Queen Elizabeth II(1926–2022)

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was born at 17 Bruton Street in Mayfair, London, on the twenty-first of April 1926, elder of the two daughters of Albert, Duke of York, the second son of King George V, and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. She was raised at 145 Piccadilly and at the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, was tutored at home by her mother and by the constitutional historian Sir Henry Marten of Eton, and on the abdication of her uncle Edward VIII in December 1936 became heir presumptive to the throne at ten on her father's accession as George VI. She trained as a Subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Service in the closing months of the Second World War, the only British monarch in history to have served in the armed forces in uniform, and on the twentieth of November 1947 married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten of the Royal Navy (Philip, Duke of Edinburgh) at Westminster Abbey.

She acceded to the throne on the sixth of February 1952 in her twenty-sixth year on the death of her father at Sandringham, was at the time at the Treetops Hotel in the Aberdare Forest of Kenya, and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on the second of June 1953 in the first televised coronation in British history (the BBC broadcast reached an estimated audience of two hundred and seventy-seven million viewers worldwide). She gave the first televised Christmas Message in 1957 and continued the tradition every year for the next sixty-five years to 2021.

Her seventy-year reign spanned the constitutional ministry of fifteen British Prime Ministers from Winston Churchill (born 1874) to Liz Truss (born 1975), seven Archbishops of Canterbury, six Roman Catholic Popes, and fourteen United States Presidents. She presided over the orderly transformation of the British Empire of 1952 (over seventy dependent territories and a quarter of the world's land surface) into the Commonwealth of Nations of 2022 (fifty-six independent member states), without a war of independence on the model of the French Algerian or Portuguese Angolan settlements; the constitutional management of decolonisation, in which the Crown's role was central, is by general assessment the most consequential single peaceful imperial dissolution in modern history.

She paid state visits to a hundred and seventeen countries, the most-travelled sovereign in history; was the constitutional architect of the Royal Commonwealth Tour of 1953 to 1954 (the seven-month Commonwealth circumnavigation that established the modern Commonwealth ceremonial); paid the first state visit by a British monarch to the Republic of Ireland in May 2011 (the visit that crowned the institutional reconciliation following the Good Friday Agreement of 1998); celebrated her Silver, Golden, Diamond and Platinum Jubilees (1977, 2002, 2012, 2022); and through the long sequence of her annual Trooping the Colour, State Openings of Parliament, Royal Maundy services, and the Christmas broadcasts, established the constitutional ceremonial of the British state in the form it carries today.

She died at Balmoral Castle on the eighth of September 2022 in her ninety-seventh year. Her state funeral at Westminster Abbey on the nineteenth of September 2022 was the most-watched single broadcast event in British history, with an estimated global audience of two and a half billion viewers. She lies buried beside her husband Prince Philip and her parents at the King George VI Memorial Chapel in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. She was succeeded by her son Charles III, the first British monarchical succession in seventy years. The Windsor name in modern constitutional history carries the weight of her seventy years on the throne.