Elizabeth II

Elizabeth II was queen of the United Kingdom and of other Commonwealth realms from 1952 until her death in 2022. Her reign of seventy years and seven months is the longest of any British monarch. She saw the end of most of the British Empire, its replacement by the Commonwealth of Nations, and enormous social change at home, while keeping the monarchy's constitutional role largely intact and her own views almost entirely private.

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was born on 21 April 1926 at 17 Bruton Street in Mayfair, London, the first child of Prince Albert, Duke of York, the second son of George V, and his wife Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. She was not expected to become queen. That changed in December 1936, when her uncle Edward VIII abdicated in order to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée, and her father became King George VI. Elizabeth, then ten, became heir presumptive. She was educated at home, with lessons in constitutional history from the vice-provost of Eton.

During the Second World War she and her younger sister Margaret spent much of the time at Windsor Castle. In 1940 she made her first radio broadcast, to children who had been evacuated, and in 1945 she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women's branch of the army, training as a driver and mechanic. On 20 November 1947 she married Philip Mountbatten, a former prince of Greece and Denmark who had served in the Royal Navy and was made Duke of Edinburgh. Their first child, Charles, was born in 1948, followed by Anne in 1950, Andrew in 1960 and Edward in 1964.

George VI's health declined after the war. In February 1952 Elizabeth and Philip were in Kenya, at the start of a tour on the way to Australia and New Zealand, when news came that he had died in his sleep on 6 February. She returned to Britain as queen, aged twenty-five. She was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953, and the ceremony was broadcast on television, a decision that helped spread television ownership across Britain. Her first prime minister was Winston Churchill; her last, appointed two days before her death, was Liz Truss, the fifteenth of her reign.

When Elizabeth came to the throne, Britain still ruled large parts of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. During the following decades almost all of these colonies became independent, in the wider decolonisation of Africa and elsewhere, sometimes peacefully and sometimes after violent conflicts such as the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Many former colonies became republics but stayed in the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of states of which Elizabeth was head and to which she was personally committed. Over her lifetime she was queen of 32 independent countries, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Jamaica, and of 15 at her death. She made more than two hundred overseas visits and was probably the most widely travelled head of state of her time.

As a constitutional monarch she reigned but did not rule. She opened Parliament, signed laws, appointed prime ministers and met them weekly in private, but by convention she acted on ministers' advice and did not express political opinions in public. Her role occasionally caused controversy, as in 1957 and 1963, when Conservative leaders were chosen through informal consultations that she took part in, and in the Australian constitutional crisis of 1975, when the governor-general dismissed the prime minister, Gough Whitlam; she declined to intervene.

The monarchy faced growing criticism from the 1960s onwards. She was criticised for waiting eight days before visiting Aberfan in Wales, where a coal-tip collapse killed 116 children and 28 adults in 1966. Her Silver Jubilee in 1977 was widely celebrated, but the 1990s brought the breakdown of three of her children's marriages, including that of Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales. In a speech in November 1992, after a fire at Windsor Castle, she called that year her annus horribilis, a horrible year. Later that year she agreed to pay income tax. When Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris in August 1997, the queen's initial silence was widely criticised, and she returned to London to make a rare live broadcast.

Her later reign saw steadier popularity. In 2011 she made the first visit by a British monarch to the Republic of Ireland since its independence, and the following year she shook hands with Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander, in Belfast, gestures widely seen as part of the reconciliation after the Troubles. She celebrated Golden and Diamond Jubilees in 2002 and 2012, and on 9 September 2015 she passed Queen Victoria as the longest-reigning British monarch.

Prince Philip died in April 2021, after seventy-three years of marriage. Her second son, Andrew, withdrew from public life after controversy over his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and her grandson Harry and his wife Meghan left their royal roles in 2020. In June 2022 she marked her Platinum Jubilee, seventy years on the throne, though by then she was making few public appearances. She died at Balmoral Castle in Scotland on 8 September 2022, aged 96. Her state funeral was held at Westminster Abbey on 19 September, and she was buried at St George's Chapel, Windsor. Her eldest son succeeded her as Charles III.

Elizabeth II was the only monarch most people in Britain and the Commonwealth had ever known. Supporters credit her with providing continuity and a sense of duty through decades of change, and with adapting the monarchy, slowly, to a less deferential age. Critics point to the institution's cost, its links to the colonial past, which became a subject of protest in several Caribbean countries during royal tours, and the privacy that limited public scrutiny. Several realms debated becoming republics during her reign, and Barbados did so in 2021. For the wider story, see the History of the United Kingdom.