Many Britons were furious and saw the queen as out of touch and uncaring. Instead of returning to London to lead her people in mourning, the queen remained in her castle in Balmoral, comforting her grandchildren, Diana's sons, Princes William and Harry. She died after the Mercedes she was traveling in crashed into a pillar in a tunnel along the Seine River.ĭiana had recently divorced Prince Charles, but remained for many a sympathetic figure. "She just felt humiliated and possibly she felt guilty about it."įive years later, things grew far worse, when paparazzi on motorcycles chased Diana, Princess of Wales, through Paris. "I think the queen really felt deeply wounded by the lack of success of her family," says Sarah Bradford, the author of several biographies of Elizabeth. "In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ' annus horribilis,' " the queen said. That November, fire devastated Windsor Castle, her childhood home along the banks of the River Thames outside London. In just one year - 1992 - the marriages of her three oldest children collapsed. "I think this is what the younger members find difficult, is the regimented side of it," she added.ĭifficulties involving younger royals led to some of the most painful periods of the queen's life. Given the nature of her job, Elizabeth said she knew exactly what she would be doing in the next two months or even the coming year. I find that's one of the sad things, that people don't take on jobs for life, they try different things all the time." "If you live this sort of life, which people don't very much," she said with a laugh, "you live very much by tradition and by continuity. She spoke of her embrace of the predictability of royal life and how younger family members chafed under its strictures.
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Occasionally, she appeared to drop her guard and allowed TV cameras into her home.
A year later, her lavish coronation in Westminster Abbey drew a global TV audience.Įlizabeth made a glamorous young queen in the gray, postwar years - but also a remote one. While traveling in Kenya five years later, Elizabeth received grim news from home that her father, who suffered from heart disease and cancer, had died in his sleep. When World War II erupted three years later, Princess Elizabeth began performing official royal duties and delivered the first of many broadcasts, billed as addresses to the children of the British Empire. Elizabeth's shy, stammering father assumed the throne as George VI, placing her next in line. In 1936, her uncle, King Edward VIII abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorced American woman. Through the ups and downs of her tenure, her hard work and longevity won her deep admiration across the United Kingdom.īorn Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor in London in 1926, her ascension to the throne was an accident of history. Late in her reign, her grandson Prince Harry left the family and England to settle in California with his American wife, Meghan Markle.
There were many personal lows, including the divorces of three of her four children the death of her former daughter-in-law Diana and a sex scandal involving her son Prince Andrew. Later, Elizabeth watched as Britain lost most of its colonies and much of its power. Queen Elizabeth II watches a flyover by the RAF Red Arrows during a military parade, held by the Household Division at Windsor Castle, to mark her official birthday on June 12, 2021, in Windsor, England.
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