A queen who dedicated her life to the throne

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 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.”

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.

On Tuesday, 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 long-standing 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 heated 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 affectionate tolerance to unbridled hostility. The monarchy was forced, more than ever, to justify its existence.

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.

Read | Queen Elizabeth II passes away at 96; tributes pour in

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.

“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.”

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 in April 2021, 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.”

Read | Elizabeth, the queen who moved with a changing world

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 reemerging as a spry presence in public life.

Still, the hectic schedule took a toll. Elizabeth 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 other 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.

In the same year, 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 — an allegation he has denied — the prince withdrew from public life that November. (In January this year, he was forced by Buckingham Palace to relinquish his military titles and royal charities.)

In her annual Christmas address to the nation in 2019, the queen described the year as “bumpy.” It was about to get a lot more so.

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.

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.

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. 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.

Significantly, Charles 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.

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

The Nation’s Anchor

On Sept. 9, 2015, Elizabeth surpassed 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.

Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee 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 Charles, Elizabeth’s eldest son, was her direct heir, many Britons seemed more drawn to Charles’ own son Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, who married a commoner, Kate Middleton, in April 2011, to much public acclaim.

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.

So enduring was Elizabeth’s grip on the nation’s supreme office that her reign overlapped the tenures of 15 British prime ministers and 14 American presidents.

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.

Yet for the tabloid news media, the doomed marriage of Charles and Diana offered fertile ground. Married in 1981, the couple fell into adulterous liaisons that led to divorce in 1996. But in that time, Diana 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. For days, the monarch refused to acknowledge publicly the mourning of the woman whose image and behavior had left the queen looking remote and old-fashioned. Finally (too late, some said), the queen relented.

She traveled from Balmoral to London, moving among crowds of mourners, and, in an address 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, 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.

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 Young Princess

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. Her reluctance to rush into new ways reinforced her critics’ depiction of the monarchy as irrelevant and out of touch.

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.

Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, daughter of the Duchess and Duke of York, was born 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 young 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 the same year, elevating her father, King George VI, to the throne. From then on, her life was that of the first person in line to the throne.

For the public and for her family, the main issue that arose was the question of whom she would marry. 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 two had met in the 1930s. 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.

On Nov. 20, 1947, Elizabeth married 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 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 before being reunited with Charles at Sandringham, in Norfolk, where her parents were also staying.

In 1950, Elizabeth had her second child, Anne, but the pace of her life as a representative of the royal family was quickening. In the fall of 1951, Elizabeth and 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 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, 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.

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, in 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.

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.

A Monarchy Restored

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. 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: Andrew in 1960 and Edward in 1964. Her children were introduced to a different world from the one their mother had known when she was growing up. 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. Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon, divorced in 1978 — the first royal marriage to founder in the queen’s immediate entourage.

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.

By the time her son and daughter-in-law’s emotional complexities had spilled over into lurid tabloid coverage of their estrangement, the queen confronted a remarkable challenge. The center of gravity of public sympathy had shifted away.

The challenges did not stop there. In November 1992, a fire broke out at Windsor Castle, causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage. 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 “annus horribilis” drew to an appropriately messy end when on Dec. 9, 1992, Charles and Diana announced their separation. 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.

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

The extent of her success was clear by 2002 when, at 76, Elizabeth celebrated 50 years as queen with a four-day national holiday. The shift from the closed early days of the monarchy was clear as 1 million people thronged the parks outside the gates of Buckingham Palace to watch a rock and pop concert on the palace grounds.

“The black-and-white newsreels from 1952 show a country very different from the one in which we live today,” Blair, then the prime minister, said in toasting the queen in 2002. “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.”