Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was born on 21 April 1926 at 17 Bruton Street in Mayfair, London, the elder daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York. She was not expected to reign. That changed in December 1936, when her uncle Edward VIII abdicated and her father became King George VI, making the ten-year-old princess heir presumptive.

She grew up in the public eye during the Second World War. In October 1940, aged fourteen, she made her first broadcast, speaking on the BBC's Children's Hour to children evacuated from British cities. In 1945 she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service as an honorary second subaltern and trained as a driver and mechanic, the only female member of the royal family to have served in the armed forces.

On 20 November 1947 she married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey. They had four children: Charles in 1948, Anne in 1950, Andrew in 1960 and Edward in 1964. Their marriage lasted seventy-three years, until Prince Philip's death on 9 April 2021.

She became Queen on 6 February 1952, on the death of her father, while she was in Kenya at the start of a Commonwealth tour. Her coronation at Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953 was the first to be televised, watched by an estimated twenty-seven million people in Britain alone. She was twenty-seven years old.

Her reign of seventy years and 214 days was the longest of any British monarch. On 9 September 2015 she passed the record set by her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria. She worked with fifteen British prime ministers, from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss, whom she appointed two days before her death, and met every sitting American president from Dwight Eisenhower to Joe Biden except Lyndon Johnson. She was head of the Commonwealth throughout, visiting more countries than any monarch before her, and made the first state visit by a British monarch to the Republic of Ireland in 2011.

Four jubilees marked the reign: Silver in 1977, Golden in 2002, Diamond in 2012 and, in June 2022, the Platinum Jubilee, the first for any British monarch. Away from duty she was a lifelong horsewoman and breeder, and she kept Pembroke Welsh corgis from the age of eighteen, when she was given Susan as a birthday present, more than thirty of them across her life.

Queen Elizabeth II died peacefully at Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire on 8 September 2022, aged ninety-six. Her death certificate recorded the cause as old age. After lying in state at Westminster Hall, where hundreds of thousands queued to pay their respects, her state funeral was held at Westminster Abbey on 19 September 2022. She was buried beside Prince Philip in the King George VI Memorial Chapel at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. Her eldest son succeeded her as King Charles III.

Photo: Joel Rouse / Ministry of Defence, Open Government Licence v3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.