Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years and 214 days, from February 1952 to September 2022 — longer than any British monarch before her, and longer than most of her subjects had been alive.
She was not supposed to be Queen
Elizabeth was born in 1926 as the daughter of the King’s second son, with no realistic expectation of the throne. That changed in 1936, when her uncle Edward VIII abdicated after 326 days to marry Wallis Simpson, and her father became George VI.
She was ten years old, and became heir presumptive overnight.
The tree in Kenya
She was 25, on a Commonwealth tour standing in for her ailing father, staying at Treetops — a lodge built into a fig tree in Kenya — when George VI died in his sleep on 6 February 1952. She learned some hours later.
The hunter Jim Corbett wrote in the visitors’ book that a princess had climbed into a tree and had come down a queen. She flew home in mourning clothes carried on the aircraft for the purpose.
The war
She joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1945, aged 18, and trained as a mechanic and military truck driver — the only female member of the Royal Family to have served in the armed forces, and the last British head of state to have served in the Second World War.
The reign
She had fifteen prime ministers, from Winston Churchill — born in 1874 — to Liz Truss, whom she appointed two days before her death. She met thirteen of the fourteen US presidents in office during her reign.
Her defining characteristic was restraint. In seventy years she gave no interview and expressed no political opinion in public, and there is genuinely no reliable record of her views on any contested question. That silence was a deliberate professional discipline, and it is the central reason the institution retained broad support through a period of enormous social change.
Annus horribilis
1992 brought the separation of three of her four children’s marriages and the Windsor Castle fire. She described it in a speech at the Guildhall as an annus horribilis — a horrible year — in an unusually direct public acknowledgement that things were going badly.
The death of Diana in 1997 produced the sharpest crisis of the reign. The palace’s initial silence, entirely in keeping with the older code of restraint, was read as coldness by a public in open grief, and she returned to London and broadcast live “as your Queen and as a grandmother” — a phrase carefully chosen and widely credited with restoring the situation.
The jubilees
Silver in 1977, Golden in 2002, Diamond in 2012, and the Platinum Jubilee in 2022 — the only one in British history. The last was marked with a four-day holiday, a Buckingham Palace concert, and a sketch in which she took tea with Paddington Bear and revealed a marmalade sandwich in her handbag.
The end
She died at Balmoral on 8 September 2022, aged 96, two days after appointing her final prime minister. Her coffin lay in state in Westminster Hall, and the queue to pass it ran for up to five miles and took as long as 24 hours — an event that became a national phenomenon in its own right and is described under queuing.
The state funeral was watched by an estimated audience in the billions, and she was buried at Windsor beside her father, her mother, her sister and her husband Philip.