I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.
Princess Elizabeth, broadcast from Cape Town on her twenty-first birthday, 21 April 1947
Elizabeth II
parents: Albert, Duke of York (later George VI), and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon
date and place of birth: 21 April 1926 at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, London
husband: Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh
date of marriage: 20 November 1947 at Westminster Abbey
children: Charles, Anne, Andrew, Edward
years of reign: 1952-2022
date of coronation: 2 June 1953 at Westminster Abbey
date and place of death: 8 September 2022 at Balmoral Castle, Aberdeenshire
place of burial: King George VI Memorial Chapel, St George's Chapel, Windsor
When Elizabeth was born, nobody expected her to become queen. Her father was the second son of George V, and her uncle David, the Prince of Wales, was thirty-one, unmarried and expected to have children of his own. She spent her first ten years as a minor royal, living at 145 Piccadilly and later at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park with her parents and her younger sister, Margaret, who was born in 1930. Her grandfather called her "Lilibet," the closest she could get as a toddler to saying her own name.
The abdication crisis of 1936 changed that. Her uncle had succeeded as Edward VIII in January, and he wanted to marry Wallis Simpson, an American who had divorced one husband and was divorcing a second. The government, the Church of England and the Dominions would not accept her as queen, and Edward abdicated on 11 December. Elizabeth's father became George VI, and the ten-year-old princess became heir presumptive. She was educated at home, with lessons in constitutional history from Henry Marten, the Vice-Provost of Eton.
The War Years
When war came in 1939 the government suggested sending the princesses to Canada. Their mother refused: "The children won't go without me. I won't leave without the King. And the King will never leave." Elizabeth and Margaret spent most of the war at Windsor Castle. On 13 October 1940, aged fourteen, Elizabeth made her first radio broadcast, on the BBC's Children's Hour, to children evacuated from their homes.
In early 1945 she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service as Second Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor and trained as a driver and mechanic, the first woman of the royal family to serve full-time in the armed forces. On VE Day, 8 May 1945, she and Margaret slipped out of Buckingham Palace with a group of friends and joined the crowds celebrating in the streets, unrecognised. She later described it as one of the most memorable nights of her life.
Marriage
Elizabeth first took notice of Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark in 1939, when she was thirteen and he was an eighteen-year-old cadet at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. He was her third cousin through Queen Victoria and had served in the Royal Navy through the war. He gave up his Greek and Danish titles, became a British subject under the surname Mountbatten, and the couple married in Westminster Abbey on 20 November 1947. Rationing was still in force, and Elizabeth used clothing coupons for her dress; members of the public sent her their own. You can read about other royal marriages on our page on famous royal weddings. Their first son, Charles, was born in November 1948, and a daughter, Anne, in August 1950.
Accession and Coronation
George VI's health failed early. He had surgery for lung cancer in 1951, and Elizabeth began standing in for him at public events. On 31 January 1952 she and Philip left London for a tour of East Africa, Australia and New Zealand. On the night of 5 February they stayed at Treetops, a hotel built in a fig tree in the Aberdare forest in Kenya, watching the wildlife at a waterhole. The king died in his sleep at Sandringham in the early hours of 6 February. Elizabeth learned the news later that day at Sagana Lodge, and flew home as queen. She was twenty-five. When asked what name she would reign under, she replied, "My own, of course."
The coronation took place at Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953, sixteen months after her accession. The government under Winston Churchill had resisted cameras in the abbey, but the queen overruled them, and the BBC broadcast the ceremony live, apart from the anointing. Around twenty-seven million people in Britain watched it, most of them on borrowed or rented televisions, and the event did more than anything else to put a television set in British homes. That morning the newspapers reported that a British expedition had made the first ascent of Everest.
Queen and Prime Ministers
Elizabeth reigned as a constitutional monarch, which meant her power lay in what Walter Bagehot called the right to be consulted, to encourage and to warn. She met each of her prime ministers every week, in private, and never revealed what they said. Fifteen held the office during her reign, from Churchill, who had served in the army under Queen Victoria, to Liz Truss, whom she appointed at Balmoral two days before her death. See our list of British prime ministers.
Twice in her early years she had to choose a prime minister herself, because the Conservative Party had no formal way to elect a leader. In 1957 she picked Harold Macmillan over Rab Butler, and in 1963 she asked Lord Home to form a government, again passing over Butler. Critics said a small circle of Tory grandees had made the decision for her. The party adopted leadership elections in 1965, and the monarch has not had to make such a choice since.
Empire to Commonwealth
When Elizabeth came to the throne, Britain still ruled much of Africa, the Caribbean and South-East Asia. Over the next three decades most of those territories became independent, and most of them joined the Commonwealth, the voluntary association of former British territories of which she served as head. She took the role more seriously than many of her ministers did. She travelled more widely than any monarch before her, and made state and official visits to more than a hundred countries. She also reigned as queen of fifteen Commonwealth realms at her death, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Jamaica.
Some visits carried real political weight. In 1961 she danced with Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, to the discomfort of the white-minority government in South Africa. In 2011 she became the first British monarch to visit the Republic of Ireland since independence, laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance to those who had died fighting for Irish freedom, and opened her speech at Dublin Castle in Irish. The next year in Belfast she shook hands with Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander. In 1979 the IRA had murdered Lord Mountbatten, Philip's uncle, in a bomb attack on his boat in County Sligo.
Annus Horribilis
The public image of the royal family as a model household fell apart in the 1990s. In 1992 three of her four children's marriages broke down: Andrew and Sarah Ferguson separated, Anne divorced Mark Phillips, and in December the Prime Minister announced the separation of Charles and Diana. Andrew Morton's book, written with Diana's secret cooperation, described her misery inside the royal family. On 20 November 1992, the queen's forty-fifth wedding anniversary, fire gutted part of Windsor Castle. Four days later she spoke at the Guildhall in London: "1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis." That month she agreed to pay income tax, and from 1993 Buckingham Palace opened to paying visitors to fund the Windsor repairs.
The low point came five years later. Diana, by then divorced from Charles, died in a car crash in Paris on 31 August 1997. The royal family stayed at Balmoral with Diana's sons, and the flagpole over Buckingham Palace stayed bare, because protocol reserved it for the royal standard when the queen was in residence. Crowds laid flowers outside the palace, and the newspapers turned on her: "Show us you care," the Express demanded. The queen returned to London, walked among the flowers, and on 5 September gave a live television address in which she spoke of Diana "as your Queen and as a grandmother." The Union Flag flew at half mast over the palace on the day of the funeral, the first time it had flown there at all.
Jubilees and Later Years
The public mood recovered. The Golden Jubilee in 2002 came weeks after the deaths of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother, and a million people gathered on the Mall. On 9 September 2015 Elizabeth passed Queen Victoria's record to become the longest-reigning monarch in British history. At the opening of the London Olympics in 2012 she appeared in a short film alongside Daniel Craig as James Bond, and in 2022 she took tea with Paddington Bear for her Platinum Jubilee.
Prince Philip died at Windsor on 9 April 2021, two months short of his hundredth birthday. Covid restrictions limited his funeral to thirty guests, and the photograph of the queen sitting alone in St George's Chapel became one of the defining images of the pandemic. Her own health declined over the following year. She celebrated her Platinum Jubilee, seventy years on the throne, in June 2022, and on 6 September she received Boris Johnson's resignation and appointed Liz Truss at Balmoral. She died there two days later, aged ninety-six, having reigned for seventy years and 214 days.
Her coffin lay in state in Westminster Hall, where people queued for up to twenty-four hours to file past it, and her state funeral took place in Westminster Abbey on 19 September 2022. She was buried beside Philip, her parents and her sister at Windsor. Her son succeeded her as Charles III. For the first queen to reign under the name, see Elizabeth I and our page on the queens of England.
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