national strife, the monarchy could be harshly criticized. The first gauntlet came after the Suez Crisis, Britain’s disastrous, short-lived invasion of Egypt in 1956. The brief fiasco resulted in a decline in the U.K.’s global status and fueled a political and economic crisis.

After Anthony Eden, the prime minister who had given the invasion the green light, resigned, Elizabeth came under fire for relying on the advice of an insular group of royal insiders in choosing Eden’s successor. In 1957, Lord Altrincham, the influential editor of the National and English Review, published sharp criticism of Elizabeth and her “tweedy” advisers. Then he launched into a personal attack on the queen herself, complaining about everything from her voice to her “priggish schoolgirl” demeanor.

The criticism—and the debate it generated—prompted the queen to make lasting changes. Though the queen kept the monarch’s prerogative to appoint prime ministers, she would defer to political parties’ choice of prime minister for the rest of her life. And, in a nod toward equality, the queen eventually did away with the custom of presenting upper-crust debutantes at court, a long-standing tradition seen by some as evidence of a privilege unfairly extended to an elite minority.

A troubled nation

British society was changing and so was the monarchy. During her reign, Elizabeth faced a seemingly endless parade of crises, from economic malaise in the 1970s and 1980s to the international woes of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic in the 21st century. But some events hit closer to home than others.

One such event was the Aberfan mine disaster in 1966, a landslide in which 144 people, many of them schoolchildren, were killed. After refusing to visit the Welsh community until more than a week after the incident, Elizabeth faced deep criticism for what some saw as leaving her subjects in the lurch. The queen reportedly considered her bungled response to the disaster to be the biggest regret of her reign.

The Troubles, a three-decades-long conflict between nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland, was another crucible. The violence left more than 3,600 dead and more than 30,000 injured. The Troubles also touched Elizabeth personally: Her second cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten was assassinated by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1979. It would take until 2011 for Elizabeth to make an official state visit to the Republic of Ireland, where she offered her sympathy to the victims of the Troubles. Despite her words—the closest a member of the Royal Family ever came to apologizing for Britain’s reprisals during the conflict—tensions continued to simmer in Northern Ireland, especially in the throes of Brexit, which threatened trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

Pomp and circumstance

As a mother of four—Prince Andrew was born in 1960 and Prince Edward in 1964—the queen hewed carefully to her symbolic duties. Every year, she presided at the State Opening of Parliament, delivering a speech to the assembled members of the Houses of Commons and Lords. (During her reign she missed only three appearances; twice while pregnant with her younger sons and once in 2022 as concerns for her health increased.)

State events were filled with pitfalls of procedure and etiquette. But for the queen, there was a practical annoyance: the weight of her nearly five-pound Imperial State Crown. “You can’t look down to read the speech, you have to take the speech up. Because if you did, your neck would break—it would fall off,” she told the BBC in a 2018 documentary. “So there are some disadvantages to crowns, but otherwise they’re quite important things.” As the queen aged, she began wearing a lighter-weight diadem to Parliament instead.

Another tradition was the royal Christmas message, a speech broadcast first by radio, then by television to a worldwide audience. During the annual messages, which her grandfather first instituted, Elizabeth offered thanks and encouragement to the people of the Commonwealth and commented on the most pressing issues of the time.

And then there were the jubilees—anniversary celebrations of the queen’s ever lengthening rule. The queen would often travel throughout the Commonwealth of Nations during jubilee years, and she used the jubilee celebrations as chances to greet her subjects and focus on the unity and progress of her nation and the Commonwealth.

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In 1969, she presided over a very personal ceremony: the investiture of her oldest son, Charles, as Prince of Wales. As her son knelt before her at Caernarfon Castle, she placed a jewel-studded coronet on his head and presented him to the Welsh people as their prince.

Family matters

Over the years, the queen survived multiple assassination attempts. But those were arguably less traumatic than the family conflicts that rocked her personal life and shook public confidence in the monarchy.

The queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, caused a furor when tabloids published photos of her cavorting with her lover in 1976. Though Margaret’s subsequent divorce scandalized the family, Elizabeth gave it her blessing. It was just a preview of the strife to come.

The fallout of the tempestuous marriage and separation of Charles III and Princess Diana led Elizabeth to refer to 1992 as her “annus horribilis,” a year that also included a catastrophic fire at Windsor Castle, the divorce of Princess Anne, and the separation of Prince Andrew and his wife, Sarah.

When Diana died in a tragic car crash while being pursued by paparazzi in 1997, her former mother-in-law was condemned for her seeming lack of emotion. But in private, the queen expressed her grief, writing to a friend that Diana’s death was “dreadfully sad.” In the aftermath, she protected and cared for her grandsons, Prince William and Prince Harry.

A stiff upper lip

Elizabeth’s troubles didn’t end then. Her son Prince Andrew was linked to infamous American financier Jeffrey Epstein and accused of sexually assaulting a minor Epstein had allegedly trafficked. Under increasing public pressure and after a widely criticized television interview in which Prince Andrew downplayed Epstein’s actions and denied any wrongdoing, he stepped down from public life in November 2019 and returned his royal patronages and military titles to the queen in January 2022.

In January 2020, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, announced they would step back from the royal family and become financially independent. They also alleged that Meghan, who is biracial, had received racist treatment from members of the royal inner circle. Though the couple’s retreat to the United States reportedly came as a blow to the queen, the monarch retained a relationship with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex from afar and was said to have been “overjoyed” that the pair named their second child Lilibet.

Another blow came in 2021, when Philip, the longest-serving royal consort in British history, died at age 99. Images of the queen sitting alone at her husband’s funeral, which was kept small to conform with the British government’s coronavirus-era restrictions, vividly illustrated the queen’s loss. But through it all, she presented a placid face to the world.

Intensely private though she was, the queen was also known to be warm and witty. She doted on her corgis and relished her summer retreats to Balmoral Castle in Scotland, where she could go on long walks and picnics, drive her Range Rover, and visit with her royal ponies. A committed horsewoman, she was a fixture at horse shows and races and could be spotted in the saddle into her 90s.

But for the woman who committed to serving her country at the age of just 25, her country was never far from her thoughts. She remained active and involved in public events into her mid-90s and never turned away from her responsibilities as queen. “These are the things that, at her age, she shouldn’t be doing, yet she’s carrying on and doing them,” her grandson Prince Harry said in a 2012 interview. So, what did the resilient queen make of her own boundary-breaking life? She reportedly joked, “I have to be seen to be believed.”

Elizabeth could find the humor in her complicated destiny. And for those who loved her—her millions of subjects, her loving family, and her fans around the world—she was much more than a figurehead. “In the days when it was a man’s world, it was very difficult for her to . . . make a difference,” her grandson Prince William said in a 2019 interview. “And she’s done it. In her own very unique, distinct way.”

To the end, she retained the calm resolve of the young woman who accepted her royal fate so many years before—a life of duty and service, accomplished as no one but Elizabeth could.

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Elizabeth II, a life on the throne

Queen Elizabeth II, head of the Commonwealth and monarch of 15 countries, ruled longer than any other monarch in British history, guiding the nation through profound changes and leaving behind a vibrant legacy. 

Issued on: 08/09/2022 - 20:04

Queen Elizabeth II, Head of the Commonwealth and monarch of 15 countries, has died. She ruled longer than any other monarch in British history, guiding the nation through profound changes and leaving behind a vibrant legacy.

In her six decades on the throne, the Queen travelled extensively, was patron of numerous charities and raised a family that includes four children, eight grandchildren and several great-grandchildren. She was credited with building national unity during times of great social and political change while also modernising the British crown.

When King George VI died of lung cancer on February 6, 1952, then Princess Elizabeth was visiting a remote wooden-stilted hotel in Kenya’s Aberdare National Park. It was while there that her husband Prince Philip broke the news of her father’s death. She was only 25.

She and the prince cancelled the rest of the trip and returned to Britain the next day. Her coronation, a spectacular ceremony viewed by millions of people on television, took place at Westminster Abbey on June 2, 1953.

Her coronation was an extraordinary fate for a girl who had never been destined to ascend to the throne.

Joining the war effort

Born on April 21, 1926, Elizabeth was only third in line to the throne after Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII), and her father Albert, the Duke of York.

She grew up at 145 Piccadilly, the London house taken by her parents (who referred to her as “Lilibet”) shortly after her birth. It was only in 1936, when her uncle Edward VIII abdicated in order to marry twice-divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson and her father acceded to the throne as King George VI, that she became heiress presumptive.

With the outbreak of World War II , Britain was regularly targeted by German bombers. The king refused to move from Buckingham Palace during the attacks but Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were moved for their safety to Windsor Castle west of London, where they spent most of the war years.

The two sisters would later join the war effort, knitting socks and making bandages for British soldiers at the front. In 1940, at the age of 14, Princess Elizabeth made her first radio speech. Addressing the children moved from London to escape the bombings, she expressed a “message of sympathy” for those separated from loved ones and “gratitude” for their hosts in the countryside.

In early 1942 she was appointed colonel-in-chief of the Grenadier Guards infantry regiment, and towards the end of the war she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army. Despite being the heir to the throne, she learned to drive and repair military vehicles. These skills would stay with her long after the war was over. She reportedly looked after her own cars and enjoyed driving on the small roads near the royal residence of Balmoral Castle in Scotland behind the wheel of a Land Rover.

The crown first

Princess Elizabeth married Prince Philip of Greece, a distant cousin who was an officer in the Royal Navy, in November 1947. She gave birth to Prince Charles a year later, who is first in line to the throne. The birth of Princess Anne would follow in 1950, that of Prince Andrew in 1960 and Prince Edward in 1964.

Even before her coronation, service to the crown rather than rearing a family appeared to be the focus for the young princess. As King George VI’s health quickly declined from 1950, she replaced him more and more regularly on official trips and ceremonies.

In 1951 she and Prince Philip embarked on a month-long trip to Canada then visited the United States, where she played host to then president Harry Truman at a formal dinner at the Canadian embassy in Washington. The next year the couple set off for a visit to Australia and New Zealand, but first stopped in Kenya – where she learned of her father’s death, news that would make her the 40th English monarch to rule since William the Conqueror.

Making her first statement to senior politicians in London two days later, she said: “By the sudden death of my dear father I am called to assume the duties and responsibilities of sovereignty … My heart is too full for me to say more to you today than I shall always work, as my father did throughout his reign, to advance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples, spread as they are all the world over.”

Above the fray

Only a few months after her coronation in 1953 she set out to complete, as Queen, the Commonwealth tour she had begun before the death of her father. She visited Bermuda, Jamaica, Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand, Australia, the Cocos Islands, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Uganda, Malta, Gibraltar and Aden.

The trip appeared to set a precedent for the rest of her reign, and revealed her aspiration to be closer to the subjects of the Commonwealth – 130 million people spread across the planet – than her royal predecessors.

The Queen completed more than 265 foreign trips, visiting around 120 countries, in her lifetime. She also hosted several generations of world leaders at Buckingham Palace: Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, John F. Kennedy, Pope John Paul II, Gerhard Schröder, George W. Bush, Jacques Chirac, Nelson Mandela, Angela Merkel and Barack Obama are only a few of the figures she has welcomed.

The Queen “[took] seriously her anointment with holy oil during her coronation”, according to biographer Sally Bedell Smith.

While being a witness to the dissolution of the British Empire, the Falklands War and the Brexit vote, the Queen was always careful to stand above the political fray.

Regular meetings between the Queen and prime minister were one of the few closely guarded secrets in British government. No prime minister has ever revealed the details of these conversations.

“She has great insights and great knowledge from all the conversations that she's had over the years,” former prime minister David Cameron told ABC on the 60th anniversary of her reign in 2013. "So she asks brilliant questions that make you think carefully."

It is estimated that more than 1 million people turned out in June 2012 to watch the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Pageant, which marked her 60 years on the throne and featured a celebratory flotilla of more than 1,000 boats sailing up the River Thames.

The Diana dilemma

While symbolising unity and continuity for her country, the Queen also faced personal family battles and tragedy. The divorces of three of her children tarnished the image of the royal family, and were played out under the unsparing gaze of the media.

Her reaction to the 1997 death of Princess Diana, Prince Charles’s former wife, caused friction between the Queen and the public. The refusal to fly the British flag at half mast over Buckingham Palace as a sign of mourning compelled the Sun tabloid to demand: “Show us there's a heart in the House of Windsor.”

The Queen was following protocol, which dictates that only the Royal Standard flies over the palace when the sovereign is in residence. Elizabeth eventually ordered the Union Flag to be lowered and paid tribute to Diana in a now-famous television address, thus regaining much of the esteem she had temporarily lost.

This break with tradition in the wake of Diana’s death was, for some, evidence that the Queen knew how to modernise the monarchy and shepherd it into the 21st century.

She also warmly welcomed Kate Middleton when she married Prince William – Prince Charles’s eldest son – in 2011 to become the Duchess of Cambridge and the first member of the middle classes to marry a future king. The young couple welcomed a new heir, Prince George, in 2013, Princess Charlotte, in 2015, and Prince Louis in 2018.

That year the Queen also gave her blessing for William’s younger brother Harry to marry divorced actress Meghan Markle, the first African-American to become part of the Windsor family. Relations with the couple soon soured, however, eventually leading the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to step down as senior members of the royal family and move to California.

Buckingham Palace was soon rocked by another scandal involving Prince Andrew’s links to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and allegations he sexually abused a teenage girl. It led the Queen to strip the prince – long dubbed her “favourite son” by the media – of his honorary military titles and royal roles in charities in January 2022.

Months earlier, in April 2021, Elizabeth II suffered her biggest blow with the death of her husband Prince Philip, her “strength and stay”, after more than 73 years of marriage.

The Queen looked increasingly frail in the wake of Philip’s death, her health dogged by a string of ailments and a bout of Covid-19. Poor health forced her to skip the traditional Queen’s Speech in May 2022 – for only the third time in her reign. Weeks later, however, she appeared on the balcony at Buckingham Palace to salute the crowd during festivities marking her Platinum Jubilee. The four days of celebrations of her 70 years on the throne underscored the nation’s deep bond with its longest reigning monarch.

A guardian of tradition and national unity, Elizabeth II passed away serenely at the age of 96, leaving behind three generations of heirs and a stable monarchy that remains central to British life.

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Queen Elizabeth II Dies at 96; Was Britain’s Longest-Reigning Monarch

She ruled for seven decades, unshakably committed to the rituals of her role amid epic social and economic change and family scandal.

The Legacy of Elizabeth II: The Media Queen

Queen elizabeth ii, the longest-reigning monarch in british history, died at the age of 96, leaving behind a legacy that blended the ancient and the modern with the help of mass media..

“It’s inevitable that I should seem a rather remote figure to many of you. When I was 21, I pledged my life to the service of our people. I am glad to have had the chance to witness and to take part in many dramatic changes in life, in this country. And with the support of my family, rededicate myself to the service of our great country.” “Queen Elizabeth II ushered the monarchy into a new and radically different era. Her reign blended the ancient and the modern. When she became queen, the country was still reeling from the memory of the Second World War. Her coronation in 1953 was the first royal event of its kind to be broadcast live on television. And it offered the British hope that something better was in the offing.” [cheering] “By then, the royal family was accustomed to broadcasting its message. In 1940, as Princess Elizabeth, the queen gave her first radio address.” “Thousands of you in this country have had to leave your homes and be separated from your fathers and mothers.” “She was age 14, and Britain faced what Churchill called its finest hour in the war against Germany. Newsreel clips showed her parents inspecting the damage of bombing attacks on London.” “And the knowledge that their king and queen are among them, they were actually caught in a raid and had to take shelter during this particular visit, has greatly heartened the people.” “The royals understood the power of imagery, and television showed what the monarchy did best. The pageantry that celebrated its position, reinforcing its stature and the vital mystique that underpinned it.” “For the first time since her coronation, we saw the great state coach, ornate, gilded, richly painted. Perhaps the world’s most beautiful anachronism.” “This was technology that molded and massaged the information that reached the public about an ancient and distant institution. In the more than 60 years of the queen’s reign, the empire shrank back essentially to its island core, and she came to preside over a different nation, far less ready to acknowledge her, far less deferential, more assertive, more wealth-driven, greedier some people thought. It became increasingly important to use mass media and television where radio had sufficed in the past to control the royal narrative and uphold its importance. Above all, she created the impression of a royal household headed by a woman beyond all reproach, whose behavior was never, ever questioned. But upholding this image was not easy.” “We interrupt this film to tell you we are getting reports that Diana,” “Princess of Wales has died” “after a car crash in Paris.” “They were apparently being pursued by paparazzi on two motorcycles.” “After the death of Princess Diana in 1997, the Queen almost lost public sympathy irrevocably, seeming very, very distant, almost aloof. She appeared reluctant to respond to a yearning among the public for her to acknowledge the national mood of mourning. It was several days before she finally went on television and addressed the nation.” “Since last Sunday’s dreadful news, we have seen throughout Britain and around the world an overwhelming expression of sadness at Diana’s death.” “Then, most tellingly of all, she stood in front of the gates of Buckingham Palace as the funeral cortege went by and lowered her head in acknowledgment of Diana’s immense popularity. Royal heads of state do not generally bow to other people, other people bow to them. And here she was in public, her head bowed, and that helped the monarchy begin to restore its image. As information became more readily available on computer screens and smartphones, the royal family established its own website. It took an account on Twitter. It used YouTube to broadcast its bigger moments.” [cheering] “You would find scripted, cautiously laid-out material that was designed overwhelmingly to create and reinforce the impression that this was a family at the service of the nation itself.” “Hip, hip, hooray!” “They wanted to make sure that they didn’t say the wrong things, that they kept their mystique. But that became harder and harder to do, and the junior members of the royal family made that harder to achieve. Prince Harry, her grandson, and Meghan Markle had decided to leave the royal family and set up a separate life for themselves in California. They went on to make various accusations against the royal family during a television interview with Oprah Winfrey.” “Months when I was pregnant, we have in tandem the conversation of he won’t be given security. He’s not going to be given a title and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born.” “The impact of the new technology had been reversed. The monarchy now was the target from within its own ranks. This happened about the same time as Prince Philip was in hospital, and it seemed like a double challenge to the queen. But as much as she needed to communicate, she remains sparing in her public utterances. Less was always more.” “It is with deep sorrow that Her Majesty the Queen announces the death of her beloved husband, his Royal Highness the Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.” “The death of Prince Philip was portrayed as a national tragedy. The couple had been married for 73 years. It was a relationship that had fused with the image of the monarchy. There was always the queen leading the way, with Philip a step behind as protocol required. Emotionally, though, he was at her side. The loss of her husband produced a tremendous outpouring of public sympathy. She responded at first with seclusion, then with the resumption of royal duties.” [laughing] “By and large, the queen’s tenure modernized the royal family without shedding its extraordinary privilege. It changed the way the world perceived the ancient institution and the way the institution reacted to the world. But at its heart, the monarchy remained ambivalent, bereft of executive power, reigning only with the tacit assent of its subjects, yet central to Britain’s sense of itself. Looking back, one is tempted to think, What was it? When did the queen define how she saw her role? And you could probably say in one speech in 1957.” “I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice, but I can do something else. I can give you my heart.” “This would be her legacy as her reign came to an end, the longest rule of any British monarch.”

By Alan Cowell

Listen to This Article

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LONDON — Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest-serving monarch, whose broadly popular seven-decade reign survived tectonic shifts in her country’s post-imperial society and weathered successive challenges posed by the romantic choices, missteps and imbroglios of her descendants, died on Thursday at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, her summer retreat. She was 96.

The royal family announced her death online, saying she had died peacefully. The announcement did not specify a cause.

Her death elevated her eldest son, Charles, to the throne as King Charles III. In a statement, he said:

“The death of my beloved Mother, Her Majesty the Queen, is a moment of the greatest sadness for me and all members of my family.

“We mourn profoundly the passing of a cherished Sovereign and a much-loved Mother. I know her loss will be deeply felt throughout the country, the Realms and the Commonwealth, and by countless people around the world.”

The New Royal Line of Succession

The death of Queen Elizabeth II has elevated her son Charles to the throne, with Prince William next in line.

Earlier Thursday, Buckingham Palace said that the queen had been placed under medical supervision and that her doctors were “concerned” about her health. She had remained at Balmoral for much of the summer. On Wednesday evening, she abruptly canceled a virtual meeting with members of her Privy Council after her doctors advised her to rest.

A day earlier, she met with the incoming Conservative prime minister , Liz Truss — the 15th prime minister the queen dealt with during her reign — though in doing so, because of infirmity, she broke with longstanding tradition by receiving her at Balmoral rather than at Buckingham Palace.

Elizabeth’s long years as sovereign were a time of enormous upheaval, in which she sought to project and protect the royal family as a rare bastion of permanence in a world of shifting values.

At her coronation on June 2, 1953 , a year after she acceded to the throne, she surveyed a realm emerging from an empire of such geographical reach that it was said the sun never set on it. But by the new century, as she navigated her advancing years with increasing frailty, the frontiers had shrunk back. As Britain prepared to leave the European Union in 2020, a clamor for independence in Scotland was rekindled, potentially threatening to narrow her horizons yet further.

Her coronation was the first royal event of its kind to be broadcast almost in full on television. But it was a token of the changes — and global fascination — that accompanied her time as queen that her reign became the subject of a Hollywood movie and a blockbuster series on Netflix , while her family’s travails offered voluminous grist to the busy mill of social media.

Just as telling in the chronicles of her rule, Britons’ unquestioning deference to the crown had been supplanted by a gamut of emotions ranging from loyal and often affectionate tolerance to unbridled hostility. The monarchy was forced, more than ever, to justify its existence in the face of often skeptical public attention and scrutiny.

Elizabeth, though, remained determinedly committed to the hallmark aloofness, formality and pageantry by which the monarchy has long sought to preserve the mystique that underpinned its existence and survival. Her courtly and reserved manner changed little.

As the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 spread to Britain, forcing people to suspend their normal lives and social ways, the queen left Buckingham Palace , in central London, for Windsor Castle, west of the capital, a move that recalled the decades she had spent inspiring genuine affection among many Britons.

It was to Windsor that she and her younger sister, Margaret, were sent to escape the threat of German bombing after the outbreak of World War II in 1939. It was from Windsor, too, that she made her first radio broadcast as a princess in 1940, age 14, ostensibly directed at British children who had been evacuated to North America, according to her biographer Ben Pimlott, but also intended to sway official thinking in Washington, which had not yet entered the war.

“My sister, Margaret Rose, and I feel so much for you, as we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most of all,” Elizabeth said then.

In 2020, too, she sought to equate her plight with that of her subjects. “Many of us will need to find new ways of staying in touch with each other and making sure that loved ones are safe,” she said in a statement released after she and her husband, Prince Philip, arrived at Windsor. “I am certain that we are up to that challenge. You can be assured that my family and I stand ready to play our part.”

On April 5, 2020 , in a televised address that evoked her 1940 broadcast, she urged her subjects to fight the virus with the same bulldog tenacity that wartime Britons had shown. It was only the fourth special broadcast of her monarchy outside of her scheduled TV appearances at Christmas.

“I hope in the years to come everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge,” she said. “And those who come after us will say that the Britons of this generation were as strong as any.”

She added, “We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return. We will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again,” the last line a direct reference to a wartime song by Vera Lynn , “We’ll Meet Again.”

In 2017, Elizabeth celebrated the 70th anniversary of her marriage to Philip , whom she first met when he was a teenager in the 1930s. Until his death last April , Philip had settled into an unusual role, usually two steps behind his wife , providing her with stoic support, even if his occasional tactless comments hurt his image.

Despite many reports of early peccadilloes on Philip’s part — hidden from public view with the help of cooperative newspaper barons — their bonds endured, a throwback to earlier decades of more durable relationships. And his death, their second son, Prince Andrew, said, “left a huge void in her life.”

Some predicted that Elizabeth would recede into the shadows after Philip’s death, much as Queen Victoria did after the death of her husband, Prince Albert. But she surprised many by re-emerging as a spry presence in public life, entertaining world leaders at a summit meeting in Cornwall in June 2021 and playing host to Bill Gates and other businesspeople at Windsor Castle after a climate-change investment conference.

Still, the hectic schedule took a toll. Elizabeth was photographed using a walking stick, a rare concession to her stiff knees. She was kept overnight in a London hospital in October 2021 after what aides said was an episode of exhaustion. Few doubted the effect of the loss of Philip, who had been a stabilizing force in the family.

Elizabeth’s own children seemed less immune to marital calamity.

In 1992, Prince Charles and his immensely popular wife, Diana, agreed to separate, as did Prince Andrew and his wife, Sarah Ferguson. Elizabeth’s second child, Princess Anne, divorced her husband, Mark Phillips, the same year. Coupled with a series of other upheavals, the queen labeled 1992 her “annus horribilis.”

But worse was to come.

In 1997, the death of Diana in a car crash in Paris wrote some of the darkest chapters of Elizabeth’s reign, and for a while the monarchy itself seemed threatened by a huge wave of public support for Diana that left the queen seeming cold and emotionally estranged from her subjects.

The monarchy survived, but well into the 21st century new challenges emerged.

In 2019, Elizabeth was dragged unceremoniously and against all previous rules of protocol into political machinations over Brexit , as Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union was known, a debate from which she would once have remained remote.

In the same year, Prince Andrew became embroiled in scandal after giving a disastrous television interview in which he seemed unaware of the toxic impact of a friendship with Jeffrey Epstein , the convicted American sexual predator. Accused of sexual impropriety with a teenage girl introduced to him by Mr. Epstein — an allegation he has denied — the prince, also known as the Duke of York, withdrew from public life that November. (In January this year, he was forced by Buckingham Palace to relinquish his military titles and royal charities, a stinging rebuke by the royal family a day after a federal judge in New York allowed a sexual abuse case against him to go ahead.)

In her annual Christmas address to the nation in 2019, the queen described the year as “bumpy.”

It was about to get bumpier.

In 2020, in a move that was perhaps as humiliating as any family convulsion the queen had confronted, her grandson Prince Harry, the sixth in line to the throne, caught her and the rest of the family off guard when he and his American wife, Meghan Markle, announced plans to “step back” from royal duties — a move that some commentators compared to the decision in 1936 by the queen’s uncle, King Edward VIII, to abdicate so that he could proceed with plans to marry the American Wallis Simpson.

Yet far from carving out a “progressive new role within this institution,” as they had hopefully declared, the young couple were forced into a hard exit, agreeing in a severance deal with Buckingham Palace to give up their loftiest royal titles, forgo state funding and repay at least $3 million in taxpayer money that had been used to refurbish their official residence on the grounds of Windsor Castle.

As the new decade unfolded and the end of Elizabeth’s reign approached, it seemed as if the House of Windsor was under assault from within as never before, a process compounded with spectacular global fanfare by a two-hour television encounter between Meghan and Harry and Oprah Winfrey .

During the show, broadcast from California first in the United States, then a day later in Britain, the couple assailed an unidentified member of the royal household as racist. Ms. Winfrey said later that Prince Harry had assured her that he and his wife had not been referring to the queen or Prince Philip. In the interview , Ms Markle said that she had felt so isolated in her unaccustomed royal role that she had actively contemplated suicide.

Buckingham Palace was taken aback, and it responded with a terse, 61-word statement that sought to contain the drama within the familiar royal palisade of privacy. The royal family was “stunned to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan,” the statement said.

“The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning,” it said. “While some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately.”

Despite the challenges, the queen pressed ahead with her Platinum Jubilee celebration in June this year to commemorate her seven decades as sovereign with a four-day public holiday, complete with a star-studded televised concert outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. But in the run-up to the occasion, the twin themes of failing health and family frictions seemed to blur together.

In February, she tested positive for the coronavirus, and in May she was forced by what Buckingham Palace called “episodic mobility issues” to cancel an appearance in Parliament to deliver a speech setting out the government’s legislative agenda — one of her most important public ceremonies.

It was the first time in almost 60 years that she had missed the event. She had been absent from it only twice before during her reign because of pregnancies with princes Andrew and Edward, her youngest child.

Significantly, Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, read the speech on her behalf, with the queen’s bejeweled ceremonial crown — the Imperial State Crown — placed next to him, as if to assert her symbolic presence.

Just days earlier, her office had announced that when the royal family appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace during the proposed Platinum Jubilee — regarded as the most potent of royal photo opportunities — Prince Andrew, Prince Harry and his wife Meghan would not be present.

Ostensibly, their exclusions were because the monarch wished to limit attendance to “those members of the royal family who are currently undertaking official public duties on behalf of the Queen,” in the words of a palace spokesman. But many Britons interpreted the move as a snub to family members who had brought unwelcome comment and unflattering headlines to the closing years of the queen’s reign.

Prince Harry is one of eight grandchildren who, along with Elizabeth’s four children, survive the queen, as do 12 great-grandchildren.

A Dazzling Parade

On Sept. 9, 2015, Elizabeth surpassed Queen Victoria as her country’s longest-serving monarch, and after the death of Thailand’s king on Oct. 13, 2016, she became the modern world’s longest reigning. Even in her older years, her subjects saw her as unusually robust and at ease with the pageantry of her office, as she was during a four-day celebration in June 2012 commemorating the 60th anniversary of her attaining the crown.

The only other British monarch to celebrate a diamond jubilee was Queen Victoria, Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother, whose reign lasted 63 years and seven months before her death in 1901.

Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee, which included a dazzling pageant of 1,000 vessels on the River Thames through London, coaxed forth an outpouring of public enthusiasm that seemed likely to cement the royal family’s place in British society, despite questions about the monarchy’s future. Although Prince Charles, Elizabeth’s eldest son, was her direct heir, many Britons seemed more drawn to Charles’s own son Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, who married a commoner , Kate Middleton, in April 2011, to much public acclaim.

The only departure from the tight choreography of the jubilee events was the illness of Prince Philip, who was 90 at the time. He was taken to a hospital with a bladder infection during the celebrations after spending hours in the biting cold atop the royal barge.

There had been concerns about the queen’s health ever since she missed church services on Christmas Day in 2016 and on New Year’s Day in 2017 because of what Buckingham Palace described as a “heavy cold.” Those absences were the first time in about 30 years that she had missed a holiday service.

The queen made her first public appearance of 2017 on Jan. 8, after a month’s absence. The next month, she celebrated her sapphire jubilee, becoming the first British monarch to reign for 65 years.

Elizabeth’s courtly and reserved manner changed little as Britain shed its empire abroad and was transformed at home, from a deferential and self-doubting nation, impoverished by World War II, into a brash, wealth-driven, less respectful and more self-centered place.

In the years after the death of her father, King George VI , in 1952, she witnessed — and exploited — the rise of television as it became the overwhelming vehicle of national communication for a generation obsessed with celebrity. Her coronation in 1953 was the first in Britain to be broadcast in almost its entirety on television. (The BBC had televised the royal procession through the streets of London in 1937 for the coronation of King George VI.) In 1997, the monarchy started its own website .

In a further leap into realms once undreamed of, in 2007 her traditional Christmastime message was broadcast on a royal channel on YouTube — 75 years after Elizabeth’s grandfather became the first British monarch to broadcast a similar holiday message by radio. And in 2018, TV viewers were treated to a relaxed, unscripted monarch when she appeared in her first on-camera interview for a documentary about her coronation. (In deference to palace sensitivities, the interview was described as a “conversation.”)

In 2009, the royal family opened a Twitter account , which currently has about 4.7 million followers.

The Nation’s Anchor

So enduring was Elizabeth’s grip on the nation’s supreme office that her reign overlapped the tenures of 15 British prime ministers — from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss — and 14 American presidents , from Harry S. Truman to Joseph R. Biden Jr. (She met with all except Lyndon B. Johnson.)

Although her role was largely ceremonial as a constitutional monarch without executive power, her supporters maintained that she played an important, less tangible role as the nation’s anchor, held in place by an unspoken consensus between queen and subjects.

And while she wielded no formal political power, her weekly audiences with prime ministers gave her insight into the nation’s business, and her appearances at international gatherings were seen as enhancing British prestige.

There were occasions when her presence even strengthened official policy. In June 2012, in what generations had been raised to see as the most improbable of encounters, the queen shook hands with Martin McGuinness , a onetime commander of the Irish Republican Army, a very public symbol of commitment to peace in Northern Ireland.

The setting alone, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, evoked three decades of sectarian strife that drew the British forces, of which the queen was the nominal commander in chief, into a fight with I.R.A. guerrillas seeking a united Ireland, before the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998 ended the so-called Troubles.

Critics nonetheless called the monarchy a costly and unloved anachronism, drawing its wealth from a nation that never formally assented to the royals’ luxurious lifestyle in palaces and castles. The queen alone maintained residences at Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and the Sandringham estate in Norfolk as well as at Balmoral.

For the paparazzi and the tabloid news media, some of the royal family’s more flamboyant members offered fertile ground. In 1992, photographs appeared in British newspapers showing Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, who had separated from Prince Andrew months earlier, topless and entwined with a wealthy American businessman.

In 2012, Charles’s son Prince Harry, then third in line to the throne, was photographed cavorting naked at a party in Las Vegas. He had earlier been seen wearing Nazi dress at a costume party . Later, a French magazine published photographs of the former Ms. Middleton, now the Duchess of Cambridge, sunbathing topless. The episodes raised questions about the limits of royal privacy and threatened to revive old strains with the news media that had reached their nadir during the doomed marriage of Charles and Diana.

Married in 1981, the couple fell into adulterous liaisons that led to divorce in 1996. But in that time, Diana, Princess of Wales — trailed by paparazzi — became a glamorous royal idol with a human touch. Tony Blair, who was prime minister when she died, called her the “people’s princess.”

The death of the princess, chased by paparazzi, in a car crash in Paris on Aug. 31, 1997, convulsed Britain in a bout of public grief that left the queen isolated at Balmoral.

For days the monarch refused to acknowledge publicly the mourning and the mountainous floral tributes in the streets and parks of London in honor of the woman whose image and behavior had left the queen looking remote and old-fashioned.

Diana’s relationship with Elizabeth had been cold. Her zest for contact with the public had seemed only to highlight the royal family’s contrasting reputation as emotionally distant and dysfunctional. The moments after Diana’s death became grist for a 2006 movie, “The Queen,” starring Helen Mirren, that portrayed Elizabeth as detached and slow to accept the crisis breaking around her.

Clinging to regal protocols, the queen at first refused to allow the Union Jack to fly at half-staff over Buckingham Palace, insisting that her role as a grandmother was to comfort the princess’ sons, William and Harry, in private.

But her initial refusal to address the nation or even leave her Scottish redoubt left the monarchy balanced on a knife edge as newspapers led Diana’s myriad mourners in a chorus of unparalleled disapproval, threatening to rupture the public consent vital to the monarchy’s survival. Finally — too late, some said — the queen relented.

She traveled from Balmoral to London, moving among crowds of mourners, and, in an address broadcast to the nation from Buckingham Palace on Sept. 5, 1997 — five days after the car crash in Paris — the queen spoke in remarkably personal terms for a British monarch, praising Diana as “an exceptional and gifted human being.”

“I for one believe that there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death,” the queen said.

Unusually, the broadcast was live, showing the queen’s advisers’ awareness of the 24-hour rolling news era. Diana, the queen said, “never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness.” For the first time in Elizabeth’s reign, Britons saw their monarch come close to an apology.

“We have all been trying in our different ways to cope,” she said. “It is not easy to express a sense of loss, since the initial shock is often succeeded by a mixture of other feelings: disbelief, incomprehension, anger and concern for those who remain.”

And, in what was perhaps the most difficult and heavily symbolic gesture, the queen, flanked by members of the royal family, emerged on foot from the black wrought-iron gates of Buckingham Palace on Sept. 6, as the gun carriage bearing Diana’s coffin passed by on its way to Westminster Abbey. At that moment, the queen bowed her head in tacit acknowledgment of a woman who had stolen Britain’s heart, and thus had threatened its queen.

A Monarchy Restored

The funeral was a turning point. Elizabeth had weathered the ferocious storm of public disapproval and quietly went out of her way to ensure that in the future the British people would be drawn at least symbolically into her life. She held huge parties in 2002, 2006 and 2012 to celebrate her golden jubilee, her 80th birthday and her diamond jubilee. The closely choreographed celebrations spoke to the balance she sought to strike between a cautious opening to the public and the aloofness of her role and personality.

Even when confronted with unscripted departures, as on a state visit to the United States in 2007, when President George W. Bush almost misspoke in her presence to imply that she might be two centuries older than she was, she maintained her composure with just a regal glance.

“She gave me a look that only a mother could give a child,” Mr. Bush said after the queen peered quizzically at him on a shared podium.

Her personal behavior, unlike that of most of her family, was beyond reproach, never tainted by even the remotest hint of scandal. Elizabeth offered her subjects a mirror of the high moral standards that many might aspire to but most generally fail to attain.

Throughout Elizabeth’s reign, social upheaval forced changes in the monarchy. But she never rushed to adopt them, strengthening the sense of a regal continuum that existed in a world apart, functioning according to an opaque code to which most Britons were not privy. Her reluctance to rush into new ways reinforced her critics’ depiction of the monarchy as irrelevant and out of touch — an expensive throwback to a distant history of bejeweled royals disporting themselves in palaces and castles at the public’s expense.

Yet her public image was managed and massaged as adroitly as that of any movie star or corporate executive.

In a way, the mystique of the monarchy was no surprise: The queen was born into a world apart. She never attended school or classes; she was brought up and educated at home by nannies, governesses and private tutors.

From the beginning, her encounters with the public were scripted and limited. From the moment her uncle King Edward VIII abdicated in a scandal over his relationship with the American divorcée Wallis Simpson in 1936 — when the future queen was 10 — she entered a line of succession that set her far apart from Britons as a figurehead-in-waiting.

When her father, King George VI, died, she was 25, a young woman whose known interests were limited to horseback riding and tending to her entourage of corgis .

But it was that upbringing, steeped in the values of a monarchy that had faced none of the pressures of the television era and postwar Britain, that made her often seem grudgingly slow to adapt to a world much different from the one she had been born into.

The Young Princess

Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, daughter of the Duchess and Duke of York, was born on Bruton Street in central London in the early hours of April 21, 1926. At her birth she was third in line to the throne after her uncle and father, but the prospect of her attaining the crown seemed remote.

She was born into the House of Windsor, a member of a dynasty that had been known as the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha until the name was changed in 1917, during World War I, to avoid its connotations of Britain’s German enemies.

The family soon moved to an aristocratic townhouse on a thoroughfare called Piccadilly, and the young princess lived in a top-floor suite of rooms while the family was in London. As a toddler, she spent much time at Scottish castles in Glamis and Balmoral. But she soon became used to the family ways (which would later extend to her own style of motherhood) when her parents left for a six-month official tour to Panama, Fiji, New Zealand and Australia.

From age 7 until just before her marriage in 1947, Princess Elizabeth, and Princess Margaret Rose, were looked after by a governess, Marion Crawford, known as Crawfie, who came to be seen as a traitor to the royals when she published her memoirs in 1950 against the family’s wishes.

The young Princess Elizabeth was a keen pony rider. Little more was known of her by the public. And her young life, already isolated, changed significantly after King George V, her grandfather, died in early 1936, and when her uncle abdicated later that year, elevating her father to the throne. From then on, her life was that of the first person in line to the throne.

Much later, Princess Margaret recalled asking her whether their father’s coronation in 1937 — when Elizabeth was 11 — meant that the older sister would one day be queen. “Yes, I suppose it does,” the young Elizabeth replied.

But the world was about to change in a much bigger way. With the outbreak of war in 1939, the princesses moved to Windsor Castle to avoid German bombing raids at a time when many other children were evacuated from the cities to safer places. Indeed, Elizabeth made her first recorded broadcast in 1940, at age 14, beamed to British children evacuated to North America and elsewhere.

According to Mr. Pimlott, her biographer, Elizabeth shot her first stag in the Scottish hills near Balmoral at 16 and hunted with dogs in Gloucestershire a year later. But she did not attend a college or university, where she might have met other teenagers. Rather, she led a royal life, inspecting the soldiers of the Grenadier Guards as their honorary colonel in 1942, her first public engagement. By 18 she was performing constitutional duties on behalf of her father, when he traveled to Italy in 1944.

The only time she is known to have experienced communal education was in early 1945 — shortly before the end of World War II — when she was enrolled briefly in the Auxiliary Territorial Service as an honorary subaltern, training in the skills of driving and maintaining military vehicles. Photographs of her in her drab military uniform became part of the royal propaganda effort to raise wartime morale — and to show the upper crust doing its part.

For the public and for her family, the main issue that arose with the end of hostilities and the beginning of a new era in postwar Britain was the question of whom she would marry — not a matter to be settled by common trial and error.

The most suitable candidate was deemed by the princess and her courtiers to be Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, the son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg. The royal genealogy traces both Elizabeth’s and Philip’s families to Queen Victoria, just one of several ways in which the prince and princess were related within a narrow coterie of European royalty.

The two had met in the 1930s. Prince Philip, five years her senior, was building a reputation — which he maintained for many years to come — as something of a playboy . But he also had what military people called a “good war” with the British fleet in the Mediterranean and the Pacific.

In 1947, Princess Elizabeth turned 21 during a royal tour of South Africa, then part of the British Commonwealth, and, in a radio broadcast to Britain’s empire and former colonies, she declared to her listeners that “my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”

She continued, “But I shall not have strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in it with me, as I now invite you to do.”

It was a theme that would recur, as in her Christmas address in 1957, five years after she became queen: “I cannot lead you into battle, I do not give you laws or administer justice, but I can do something else,” she said. “I can give you my heart.”

On both occasions, Elizabeth seemed to acknowledge the frail limits of a constitutional monarch: a ceremonial head of state with no real political power, the scion of a dynasty rooted in 19th-century Germany whose vast wealth and palatial privileges survived, ultimately, only with the public’s consent.

Part of that consent is derived from pageantry, and few people are more skilled in pageantry than the British royals. On Nov. 20, 1947, Princess Elizabeth married Prince Philip, and despite the parlous state of the postwar British economy, the wedding offered a panoply of crowned heads and a statement of continuity.

A Queen at 25

Elizabeth was 22 when Prince Charles was born a year later. In his early years, he was treated much the same way his mother had been as an infant. When his father was stationed on naval duties in Malta, his mother flew out to join him. After five weeks in Malta, she returned to London and spent several days attending to other business (including a day at the horse races, an abiding passion) before being reunited with Charles at Sandringham, in Norfolk, where her parents were also staying.

In 1950, Princess Elizabeth had her second child, Princess Anne, but the pace of her life as a representative of the royal family was quickening. In the fall of 1951, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip toured Canada and the United States before embarking on what was supposed to be a lengthy trip to Australia and New Zealand, starting with a stop in what was still at the time the British colony of Kenya.

And it was there, far from her own land, that she became queen. Back home, her father, King George VI, had cancer, and in September 1951 his left lung was removed. He died in his sleep and was found dead in his bed on Feb. 6, 1952, but Elizabeth, heir to the throne, was at a remote Kenyan game-viewing camp called Treetops.

Princess Elizabeth — now Queen Elizabeth II, under the rule of automatic succession — returned from the camp to a lodge , unaware for four hours because of communications difficulties that her father had died and that she was Britain’s new sovereign. She was 25.

The coronation came later, on June 2, 1953, a moment described by Princess Margaret as like a phoenix rising from the ashes — the emblem of postwar recovery. As if to mark the occasion, news broke that two climbers from a British-led expedition had been the first to conquer Mount Everest .

The coronation was an extraordinary mixture of ancient ritual and contemporary technology. Across the land, Britons huddled in front of early-model black-and-white television sets in veneered cabinets or celebrated with street parties.

With more than 8,000 guests at Westminster Abbey, the ceremony culminated in the secret anointing of the new monarch under a canopy that kept her beyond the view of the congregation and the cameras. Then, the newly crowned queen returned to her palace, carrying scepter and orb, with almost 30,000 troops, 29 bands and 27 carriages to accompany her. Three million people lined the route as her golden horse-drawn state coach rolled by.

Within months of the coronation, the queen and her husband were again on tour, resuming and expanding the itinerary abandoned after the death of the king.

The marathon tour, from Bermuda to Australia, was a turning point, as much in the adulation that greeted the new queen as in the history of the empire her forebears had ruled. In 1957, as that empire unraveled, Ghana became independent, as India had 10 years earlier.

The royal family came under more scrutiny, too: Princess Margaret for her romantic interests, Prince Philip for an increasingly public knack for diplomatic gaffes.

Television was advancing: In 1957, for the first time, the queen agreed to televise her annual Christmas Day message, previously broadcast by radio.

The country was changing, too, as its empire shrank. Across the Channel, the European Union began to germinate in the late 1950s, offering a new set of alliances and rivalries to challenge the declining empire. In 1965, the white minority regime in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) defied the queen and her country by unilaterally declaring independence.

At home, the queen’s subjects were looking for new icons and idols.

A Brewing Storm

The 1960s heralded “Swinging London,” with a new permissiveness and culture built around bands like the Beatles ( honored by the queen in 1965 ) and the Rolling Stones. Satirical television shows broke long-held taboos to lampoon the monarchy, leading the queen’s image managers to cooperate with the makers of a long BBC documentary that portrayed the royals in a more favorable light.

In the 1970s, the pendulum swung back to economic malaise, with the winter of discontent and the three-day workweek.

The queen had two more sons: Prince Andrew in 1960 and Prince Edward in 1964. Her children were introduced to a different world from the one their mother had known when she was growing up. Prince Charles attended the physically rigorous Gordonstoun boarding school in Scotland and went on to Trinity College, Cambridge.

But something in the public perception of the monarchy was shifting. The tone of royal reporting was becoming more aggressive, just as the royal family showed itself as vulnerable to the strains and stresses consuming ordinary people in a land where traditional moral values had been battered by the permissiveness of the 1960s.

Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon, divorced in 1978 — the first royal marriage in the queen’s immediate entourage to founder. In 1979, the royal family was rocked by the death of Lord Louis Mountbatten , who was murdered by an I.R.A. bomb aboard his fishing boat, an attack that left three others dead. Known to the royals as “Uncle Dickie,” Lord Mountbatten was the queen’s second cousin, Prince Philip’s uncle and a mentor to Prince Charles, who later described him as “the grandfather I never had.”

And perhaps the biggest storm to buffet the queen began to brew on the sparkling day in July 1981 when the family took into its ranks, possibly with some reluctance, a newcomer who was to bring turmoil to the royal hearth: Lady Diana Spencer.

As R.W. Apple Jr. reported in The New York Times : “The 2,500 guests inside Christopher Wren’s Baroque masterpiece, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the hundreds of thousands who watched the wedding party ride in magnificent horse-drawn carriages from Buckingham Palace to the cathedral and back, and the 700 million television viewers around the world witnessed a fairy tale come to life: the handsome Prince Charles in naval uniform marrying the lovely 20-year-old Diana Spencer, daughter of an earl, amid the sort of splendor the modern world has all but forgotten.”

The fairy-tale moment did not endure, and by the time the couple’s emotional complexities had spilled over into lurid tabloid coverage of their estrangement and dalliances, the queen confronted a remarkable challenge. The center of gravity of public sympathy had shifted away. The nation was increasingly divided between supporters of her son and those of her daughter-in-law — a contest the unhappy couple played out through leaks and innuendo that appeared in the print and broadcast news media.

“The royal family, it came to be said, was not a model of domestic virtue and private happiness,” Mr. Pimlott wrote, “but, in the modern jargon, dysfunctional.” No longer was royalty shielded from what he called “public prurience” and “a press which now had almost no incentive to give the royal family the loyal protection it had enjoyed since the 19th century.”

The challenges did not stop there. In November 1992, a fire broke out at the queen’s beloved Windsor Castle, causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage. She faced criticism for her exemption from paying the same income tax as her subjects. And royal marriages were breaking. As the catalog of problems expanded, the queen noted famously that “1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure.”

“In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents,” she said, “it has turned out to be an ‘annus horribilis.’”

The queen responded with a familiar blend of aloofness and belated acknowledgment that the public demanded changes from her.

On With the Show

The “annus horribilis” drew to an appropriately messy end when, on Dec. 9, 1992, Charles and Diana announced their separation after 11 years of increasingly unhappy marriage. The course had been set for much greater division and tragedy with Diana’s death in 1997, the event that shook the monarchy to the core.

It was a measure of the queen’s determination to protect and promote her rule that she not only endured the public challenge but did so in a way that cemented rather than diminished public acceptance of her position and her manner.

Despite the aftershocks of Diana’s death — including Charles’s subsequent public relationship with his longtime mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, whom he married in 2005 and who now bears the title the Queen Consort — Elizabeth continued with unshakable commitment to the rituals of her rule.

Huge summer garden parties filled the grounds of Buckingham Palace with hundreds of invited guests. At such gatherings, the queen would be escorted by aides and introduced to selected guests she had never met before, many of whom marveled at her diminutive stature and gracious manner. The queen and her family continued to honor citizens with awards, medals and titles.

Foreign dignitaries were received and treated to state dinners and regal rides in gilded carriages along the Mall stretching from Buckingham Palace to Trafalgar Square. But other lessons seemed to have been learned. If this was to be an era of a more public monarchy, then the queen would control the pace of change, permitting a smidgen more access in a more modern manner, without abandoning the aloofness that underpinned the monarchy.

The extent of her success was clear by 2002 when, at 76, Elizabeth celebrated 50 years as queen with a four-day national holiday. She closed out the occasion with what Warren Hoge of The Times called “ the traditional wave from the balcony of Buckingham Palace as choirs sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory.’”

“There was no doubt that the emotional and institutional hold on the nation that her presence represents had been emphatically revalidated,” Mr. Hoge wrote.

The shift from the closed early days of the monarchy was clear as one million people thronged the parks outside the gates of Buckingham Palace to watch a rock and pop concert on the palace grounds that was projected on giant screens. Brian May, the lead guitarist of the band Queen, played the national anthem, “God Save the Queen,” in a live solo performance from the roof of the palace.

“The black-and-white newsreels from 1952 show a country very different from the one in which we live today,” Tony Blair, then the prime minister, said in toasting the queen in 2002 at a formal lunch in the 17th-century Guildhall. “You have adapted the monarchy successfully to the modern world, and that has been a challenge because it is a world that can pay scant regard to tradition and often values passing fashions above enduring faith.”

The queen replied, “It has been a pretty remarkable 50 years by any standards.”

Part of the public sympathy for the queen in 2002 may have derived from her personal losses: Her mother and her sister , Margaret, both died that year. And, although her role precluded direct political intervention, she used her position deftly to offer comfort to those facing loss.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she sent a message to New Yorkers, telling them, “Grief is the price we pay for love.” And after the attacks in her own capital on July 7, 2005, in which four suicide bombers killed 52 people, she told Londoners, “Atrocities such as these simply reinforce our sense of community, our humanity and our trust in the rule of law.”

Mark Landler and Mark A. Walsh contributed reporting.

An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly at one point to Princess Anne. As correctly stated elsewhere, she was Queen Elizabeth’s second child, not her third. The earlier version misstated at one point the length of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It was seven decades, not “almost seven decades.” (As noted elsewhere, there had been a celebration in June “to commemorate her seven decades as sovereign.”)

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated the number of United States presidents with whose tenure Queen Elizabeth’s reign overlapped. It was 14, not 13.

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Queen Elizabeth II

• Early Life, Princess, and World War II
• Occupation: Queen of the United Kingdom
• Reign: February 6, 1952 – present
• Born: April 21, 1926 in Mayfair, London, United Kingdom
• Died: September 8, 2022 in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, United Kingdom
• Best known for: The longest-reigning British monarch

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• Life as Queen, Family, Politics
• Major Events in Reign and Interesting Facts

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The British Royal Family Tree

A comprehensive who's who of the royal family, from the first Windsors to Princess Lilibet, and every cousin in between.

King George V, 1865-1936

The grandson of Queen Victoria—and great-grandfather to King Charles III—George V was born third in the line of succession and did not expect to become king. That changed after his elder brother Prince Albert Victor died in 1892. George ascended the throne after the death of his father in 1910, serving as King of the United Kingdom and Emperor of India until his death in 1936.

Queen Mary, 1867-1953

King Charles's great-grandmother Queen Mary was royal by birth (her great-grandfather was King George III). Despite technically being a princess of the German Duchy of Teck, she was born and raised in England. She was first engaged to marry Prince Albert Victor, the eldest son of King Edward VII and her second cousin once removed, but after Albert’s sudden death in 1892, Mary agreed to marry his brother, the future King George V. The couple married in 1893, and had six children, two of whom would become reigning monarchs. She died in 1953, one year after her son, King George VI.

King Edward VIII, 1894-1972

The eldest son of George V and Queen Mary, Edward became king after his father’s death in 1936, but threw the country into crisis months later when he proposed to Wallis Simpson , an American divorcée. As monarch, Edward was head of the Church of England, which at the time did not allow divorced people with a living former spouse to remarry in the church, and thus the government opposed the marriage. Unable to marry Simpson and remain on the throne, Edward abdicated in December of 1936 , and was succeeded by his younger brother Albert, Queen Elizabeth’s father, who would go on to become King George VI. Edward’s reign lasted just 326 days, one of the shortest in British history. After his abdication, he was named Duke of Windsor and married Simpson in 1937 . They lived abroad until his death in 1972.

Princess Mary, 1897-1965

The only daughter of George V and Queen Mary. During World War I, Mary devoted herself to charity work, visiting hospitals and launching fundraising campaigns to support British soldiers and sailors. She later trained as a nurse, and worked two days a week at the Great Ormond Street children’s hospital in London. In 1922, Mary married Viscount Lascelles, who later became Earl of Harewood; theirs was the first royal wedding to receive coverage in fashion magazines like Vogue . Those fans of the Downton Abbey movie will recognize Mary from her part in the plot .

Prince John, 1905-1919

The youngest child of George V and Queen Mary, John was diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of four, and was sent to live at Sandringham House where he was cared for by his governess. He died in 1919 at the age of 13, following a severe seizure. His condition was not disclosed to the public until after his death.

Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, 1900-1974

King George V and Queen Mary’s third son, Henry was the first child of a British monarch to be educated at school, rather than be tutored at home, and ultimately attended Eton College. He served in the British military and had ambitions to command a regiment, but his career was interrupted by royal responsibilities following the 1936 abdication of his brother Edward VIII. He married Lady Alice Montagu Douglas Scott in 1935, and the couple had two sons, Prince William and Prince Richard. Henry died in 1974 as the eldest surviving child of George V and Mary.

Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, 1901-2004

The wife of Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, Lady Alice was a direct descendant of Charles II through his illegitimate son, the nobleman James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth. She married Prince Henry in 1935, days after the death of her father, the 7th Duke of Buccleuch. The couple had two sons, Prince William and Prince Richard. Alice died at the age of 102 in 2004.

Prince George, Duke of Kent, 1902-1942

The fourth son of George V and Queen Mary. Like his elder brother Henry, George was educated at school, and spent time in the Navy before becoming the first member of the royal family to work as a civil servant. In 1934, he married Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark, and the couple had three children: Prince Edward, Princess Alexandra, and Prince Michael. At the start of World War II, he returned to active military service in the Royal Navy and later the Royal Air Force. His death in 1942 in a military air crash marked the first time in more than 450 years that a member of the royal family died during active service.

Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, 1906-1968

The wife of Prince George, and a princess of the Greek royal house, Princess Marina was the daughter of Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark, and Grand Duchess Elena Vladimirovna of Russia. (Prince Philip is her first cousin.) In 1932, she met Prince George during a visit to London, and the couple married two years later; theirs was the first royal wedding to be broadcast by wireless radio. The couple had three children: Prince Edward, Princess Alexandra, and Prince Michael. Following her husband’s death in 1942, Marina remained an active member of the royal family and carried out many royal duties across the world, even representing the Queen at some events. She died in 1968 at the age of 61.

King George VI, 1895 - 1952

Known publicly as Prince Albert until his accession, King George VI did not expect to inherit the throne because his elder brother Edward VIII was first in the line of succession.

As the second son of George V and Queen Mary, he was made Duke of York in 1920, after serving in the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force during World War I. In 1923, he married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, and the couple had two daughters: the future Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. Following Edward’s abdication in 1936, Albert took the throne and assumed the name King George VI. The dissolution of the British Empire and formation of the British Commonwealth were finalized during George’s reign, so he was both the last Emperor of India and the first Head of the Commonwealth. George died in 1952 at the age of 56, and was succeeded by his daughter.

Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, 1900 - 2002

Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was born into British nobility, the 9th of 10 siblings. In 1923, she married Prince Albert, the Duke of York, having turned down several previous proposals because she had misgivings about royal life. When her brother-in-law abdicated in 1936, Albert became King George VI and Elizabeth became the Queen Consort of the United Kingdom. Upon her husband’s death in 1952, her elder daughter Elizabeth ascended to the throne, and she became known as the Queen Mother. She remained active in public life, even after her 100th birthday in 2000, and died at 101, seven weeks after the death of her younger daughter, Princess Margaret.

Prince William of Gloucester, 1941-1972

As the eldest son of Prince Henry and Lady Alice, Prince William was highly educated, studying at Eton College, Cambridge University, and Stanford University. While he later held jobs in banking and in the British civil service, Queen Elizabeth’s first-cousin was also a licensed pilot, and regularly competed in air show races. It was that passion eventually lead to his untimely death. In 1972, at the age of 30, Prince William died in an airplane crash.

Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, 1944-

The younger son of Prince Henry and Lady Alice, Prince Richard initially had a career as an architect, but following the death of his older brother Prince William in 1972, he took on additional royal duties.

That same year, he married Birgitte van Deurs (1946-) whom he met at Cambridge University, and just two years after that, Richard inherited the title of Duke of Gloucester from his father Prince Henry. Now in his 70s, Richard remains active in public life and carries out regular royal duties for his first cousin, the Queen. He and his wife have three children together–Alexander Windsor (1974-), Lady Davina Lewis (1977-) and Lady Rose Gilman (1980-)–and six grandchildren (Xan Windsor, Lady Cosima Windsor, Senna Lewis, Tāne Lewis, Lyla Gilman and Rufus Gilman). The couple resides in Kensington Palace.

Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, 1935-

The eldest child of Prince George, the Duke of Kent and Princess Marina, Prince Edward is directly related to both Prince Philip and the Queen. As a grandchild of George V and Queen Mary, he is the Queen’s first cousin, and since his mother was a first cousin to Prince Philip, Edward is also Philip’s first cousin once removed. Edward inherited the dukedom of Kent following his father’s death in a 1942 military air crash. Nearly two decades later, he married Katharine Worsley, and the couple have three children together–George Windsor, Earl of St Andrews (1962-), Lady Helen Taylor (1964-), Lord Nicholas Windsor (1970-)–and ten grandchildren (Lord Edward Windsor, Lady Marina Charlotte Windsor, Lady Amelia Windsor, Columbus Taylor, Cassius Taylor, Eloise Taylor, Estella Taylor, Albert Windsor, Leopold Windsor and Louis Windsor). Now in his 80s, Prince Edward regularly carries out royal duties on behalf of the Queen. He and his wife live on the grounds of Kensington Palace in the royal residence Wren House.

Princess Alexandra, The Honourable Lady Ogilvy, 1936-

Like her two brothers, Princess Alexandra is directly related to both Prince Philip and the Queen. As the eldest daughter of Prince George, the Duke of Kent and Princess Marina, she is both Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin and Prince Philip’s first cousin once removed. Princess Alexandra married the businessman Sir Angus Ogilvy in 1963, and the couple have two children–James Ogilvy (1964-) and Marina Ogilvy (1966-)–and four grandchildren (Alexander Charles Ogilvy, Flora Alexandra Ogilvy, Zenouska Mowatt and Christian Mowatt). Alexandra is reportedly quite close with the royal couple, and while Sir Angus Ogilvy passed away in 2004, she continues to be an active working royal and resides in St James’s Palace in London.

Prince Michael of Kent, 1942-

Like his brother Prince Edward and his sister Princess Alexandra, Prince Michael of Kent is directly related to both Prince Philip and the Queen.

As the youngest child of Prince George, the Duke of Kent and Princess Marina, he is both Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin and Prince Philip’s first cousin once removed. In 1978, he married Baroness Marie Christine von Reibnitz in a civil ceremony in Austria, and the couple have two children together: Lord Frederick Windsor (1979-) and Lady Gabriella Windsor (1981-) . Michael takes on fewer royal responsibilities than his siblings, but he does sometimes represent the Queen at events in Commonwealth countries outside of the United Kingdom. In recognition of this work, the Queen provided Prince Michael and his wife with an apartment at Kensington Palace for a number of years, but after that proved controversial, they now pay rent.

Queen Elizabeth II, 1926-2022

Born third in the line of succession, Elizabeth became the presumptive heir to the throne in 1936, following the abdication of her uncle Edward VIII and the ascension of her father, George VI. In 1947, she became engaged to Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark , whom she had first met at the age of 13. The couple were married the same year at Westminster Abbey, and had four children together . After her father died in 1952, Elizabeth ascended to the throne, going on to become both the longest-reigning and the longest-living British monarch in history, having reigned for 70 years. Her great-grandmother Queen Victoria, the second longest-reigning monarch, reigned for 63 years. Elizabeth died on September 8, 2022 at the age of 96 and was succeeded to the throne by her son, Charles.

Princess Margaret, 1930-2002

Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister Margaret was 22 when her sister took the throne, and shortly afterwards became engaged to air force officer Peter Townsend . Because Townsend was divorced, the Church of England would not approve the marriage, and Margaret was famously forced to choose between ending the relationship and losing her royal privileges. She broke off her engagement with Townsend, and in 1960 married society photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones , who was given the title Earl of Snowdon. The couple had two children together, and ultimately divorced in 1978 after a tempestuous 20-year marriage. Margaret died in 2002, at the age of 71.

Antony Armstrong-Jones, Lord Snowdon, 1930-2017

Antony Armstrong-Jones, a.k.a. Lord Snowdon, was the husband of Princess Margaret, and brother-in-law to Queen Elizabeth. Armstrong-Jones was a fashion and society photographer when he met Margaret in 1958, and they married two years later in 1960. The couple had two children together – David Armstrong-Jones (1961-) and Lady Sarah Chatto (1964-) – and four grandchildren (Charles Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley, Lady Margarita Armstrong-Jones, Samuel Chatto and Arthur Chatto), but divorced in 1978. Armstrong-Jones married his second wife Lucy Mary Lindsay-Hogg that same year, and they remained married until 2000. Armstrong-Jones died in 2017 at the age of 86.

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, 1921-2021

Prince Philip was best known as Queen Elizabeth’s husband and consort, but he is also royal in his own right. He was born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, but Philip and his family were exiled from Greece during his childhood , and so he studied in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom before eventually serving in the British Royal Navy. He married then-Princess Elizabeth in 1947, during the reign of her father George VI, and the couple have four children together. When he passed away in 2021 at the age of 99, Prince Philip was not only the the longest-serving consort of a reigning British monarch , but also the longest-living male British royal in history.

King Charles III, 1948-

Charles is the current King of the United Kingdom and Head of the Commonwealth. The eldest child of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Charles was born in 1948 in Buckingham Palace. He went on to be educated at a number of institutions including Cheam and Gordonstoun Schools (which his father attended before him) and Cambridge University, before serving in the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, making him the first heir to the British throne (and the first British monarch) ever to have a university degree.

In 1981, Charles married Diana Spencer , and the couple had two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, before divorcing in 1996. Charles later married his second wife Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. Having held the title since 1958, Charles was the longest-serving Prince of Wales in history before he ascended the throne following his mother’s death in 2022. Charles was officially crowned on May 6, 2023 .

Diana, Princess of Wales, 1961-1997

Diana Spencer was born on July 1, 1961 into British nobility, as the third John Spencer, Viscount Althorp and Frances Roche's four children. She met Prince Charles when she was 16, and married him in July of 1981, becoming the Princess of Wales. Charles and Diana had two children together, Prince William and Prince Harry before divorcing in 1996. One year later, she tragically died in a car accident in Paris on August 31, 1997.

Camilla, Queen Consort, 1947-

The second wife of King Charles III, Camilla Rosemary Shand is the eldest daughter of military officer and businessman Major Bruce Shand and his wife Rosalind Shand . She is also the granddaughter of nobleman Roland Cubitt, 3rd Baron Ashcombe. In 1973, Camilla married her first husband Andrew Parker Bowles, and the couple had two children, Tom and Lisa , before divorcing in 1995. In 2005, Camilla married then-Prince Charles in a civil ceremony, and she became the Duchess of Cornwall . In 2022, upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II, she took on the title Queen Consort.

Princess Anne, Princess Royal, 1950-

The second child and only daughter of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Princess Anne is one of the hardest working members of the royal family. She is also an accomplished equestrian, and was even the first British royal to compete in the Olympic Games. In 1973, Anne married Captain Mark Phillips, and the couple had two children together before divorcing in 1992. Later that year, Anne married Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, her mother’s former equerry. She currently resides in St James’s Palace.

Captain Mark Phillips, 1948-

Princess Anne met her first husband, Captain Mark Phillips , at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, where he was part of the British equestrian team and also competed individually. The couple married in 1973, and had two children together before divorcing in 1992.

Sir Timothy Laurence, 1955-

The second husband of Anne , Princess Royal. A retired Royal Navy officer, Timothy met Anne in 1986 while he was serving as equerry to Queen Elizabeth. After her divorce from Captain Mark Phillips in 1992, Anne and Timothy married, and although he received no title upon the marriage, in 2008 he was appointed as a personal aide-de-camp to the Queen.

Peter Phillips, 1977-

Peter Phillips is the only son of Princess Anne and her first husband Captain Mark Phillips, and the eldest grandchild of Queen Elizabeth. Peter’s parents reportedly turned down the Queen’s offer of a royal title for their son, hoping instead to enable him to lead a more normal life. In 2008 he married Autumn Kelly, and the couple have two children together: Savannah Phillips (2010-) and Isla Phillips (2012-). Peter and Autumn announced their separation in February of 2020, and the following summer their divorce was finalized.

Autumn Kelly, 1978-

Originally born in Canada, Autumn Kelly was married to the Queen’s grandson Peter Phillips from 2008 until 2021. Peter and Autumn announced their separation in 2020, and finalized their divorce in June 2021. The couple have two children together, Savannah and Isla Phillips.

Zara Tindall, 1981-

Zara Tindall is the younger child of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips and the eldest granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth. That said, she does not hold a royal title. Her parents reportedly turned down the Queen’s offer for one in hopes that Zara might lead a more normal life. Like her mother, Zara is an accomplished equestrian and Olympian, winning a silver medal at the 2012 Olympics in London, and she has been appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire for her services to equestrianism. Zara married Mike Tindall , a former rugby player, in 2011, and the couple have three children together: Mia Tindall (2014-), Lena Tindall (2018-), and Lucas Tindall (2021-).

Mike Tindall, 1978-

A former rugby player for the England championship team, Mike Tindall married Zara Phillips in July of 2011. The couple have since welcomed three children: Mia, Lena, and Lucas Tindall.

Prince Andrew, Duke of York, 1960-

The third child and second son of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Prince Andrew served in the Royal Navy for many years, including during the Falklands War in 1982, and holds the ranks of commander and vice admiral. He married Sarah Ferguson in 1986, and the couple had two daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, before divorcing in 1996. In 2019, he stepped back from his working royal duties following enormous public criticism over his association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein .

Sarah, Duchess of York, 1959-

The former wife of Prince Andrew, Sarah Ferguson is widely known by the nickname “Fergie.” Sarah had known Andrew since childhood, and became engaged to him in 1986. The couple married at Westminster Abbey later that year, and went on to have two daughters. Sarah and Andrew announced their separation in 1992, and were divorced four years later in 1996, though by all accounts they still have an amicable relationship.

Princess Beatrice of York, 1988-

Princess Beatrice is the oldest daughter of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, and holds a place in the British line of succession even though she is not a working royal. The princess has a career outside the Palace, and currently works for a New York-based artificial intelligence company, but she also often attends major family events like Trooping the Colour and the annual Christmas church services. In July of 2020, she married her boyfriend Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi in a private wedding ceremony in Windsor, and became stepmother to his son, Wolfie. In October of 2021, Princess Beatrice and her husband welcomed a daughter , Sienna Elizabeth Mapelli Mozzi.

Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 1983-

In July of 2020, Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi married Princess Beatrice in a small private wedding ceremony in Windsor. He has a young son, Wolfie, from a previous relationship—making Beatrice an instant stepmother.

Princess Eugenie, 1990-

The younger daughter of Prince Andrew and Sarah, Duchess of York, and Queen Elizabeth’s granddaughter . Eugenie attended St George’s School with her elder sister Beatrice, and later graduated from Newcastle University. In October of 2018, Eugenie married her partner of seven years , Jack Brooksbank, in a ceremony at Windsor Castle. In February of 2021, Princess Eugenie gave birth to a baby son , August Philip Hawke Brooksbank. In 2023, she welcomed another son named Ernest George Ronnie Brooksbank .

Jack Brooksbank, 1986-

Jack Brooksbank first met Princess Eugenie in Verbier, Switzerland, while on a ski vacation. The pair dated for approximately seven years before marrying in October of 2018 in front of friends and family in St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. Princess Eugenie and Jack welcomed their first baby in February of 2021, naming their son August Philip Hawke Brooksbank, and their second child on June 5, 2023, Ernest George Ronnie Brooksbank.

Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh, 1964-

The youngest child and third son of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Edward attended Cambridge University and later joined the Royal Marines, but dropped out after four months. In 1999 he married Sophie Rhys-Jones , and the couple have two children. Prince Edward is a full-time working royal, and after his father Prince Philip retired from public life in 2017, he took on many of his responsibilities. In 2023, he also inherited his father's title (he was previously known as the Earl of Wessex), which was conferred onto him by his brother, King Charles III, to mark Edward's 59th birthday

Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh, 1965-

Sophie Helen Rhys-Jones met Prince Edward while she was working in radio, and the couple dated for six years before marrying in 1999. They have two children together, Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount Severn. While she previously had a career in public relations, Sophie is now a full-time working royal like her husband.

Lady Louise Windsor, 2003-

The elder child and only daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh, and Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh, Lady Louise is the youngest granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth. She and her brother James embarked on their first royal engagement in 2015, accompanying their parents to South Africa. You might also recognize her as one of the bridesmaids from Will and Kate’s royal wedding in 2011.

James, Earl of Wessex, 2007-

The younger child and only son of Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh, and Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh, James is the youngest grandchild of Queen Elizabeth. Both he and his older sister Louise embarked on their first royal engagement in 2015, accompanying their parents to South Africa. Though he was originally styled Viscount Severn, in 2023, he inherited the title of Earl of Wessex from his father, after Edward was named the new Duke of Edinburgh (a title previously held by Edward's late father Prince Philip.)

Prince William, Prince of Wales, 1982-

The elder son of King Charles III and Princess Diana, William is currently the heir apparent and first in line to the British throne. After attending Eton College and St Andrew’s University, he trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and served in the Royal Air Force, eventually becoming a search-and-rescue pilot. He has since left the military and is now a full-time working royal. In 2011, he married his longtime girlfriend, Catherine Middleton, whom he met at St Andrew’s, and the couple now have three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis.

Catherine, Princess of Wales, 1982-

After growing up in Chapel Row near Newbury as the oldest daughter of Carole and Michael Middleton, Kate met Prince William at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. After a long courtship, the couple married at Westminster Abbey in 2011 in a ceremony which was attended by celebrities, dignitaries, and royals from across Europe. She and William have three children together, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis, and Kate now works as a full-time royal focusing on organizations which support young people and mothers, and that help to fight the stigma of mental health issues.

Prince George, 2013-

The first child and elder son of Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales, George was born on July 22, 2013 and is currently second in the line of succession.

Princess Charlotte, 2015-

The second child, and only daughter, of Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales, Charlotte was born on May 2, 2015. She is currently third in the line of succession.

Prince Louis, 2018-

The third child, and second son, of Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales, Prince Louis was born on April 23, 2018. He is currently fourth in the line of succession.

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, 1984-

The younger son of King Charles III and Princess Diana, Harry is currently fifth in the line of succession . After attending Eton College like his elder brother William, Harry trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and served in the British Army where he was twice deployed to Afghanistan, making Harry the first royal to serve in a war zone since his uncle Prince Andrew. In May of 2018, Harry married American actress Meghan Markle in a widely-watched royal wedding. A year and a half later, he and Meghan announced their decision to step back from their roles as working roles, and have since carved out space for themselves in the private sector, inking a deal with Netflix and signing with a speaking agency.

In May of 2018, Harry married American actress Meghan Markle in a widely-watched royal wedding. A year and a half later, he and Meghan announced their decision to step back from their roles as working roles, and have since carved out space for themselves in the private sector, inking a deal with Netflix and signing with a speaking agency. In May of 2019, they welcomed their first child, Prince Archie . Two years later, in June of 2021, the couple welcomed their baby daughter, Princess Lilibet 'Lili' Diana . The family of four currently lives in California.

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, 1981-

The Duchess of Sussex broke the mold of the expected royal bride, as a biracial, California-born actress. Markle, who divorced her first husband in 2013, was reportedly set up on a blind date with Harry in 2016, and the rest is history. They married in May 2018 at Windsor Castle, and Meghan spent a year and a half as a working royal before she and Harry decided to step back from their roles. She now lives in Santa Barbara, California with Harry and their son, Prince Archie , who was born in May 2019, and their daughter, Princess Lilibet , born in June 2021.

Prince Archie Harrison, 2019-

The first child of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor was born on May 6, 2019. At the time, he had no official royal title , but later earned the styling Prince Archie when his grandfather, King Charles, became reigning monarch. He is currently sixth in the line of succession. Archie became a big brother to newborn Lilibet in June of 2021, just days after his second birthday.

Princess Lilibet 'Lili' Diana, 2021-

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s second child, Lilibet 'Lili' Diana Mountbatten-Windsor was born on June 4, 2021 in Santa Barbara, California. She’s named after both her great-grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, and her grandmother Princess Diana—the Queen’s family nickname is Lilibet. Like her brother, she didn't inherit the title Princess until 2022 when her grandfather became king, but even then it was not clear she would use the title until the announcement of her christening in 2023. She is currently seventh in the line of succession to the throne.

Michael Stillwell is the Senior Designer at TownandCountryMag.com , creating the visuals for stories covering everything from the royal family tree to watches, travel, and more.

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The Royal Family Celebrates Queen Elizabeth II’s Birthday With a Few Photographs

By Erin Vanderhoof

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Nearly two years after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, her birthday, April 21, is becoming a day when both the royal family—and the rest of the nation—celebrate the legacy of Britain’s longest-serving monarch. This year , King Charles III and Queen Camilla spent the weekend at Balmoral Castle , where the late queen died in September 2022, and on Sunday , which would have been her 98th birthday, the couple were spotted on their way to nearby Crathie Kirk.

According to a former butler for the royals who spoke to Slingo , the family likely continued honoring the queen during the rest of the day. “Privately, I have no doubt they'll raise a toast to her in the evening,” said Grant Harrold, per People . “I'm sure the day will very much be spent reflecting on the late queen.”

On Instagram, Sarah Ferguson remembered her mother-in-law with a photograph taken on the balcony of Buckingham Palace during 2022’s Platinum Jubilee. “Thank you for all that you have taught us, for being a steadfast leader and dear friend,” she wrote . “You are sorely missed.”

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The Royals Collection Trust, which cares for and curates the royal collections, honored the late queen with an image taken during her teenage years. The photograph by Cecil Beaton will be part of a new palace exhibition called Royal Portraits, which will open next month in the King’s Gallery.

According to The Telegraph , a few corgis were on hand during one tribute to the late queen. On Sunday, the first posthumous statue of Queen Elizabeth was unveiled in the town of Oakham, Rutland, in England’s East Midlands, and the bronze sculpture by artist Hywel Pratley features three life-size corgis climbing on the plinth. To celebrate the unveiling, the Welsh Corgi League brought 46 of the queen’s beloved breed to the event, and they could be heard barking during a speech by Sarah Furness, the Lord-Lieutenant of Rutland who commissioned the statue.

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Former Royal Butler Reveals 'Private' Way Queen Elizabeth's Birthday Will Be Marked by Royal Family

A former butler to King Charles shares insight into the late Queen's second posthumous birthday

Janine Henni is a Royals Staff Writer for PEOPLE Digital, covering modern monarchies and the world's most famous families. Like Queen Elizabeth, she loves horses and a great tiara moment.

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Queen Elizabeth would have turned 98 on April 21, and a former royal butler to King Charles is sharing how the royal family will commemorate the day.

Grant Harrold, who served on staff for King Charles and Queen Camilla from 2004 to 2011, said there will be toasts, tributes and reflections in honor of the late Queen, who died in September 2022 at age 96.

"They won't publicly do anything. Privately, I have no doubt they'll raise a toast to her in the evening. I'm sure the day will very much be spent reflecting on the late Queen," he told Slingo .

"I can almost guarantee that if you were to go to Windsor Castle that day, it's very likely there'll be some flowers on the tomb that have been sent by the family members," he continued. "Sometimes on royal anniversaries, flowers are sent to royal graves. It's very possible there will be flowers on the tombstone."

Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Well-wishers to St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, where the late Queen is buried , may also leave bouquets in the area that day. Queen Elizabeth's birthday on April 21 is not to be confused with Trooping the Colour , which is the British Army's annual parade for the sovereign's official birthday, usually held in June.

While Harrold’s bio outlines that he was based at King Charles’ beloved country home Highgrove House during his tenure on the royal household staff, it also mentions that he had occasionally worked for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip — where he became acquainted with the late Queen’s legendary sense of humor !

"With the Queen, I used to hear about her sense of humor and the fact that sometimes you couldn’t tell if she was being serious or not… and sometimes she’d catch you off guard," Harrold said. 

According to the staffer, he was once with her in Scotland and announced dinner for Queen Elizabeth and guests. When no one followed her cue to make their way to the meal, the monarch broke out into a run. 

"Royal protocol kind of states they should follow or at least already be in the dining room and they were all still in the other room chatting. So she ran down the corridor and I remember looking thinking, 'The Queen is running, what do I do?' so I started running, well not running because I thought it would be rude to run as a butler," Harrold said. 

"I kind of did a trot into the room and when we got in there she looked around and she smiled and I heard the rest of the guests running down the corridor to come in. She looked at me then she gave me a wink as if to say 'How about that.' "

Queen Elizabeth was born as Princess Elizabeth to the future King George VI and Queen Mother on April 21, 1926, and died at age 96 on Sept. 8, 2022. She is remembered for her steadfast poise and dedication to duty throughout her record 70-year reign that spanned 15 prime ministers , shepherding the modern monarchy into a changing 21st century.

This April 21 is her second posthumous birthday following her death in September 2022, and King Charles, Queen Camilla, Prince William and Kate Middleton are known to mark the moment with posts on social media.

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As the royal family honors Queen Elizabeth’s birthday in a private way, Harrold remembers the bright energy she radiated.

"When they say she lit up a room, you went into the room and you knew she was in the room. You walked in and you could spot her and she was always so polite, so polite, always smiling and making a joke or comment. Very observant, she noticed every detail," he said.

"On the observant part, when there was a state dinner or a banquet she would inspect the table," he continued. "You’ve got an army of staff, but she would still go around the table to make sure it had been done correctly. She noticed things if something wasn’t right." 

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Queen Elizabeth had two birthdays 'because of British weather' - as does King Charles

Today, April 21, would have marked Queen Elizabeth II’s 98th birthday. However, her special day wouldn’t actually have been ‘officially’ celebrated by the public today as her official celebrations took place in June, at Trooping the Color.

Trooping The Color takes place on a Saturday in June. Queen Elizabeth II ‘s last was held on Thursday 2 June, as part of the royal Platinum Jubilee celebrations, three months before her death . Over 1400 parading soldiers, 200 horses, and 400 musicians come together each June to display military precision and for over 200 years, to mark the Sovereign’s official birthday. That date was picked, simply because of the (hopefully) nice weather. Yep, that’s right. Good old British weather.

Why Queen Elizabeth had two birthdays – and where the ‘tradition’ started

If you live in Britain, this reasoning is completely understandable. If not, we’ll explain. The tradition of celebrating the monarch’s birthday in June started back in 1748 with King George II, who was born in November 1683.

Of course, the monarch rightly wanted a big event for the public to join, but an outdoor celebration in November in the UK was a big no, due to the chilly weather. The annual Trooping the Colour parade was held in June, and before this was strictly a military event. Regiments would display their flags and colors so soldiers could familiarize themselves.

King George II then merged his birthday celebrations with the annual event, and ever since then, all all British monarchs have had the option of the “official birthday.” As Queen Elizabeth II’s birthday is in spring, which can still be chilly in the UK, she also opted for June as a ‘safer’ option.

・ OMG: ‘Resilient’ King Charles may take his own advice he ‘gave to Queen Elizabeth’

King Charles will be following in the footsteps, as like King George II, Charles was born in November. November 14, 1948, to be precise. Of course, an outdoor celebration in Britain is a no-go at this freezing time, so he also ‘officially’ celebrates during Trooping the Color.

As for upcoming monarchs, Prince William ‘s birthday falls on 21 June. If he upholds the Trooping tradition when he’s King, he’ll be the first monarch since his great-grandfather, King Charles VI, to celebrate his actual birthday in the same month as his official birthday parade. Or it could so happen that the event is moved to line up with his birthday.

Prince George ‘s birthday is on July 22, once again a summer birthday. Therefore, it will be interesting to see how things pan out in the future.

This year, the event will be held on Saturday, June 15.

Sarah Ferguson shares birthday message to remember late Queen

Sarah Ferguson, who was previously married to Prince Andrew, has taken to Instagram to pay tribute to the Queen on what would have been her 98th birthday. However, she mistakingly wrote 97th, which many fans noticed in the comments.

“Today we are remembering Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on what would have been her 97th birthday,” the Duchess of York wrote. “Thank you for all that you have taught us, for being a steadfast leader and dear friend. You are sorely missed.”

Fergie recently announced she had been diagnosed with skin cancer , following her diagnosis with an early form of breast cancer last summer .

It is thought the rest of the royal family will celebrate the former monarch’s birthday ‘privately’.

・ FINAL DAYS: Queen’s ‘duty’ took a ‘greater toll than anyone imagined’ in her final days

The post Queen Elizabeth had two birthdays 'because of British weather' - as does King Charles appeared first on Celebrity Tidbit .