People PEOPLE Queen Elizabeth

QUEEN ELIZABETH II 1926 - 2022 “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”—ELIZABETH II, 1957“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”—KING CHARLES III…

SOME OF THE CLICHÉS ARE TRUE: She loved corgis, gin cocktails and horses, and rode well into her 10th decade. But she was also interested in space exploration. Given a camera as a wedding gift, she became an enthusiastic photographer. In her 80s, she sat front row at her first Fashion Week, sent her first tweet and became a fan of Downton Abbey (her grandfather was a character). She was known to point out the show’s rare gaffes, for she was nothing if not keenly attuned to history. Even before she succeeded to the throne at age 25, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, coronated as Elizabeth II, accepted her role with unwavering seriousness, whether rallying British youth during wartime or returning to work after the April 2021 death of Prince Philip, her…

WHEN ELIZABETH ALEXANDRA Mary Windsor was born on April 21, 1926, in her maternal grandparents’ Mayfair townhouse, she seemed destined for a life of quiet privilege as a member of the royal family. The daughter of the second son of King George V, she was third in the line of succession, behind the heir apparent, her bachelor uncle David (officially Edward, Prince of Wales) and her father, Prince Albert, Duke of York, affectionately known as Bertie. Still, her arrival was big news—a new princess in the palace! Fleet Street reporters nicknamed her “Baby Betty” and breathlessly reported her first yawn, her open-carriage perambulation into Hyde Park and a sighting of her in a Buckingham Palace nursery window, sucking her thumb. Winston Churchill—who would later become her first Prime Minister—perceived an…

AFTER BRITAIN’S DECLARATION OF WAR on Sept. 3, 1939, Elizabeth and Margaret were sent to Windsor Castle, 22 miles west of London, where it was felt they would be protected from German air strikes. When the British cabinet advised their mother the Queen that they would be safer still in Canada, she memorably replied, “The children won’t go without me. I won’t leave the King. And the King will never leave.” They visited their daughters on weekends but stayed in London as bombs were dropped on Buckingham Palace—it was hit nine times, including once when they were in residence. Elizabeth rolled bandages for the war effort and contributed to the Red Cross and the Air Ambulance Fund from her five-shilling weekly allowance. She also made her first radio broadcast in October…

BRITAIN IN 1947 WAS STILL a war-weary nation, its cities strewn with rubble and food in short supply. But in the ninth winter of austerity, “the skies cleared for a brief moment,” wrote Life magazine, and “shining through came a fleeting, nostalgic glimpse of an ancient glory and a little pang of hope for better days to come.” The wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Lt. Philip Mountbatten on Nov. 20th, 1947, brought joy to Britons and captivated the world. The romance had been kept largely secret from the public but took off during the holidays of 1943, when Philip, then a first lieutenant and second-in-command on HMS Wallace, accepted an invitation to spend Christmas at Windsor Castle. Elizabeth, by then 17, confided to her governess that he was “the one,” and…

“I’M BLISSFULLY HAPPY,” ELIZABETH wrote to her cousin Margaret Rhodes during her honeymoon. “I’m enjoying being married to the best and nicest man in the world.” After the wedding the newlyweds relaxed at Broadlands, the 16th-century Hampshire estate owned by Philip’s uncle Lord Mountbatten, and at Balmoral, the royal retreat in Scotland. They tromped around the woods hunting deer, where, a carefree princess, wearing army boots and a leather vest, joked to Rhodes in a letter, “I couldn’t help wishing that a photographer would come along, just for once, as he would never have believed what he saw! I imagined that I looked like a female Russian commando leader followed by her faithful cut-throats, all armed to the teeth with rifles.” Philip, too, was very much in love. “Cherish Lilibet? I…