Queen Elizabeth II, longest-reigning monarch of U.K., dies

Britain’s longest reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, died on September 8 at the age of 96. Her death at her Scottish estate, Balmoral Castle, was announced by Buckingham Palace shortly after 6 p.m. on Sept. 8 evening.

Obituary | Queen Elizabeth II, queen of the world

“The Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon,” a statement from the palace said. “The King and The Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow,” it read, referring to the former Prince of Wales, Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, Camilla.

Just on Tuesday the Queen had ceremonially appointed the country’s 56th Prime Minister, Liz Truss — the 15th during her reign. On Thursday morning the palace said that the Queen had been placed under “medical supervision” at her Balmoral Castle. Many members of her large immediate family, including several children and grandchildren, had gathered by Thursday afternoon at Balmoral.

Also read | Queen Elizabeth’s death | Reaction from world leaders

Pictures of the Queen, standing with the help of a cane and shaking hands with the new Prime Minister, Ms. Truss, were released on Tuesday. The Queen usually appointed the elected head of government at Buckingham Palace in London but owing to “mobility” issues, had cut back on events this year. The Queen was known to have stuck to her constitutional role, and while maintaining a deep interest in politics (such as through regular audiences with her Prime Ministers), had a reputation for maintaining political neutrality during the seventy plus years on the throne.

‘Operation Unicorn’

Plans for the Queen’s death and the accession of Charles, 73, to the British throne are code named Operation London Bridge and Operation Spring Tide respectively. The plans provide details from the “London bridge is down” code used to convey news of the monarch’s passing to the Prime Minister, to design changes to government websites to mark the occasion. If the Queen dies in Balmoral — as she has — another set of steps called ‘Operation Unicorn’ is triggered, according to a 2021 report from Politico.

Her body, as per this protocol, is to be brought to London by train or by plane and will be received by Ms. Truss in London. The Prime Minister and the new King are expected to make a statement on Thursday. The funeral, if the reported protocol is followed, is expected to be held on the tenth day following the Queen’s death.

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

The Queen was the titular head of 14 Commonwealth countries, including Australia and New Zealand. Barbados became a Republic last November after nearly 400 years of colonial rule.

Addressing the nation outside Downing Street, Ms. Truss called the monarch’s death “a huge shock” to Britain and the world. “Britain is the great country it is today because of her,” she said.

The Queen had been a ubiquitous figure for an entire generation, especially in Britain, given the sheer length of her reign. “Her love her life of service, stretch beyond most of our living memories,” Ms. Truss said, as she called on Britons to support “King Charles III”, suggesting, this is how Charles will be known as king (the question was open as to how he would ‘style ‘ himself when King).

She indicated that a “new era” was upon Britain with passing of its ‘second Elizabethan age – a description at odds with the sobering facts. The U.K. faces soaring energy costs, inflation higher than seen in four decades, a cost of living crisis and renewed calls for Scottish impudence.

Although there are serious questions about the relevance of the monarchy as an institution today, including its profoundly exploitative and colonial past, the Queen, who ascended the throne in 1952, has remained a popular figure, not just in Britain but also globally. Some 61% of Britons favoured the monarchy, according to a YouGov poll from May 2021. However, republicanism was growing in the 18-24 age group, with a higher share (41% versus 26%) preferring to replace the monarch with an elected head of state in 2021 than two years before that survey.

The Queen has visited India three times, in 1961, 1983 and 1997.

“Queen Elizabeth II was a stateswoman of unmatched dignity and constancy who deepened the bedrock Alliance between the United Kingdom and the United States. She helped make our relationship special,” U.S. President Joe Biden and U.S. First Lady Jill Biden said in a long statement about the Queen.

AP adds:

Elizabeth was not born to be Queen

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was born in London on April 21, 1926, the first child of the Duke and Duchess of York. She was not born to be Queen — her father’s elder brother, Prince Edward, was destined for the crown, to be followed by any children he had.

But in 1936, when she was 10, Edward VIII abdicated to marry twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson, and Elizabeth’s father became King George VI.

Princess Margaret recalled asking her sister whether this meant that Elizabeth would one day be Queen.” ‘Yes, I suppose it does,’” Margaret quoted Elizabeth as saying. “She didn’t mention it again.”

Elizabeth was barely in her teens when Britain went to war with Germany in 1939. While the King and Queen stayed at Buckingham Palace during the Blitz and toured the bombed-out neighbourhoods of London, Elizabeth and Margaret spent most of the war at Windsor Castle, west of the capital. Even there, 300 bombs fell in an adjacent park, and the princesses spent many nights in an underground shelter.

In 1945, after months of campaigning for her parents’ permission to do something for the war effort, the heir to the throne became Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She enthusiastically learned to drive and service heavy vehicles.

On the night the war ended in Europe, May 8, 1945, she and Margaret managed to mingle, unrecognised, with celebrating crowds in London — “swept along on a tide of happiness and relief,” as she told the BBC decades later, describing it as “one of the most memorable nights of my life.”

At Westminster Abbey in November 1947 she married Royal Navy officer Philip Mountbatten, a prince of Greece and Denmark whom she had first met in 1939 when she was 13 and he 18. Postwar Britain was experiencing austerity and rationing, and so street decorations were limited and no public holiday was declared. But the bride was allowed 100 extra ration coupons for her trousseau.

The couple lived for a time in Malta, where Philip was stationed, and Elizabeth enjoyed an almost-normal life as a navy wife. The first of their four children, Prince Charles, was born on Nov. 14, 1948. He was followed by Princess Anne on Aug. 15, 1950, Prince Andrew on Feb. 19, 1960, and Prince Edward on March 10, 1964.

In February 1952, George VI died in his sleep at age 56 after years of ill health. Elizabeth, on a visit to Kenya, was told that she was now Queen.

Her private secretary, Martin Charteris, later recalled finding the new monarch at her desk, “sitting erect, no tears, color up a little, fully accepting her destiny.”

“In a way, I didn’t have an apprenticeship,” Queen Elizabeth reflected in a BBC documentary in 1992 that opened a rare view into her emotions. “My father died much too young, and so it was all a very sudden kind of taking on, and making the best job you can.”

Her coronation took place more than a year later, a grand spectacle at Westminster Abbey viewed by millions through the still-new medium of television.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s first reaction to the King’s death was to complain that the new Queen was “only a child,” but he was won over within days and eventually became an ardent admirer.

In Britain’s constitutional monarchy, the Queen is head of state but has little direct power; in her official actions she does what the government orders. However, she was not without influence. She once reportedly commented that there was nothing she could do legally to block the appointment of a bishop, “but I can always say that I should like more information. That is an indication that the Prime Minister will not miss.”

The extent of the monarch’s political influence occasionally sparked speculation — but not much criticism while Queen Elizabeth was alive. The views of Charles, who has expressed strong opinions on everything from architecture to the environment, might prove more contentious.

She was obliged to meet weekly with the Prime Minister, and they generally found her well-informed, inquisitive and up to date. The one possible exception was Margaret Thatcher, with whom her relations were said to be cool, if not frosty, though neither woman ever commented.

The Queen’s views in those private meetings became a subject of intense speculation and fertile ground for dramatists like Peter Morgan, author of the play “The Audience” and the hit TV series “The Crown.” Those semi-fictionalised accounts were the product of an era of declining deference and rising celebrity, when the royal family’s troubles became public property.

Troubles within the family

And there were plenty of troubles within the family, an institution known as “The Firm.” In Queen Elizabeth’s first years on the throne, Princess Margaret provoked a national controversy through her romance with a divorced man.

In what the Queen called the “annus horribilis” of 1992, her daughter, Princess Anne, was divorced, Prince Charles and Princess Diana separated, and so did Prince Andrew and his wife, Sarah. That was also the year Windsor Castle, a residence she far preferred to Buckingham Palace, was seriously damaged by fire.

The public split of Charles and Diana — “There were three of us in that marriage,” Diana said of her husband’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles — was followed by the shock of Diana’s death in a Paris car crash in 1997. For once, the Queen appeared out of step with her people.

Amid unprecedented public mourning, Queen Elizabeth’s failure to make a public show of grief appeared to many to be unfeeling. After several days, she finally made a televised address to the nation.

The dent in her popularity was brief. She was by now a sort of national grandmother, with a stern gaze and a twinkling smile.

Despite being one of the world’s wealthiest people, Queen Elizabeth had a reputation for frugality and common sense. She was known as a monarch who turned off lights in empty rooms, a country woman who didn’t flinch from strangling pheasants.

A newspaper reporter who went undercover to work as a palace footman reinforced that down-to-earth image, capturing pictures of the royal Tupperware on the breakfast table and a rubber duck in the bath.

Her sangfroid was not dented when a young man aimed a pistol at her and fired six blanks as she rode by on a horse in 1981, nor when she discovered a disturbed intruder sitting on her bed in Buckingham Palace in 1982.

The image of the Queen as an exemplar of ordinary British decency was satirized by the magazine Private Eye, which called her Brenda. Anti-monarchists dubbed her “Mrs. Windsor.” But the republican cause gained limited traction while the Queen was alive.

On her Golden Jubilee in 2002, she said the country could “look back with measured pride on the history of the last 50 years.”

“It has been a pretty remarkable 50 years by any standards,” she said in a speech. “There have been ups and downs, but anyone who can remember what things were like after those six long years of war appreciates what immense changes have been achieved since then.”

A reassuring presence at home, she was also an emblem of Britain abroad — a form of soft power, consistently respected whatever the vagaries of the country’s political leaders on the world stage. It felt only fitting that she attended the opening of the 2012 London Olympics alongside another icon, James Bond. Through some movie magic, she appeared to parachute into the Olympic Stadium.

Longest-serving monarch

In 2015, she overtook her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria’s reign of 63 years, seven months and two days to become the longest-serving monarch in British history. She kept working into her 10th decade, though Prince Charles and his elder son, Prince William, increasingly took over the visits, ribbon-cuttings and investitures that form the bulk of royal duties.

The loss of Philip in 2021 was a heavy blow, as she poignantly sat alone at his funeral in the chapel at Windsor Castle because of coronavirus restrictions.

The Queen’s grandson Prince Harry walked away from Britain and his royal duties after marrying American actress Meghan Markle in 2018. He alleged in an interview that some in the family -– but pointedly not the Queen -– had been less than welcoming to his wife.

She enjoyed robust health well into her 90s, although she used a cane in an appearance after Philip’s death. In October 2021, she spent a night in a London hospital for tests after canceling a trip to Northern Ireland.

A few months later, she told guests at a reception “as you can see, I can’t move.” The palace, tight-lipped about details, said the Queen was experiencing “episodic mobility issues.”

She held virtual meetings with diplomats and politicians from Windsor Castle, but public appearances grew rarer. The Queen withdrew from fixtures of the royal calendar, including Remembrance Sunday and Commonwealth Day ceremonies, though she attended a memorial service last March for Philip at Westminster Abbey.

Meanwhile, she took steps to prepare for the transition to come. In February, the Queen announced that she wanted Charles’ wife Camilla to be known as “Queen Consort” when “in the fullness of time” her son became King. It removed a question mark over the role of the woman some blamed for the breakup of Charles’ marriage to Princess Diana in the 1990s.

May brought another symbolic moment, when she asked Charles to stand in for her and read the Queen’s Speech at the State Opening of Parliament, one of the monarch’s most central constitutional duties.

Seven decades after World War II, Queen Elizabeth was again at the centre of the national mood amid the uncertainty and loss of COVID 19 — a disease she came through herself in February.

In April 2020 — with the country in lockdown and Prime Minister Boris Johnson hospitalised with the virus — she made a rare video address, urging people to stick together.

She summoned the spirit of World War II, that vital time in her life, and the nation’s, by echoing Vera Lynn’s wartime anthem “We’ll Meet Again.”

“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,” she said.