Question: Which prince is Queen Elizabeth II's youngest son?
Answer: Edward

Charles, Prince of Wales (Charles Philip Arthur George; born 14 November 1948), is the eldest child and heir apparent of Queen Elizabeth II. Known alternatively in Scotland as Duke of Rothesay and in South West England as Duke of Cornwall,  he is the longest-serving heir apparent in British history, having held the position since 1952.  He is also the oldest person to be next in line to the throne since Sophia of Hanover (the heir presumptive to Queen Anne), who died in 1714 at the age of 83.

Charles was born at Buckingham Palace as the first grandchild of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. He was educated at Cheam and Gordonstoun Schools, which his father, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, had attended as a child, as well as the Timbertop campus of Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, Australia. After earning a bachelor of arts degree from Trinity College, Cambridge, Charles served in the Royal Navy from 1971 to 1976.

In 1981, he married Lady Diana Spencer and they had two sons: Prince William (born 1982) later to become Duke of Cambridge, and Prince Harry (born 1984). In 1996, the couple divorced, following well-publicised extramarital affairs. Diana died in a car crash in Paris the following year. In 2005, Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles, who uses the title Duchess of Cornwall.

Charles's interests encompass a range of humanitarian and social issues: he founded The Prince's Trust in 1976, sponsors The Prince's Charities, and is patron of numerous other charitable and arts organisations. Charles has long championed organic farming for which he established the Duchy Home Farm, run by the Duchy of Cornwall, which produces ingredients for the Duchy Originals brand which he founded in 1990. Charles has sought to raise world awareness of the dangers facing the natural environment, such as climate change. As an environmentalist, he has received numerous awards and recognition from environmental groups around the world.     His support for alternative medicine, including homeopathy, has been criticised by some in the medical community.  He has been outspoken on the role of architecture in society and the conservation of historic buildings. Subsequently, Charles created Poundbury, an experimental new town based on his theories, in Dorset in 1993. He has authored a number of books, including A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture in 1989 and the children's book The Old Man of Lochnagar in 1980.

Early life

Charles was born at Buckingham Palace on 14 November 1948,  at 9.14 pm (GMT), the first child of Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh, and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and first grandchild of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, baptised him in the palace's Music Room on 15 December 1948, using water from the River Jordan. The Prince's godparents were: the King (his maternal grandfather); the King of Norway (his cousin, for whom the Earl of Athlone stood proxy); Queen Mary (his maternal great-grandmother); Princess Margaret (his maternal aunt); Prince George of Greece and Denmark (his paternal great-uncle, for whom the Duke of Edinburgh stood proxy); the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven (his paternal great-grandmother); the Lady Brabourne (his cousin); and the Hon David Bowes-Lyon (his maternal great-uncle).  As the child of a daughter of the sovereign, Charles would not usually have been accorded the titles of a British prince or the style Royal Highness. Instead, he would have taken his father's secondary title, Earl of Merioneth, as a courtesy title. However, on 22 October 1948, George VI had issued letters patent granting a royal and princely status to any children of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, making Charles a royal prince from birth. 

When Charles was aged three his mother's accession as Queen Elizabeth II made him her heir apparent. As the sovereign's eldest son, he automatically took the titles Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland, in addition to being a prince of the United Kingdom. Charles attended his mother's coronation at Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953, seated alongside his grandmother and aunt. As was customary for royal offspring, a governess, Catherine Peebles, was appointed and undertook his education between the ages of five and eight. Buckingham Palace announced in 1955 that Charles would attend school rather than have a private tutor, making him the first heir apparent ever to be educated in that manner. 

Youth

Education

Charles first attended Hill House School in west London, receiving non-preferential treatment from the school's founder and then head, Stuart Townend, who advised the Queen to have Charles train in football because the boys were never deferential to anyone on the football field.  Charles then attended two of his father's former schools, Cheam Preparatory School in Berkshire, England, followed by Gordonstoun in the north-east of Scotland. He reportedly despised the latter school, which he described as "Colditz in kilts".  He spent two terms in 1966 at the Timbertop campus of Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, Australia, during which time he visited Papua New Guinea on a school trip with his history tutor, Michael Collins Persse. Upon his return to Gordonstoun, Charles emulated his father in becoming Head Boy. He left in 1967, with six GCE O-levels and two A-levels in history and French, at grades B and C, respectively. 

Tradition was broken again when Charles proceeded straight from secondary school into university, as opposed to joining the British Armed Forces. In October 1967, the Prince was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read anthropology, archaeology, and history. During his second year, Charles attended the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, studying Welsh history and language for a term. He graduated from Cambridge with a 2:2 Bachelor of Arts on 23 June 1970, the first heir apparent to earn a university degree. On 2 August 1975, he was subsequently awarded a Master of Arts degree from Cambridge, per the university's tradition.

Created Prince of Wales

Charles was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester on 26 July 1958,   though his investiture as such was not conducted until 1 July 1969, when he was crowned by his mother in a televised ceremony held at Caernarfon Castle, and gave his replies and speech in both Welsh and English.  The following year he took his seat in the House of Lords,  and later in the decade became the first member of the Royal Family since King George I to attend a British Cabinet meeting, having been invited by Prime Minister James Callaghan so that the Prince might see the workings of the British government and Cabinet at first hand. Charles also began to take on more public duties, founding The Prince's Trust in 1976,  and travelling to the United States in 1981. 

In the mid-1970s, the Prince expressed an interest in serving as Governor-General of Australia; Commander Michael Parker explained: "The idea behind the appointment was for him to put a foot on the ladder of monarchy, or being the future King and start learning the trade." However, because of a combination of nationalist feeling in Australia and the dismissal of the government by the Governor-General in 1975, nothing came of the proposal. Charles accepted the decision of the Australian ministers, if not without some regret; he reportedly stated: "What are you supposed to think when you are prepared to do something to help and you are told you are not wanted?" 

Charles is the oldest heir apparent to bear the title Prince of Wales, and the second-longest serving Prince of Wales, behind Edward VII, whose record he would surpass on 9 September 2017. If he became monarch at present he would be the oldest person to do so; the current record holder is William IV, who was 64 when he became king in 1830.

Military training and career

Following royal tradition, Charles served in the navy and air force. After requesting and receiving Royal Air Force training during his second year at Cambridge, on 8 March 1971, he flew himself to the Royal Air Force College Cranwell to train as a jet pilot. Following the passing-out parade that September, he embarked on a naval career, enrolling in a six-week course at the Royal Naval College Dartmouth and then serving on the guided missile destroyer  (1971–1972) and the frigates  (1972–1973) and  (1974). He also qualified as a helicopter pilot at RNAS Yeovilton in 1974, just prior to joining 845 Naval Air Squadron, operating from .

On 9 February 1976, he took command of the coastal minehunter  for his last ten months serving actively in the navy. He learned to fly on a Chipmunk basic pilot trainer, a BAC Jet Provost jet trainer, and a Beagle Basset multi-engine trainer; he then regularly flew the Hawker Siddeley Andover, Westland Wessex and BAe 146 aircraft of The Queen's Flight. 

Early romances

In his youth, Charles was linked to a number of women. His great-uncle Lord Mountbatten advised him: "In a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down, but for a wife he should choose a suitable, attractive, and sweet-charactered girl before she has met anyone else she might fall for ... It is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage."

Charles's female friends included Georgiana Russell, daughter of the British Ambassador to Spain; Lady Jane Wellesley, daughter of the 8th Duke of Wellington; Davina Sheffield; Lady Sarah Spencer; and Camilla Shand, who later became his second wife and Duchess of Cornwall.

Early in 1974, Mountbatten began corresponding with Charles about a potential marriage to Amanda Knatchbull, Mountbatten's granddaughter. Charles wrote to Amanda's mother, Lady Brabourne (who was also his godmother), expressing interest in her daughter, to which she replied approvingly, though suggesting that a courtship with the not yet 16-year-old girl was premature. Four years later Mountbatten arranged for himself and Amanda to accompany Charles on his 1980 tour of India. Both fathers, however, objected; Philip feared that Charles would be eclipsed by his famous uncle (who had served as the last British Viceroy and first Governor-General of India), while Lord Brabourne warned that a joint visit would concentrate media attention on the cousins before they could decide on becoming a couple. However, in August 1979, before Charles would depart alone for India, Mountbatten was killed by the IRA. When Charles returned, he proposed to Amanda, but in addition to her grandfather, she had lost her paternal grandmother and youngest brother Nicholas in the bomb attack and was now reluctant to join the Royal Family. In June 1980, Charles officially turned down Chevening House, placed at his disposal since 1974, as his future residence. Chevening, a stately home in Kent, was bequeathed, along with an endowment, to the Crown by the last Earl Stanhope, Amanda's childless great-uncle, in the hope that Charles would eventually occupy it. In 1977, a newspaper report mistakenly announced his engagement to Princess Marie-Astrid of Luxembourg.

First marriage

Although Charles first met Lady Diana Spencer in 1977—while visiting her home, Althorp, as the companion of her elder sister, Sarah—he did not consider her romantically until mid-1980. While sitting together on a bale of hay at a friend's barbecue in July, he mentioned Mountbatten's death, to which Diana replied that Charles had looked forlorn and in need of care during his uncle's funeral. Soon, according to Charles's chosen biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, "without any apparent surge in feeling, he began to think seriously of her as a potential bride", and she accompanied Charles on visits to Balmoral Castle and Sandringham House.

Charles's cousin, Norton Knatchbull (Amanda's eldest brother), and his wife told Charles that Diana appeared awestruck by his position and that he did not seem to be in love with her. Meanwhile, the couple's continued courtship attracted intense press and paparazzi attention. When Prince Philip told him that the media speculation would injure Diana's reputation if Charles did not come to a decision about marrying her soon, and realizing that she was a suitable royal bride (according to Mountbatten's criteria), Charles construed his father's advice as a warning to proceed without further delay.

Prince Charles proposed to Diana in February 1981 and they married in St Paul's Cathedral on 29 July. Upon his marriage, Charles reduced his voluntary tax contribution from the profits generated by the Duchy of Cornwall from 50% to 25%.  The couple made their homes at Kensington Palace and at Highgrove House, near Tetbury, and had two children: Princes William (born 21 June 1982) and Henry (known as "Harry") (born 15 September 1984). Charles set precedent by being the first royal father to be present at his children's births. Persistent suggestions that Harry's father is not Charles but James Hewitt, with whom Diana had an affair, have been based on a physical similarity between Hewitt and Harry. However, Harry had already been born by the time the affair between Hewitt and Diana began.  

Separation and divorce

Within five years, the couple's incompatibility and near thirteen-year age difference,  as well as Diana's concern about Charles's previous girlfriend, Camilla Parker Bowles, became visible and damaging to their marriage. Their evident discomfort in each other's company led to them being dubbed "The Glums" in the press.  Diana exposed Charles's affair with Camilla in a book by Andrew Morton, Diana, Her True Story. Tapes of her own extramarital flirtations also surfaced.

In December 1992, the British Prime Minister, John Major, announced their formal separation in Parliament. That same year, the British press published bugged recordings of a passionate private 1989 telephone conversation between Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.   Charles and Diana divorced on 28 August 1996.  When Diana died in a car crash in Paris on 31 August 1997, Charles flew there, with Diana's sisters, to accompany her body back to Britain. 

Second marriage

The engagement of Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles was announced on 10 February 2005; he presented her with an engagement ring which had belonged to his grandmother.  The Queen's consent to the marriage (as required by the Royal Marriages Act 1772) was recorded in a Privy Council meeting on 2 March.  In Canada, the Department of Justice announced its decision that the Queen's Privy Council for Canada was not required to meet to give its consent to the marriage, as the union would not result in offspring and would have no impact on the succession to the Canadian throne. 

Charles is the first member of the Royal Family to have a civil, rather than religious, wedding in England. Government documents from the 1950s and 1960s, published by the BBC, stated that such a marriage was illegal,  though these were dismissed by Charles's spokesman,  and explained to be obsolete by the sitting government. 

The marriage was to take place in a civil ceremony at Windsor Castle, with a subsequent religious blessing at St George's Chapel. However, because a civil marriage at Windsor Castle would oblige the venue to be available to anyone wishing to be married there, the location was changed to Windsor Guildhall. On 4 April the originally scheduled date of 8 April was postponed by one day, to allow Charles and some of the invited dignitaries to attend the funeral of Pope John Paul II. 

Charles's parents did not attend the civil marriage ceremony; the Queen's reluctance to attend perhaps arising from her position as Supreme Governor of the Church of England.  The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh did attend the service of blessing, and held a reception for the newlyweds at Windsor Castle afterwards.  The blessing, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, was televised. 

Social interests

Philanthropy and charity

Since founding The Prince's Trust in 1976, Charles has established sixteen more charitable organisations, and now serves as president of all of those.  Together, these form a loose alliance called The Prince's Charities, which describes itself as "the largest multi-cause charitable enterprise in the United Kingdom, raising over £100million annually ... [and is] active across a broad range of areas including education and young people, environmental sustainability, the built environment, responsible business and enterprise and international."

In 2010, The Prince's Charities Canada was established in a similar fashion to its namesake in the UK.  Charles is also patron of over 350 other charities and organisations, and carries out duties related to these throughout the Commonwealth realms; for example, he uses his tours of Canada as a way to help draw attention to youth, the disabled, the environment, the arts, medicine, the elderly, heritage conservation, and education.  In Canada, Charles has supported humanitarian projects, for example taking part, along with his two sons, in the ceremonies marking the 1998 International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Charles has also set up The Prince's Charities Australia, which is based in Melbourne, Victoria. The Prince's Charities Australia is to provide a coordinating presence for the Prince of Wales’s Australian and international charitable endeavors. 

Charles was one of the first world leaders to express strong concerns about the human rights record of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, initiating objections in the international arena, and subsequently supported the FARA Foundation, a charity for Romanian orphans and abandoned children. 

In 2013, Charles donated an unspecified sum of money to the British Red Cross Syria Crisis appeal and DEC Syria appeal, which is run by 14 British charities to help victims of the Syrian civil war.   According to The Guardian, It is believed that after turning 65 years old in 2013, Charles donated his state pension to an unnamed charity which supports elderly people.  In March 2014, Charles arranged for five million measles-rubella vaccinations for children in the Philippines on the outbreak of measles in South-East Asia. According to Clarence House, Charles was affected by news of the damage caused by Typhoon Yolanda in 2013. International Health Partners, of which he has been Patron since 2004, sent the vaccines, which are believed to protect five million children below the age of five from measles.  

Built environment

The Prince of Wales has openly expressed his views on architecture and urban planning, fostering the advancement of New Classical Architecture, and asserting that he "care[s] deeply about issues such as the environment, architecture, inner-city renewal, and the quality of life."   In a speech given for the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) on 30 May 1984, he memorably described a proposed extension to the National Gallery in London as a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend" and deplored the "glass stumps and concrete towers" of modern architecture.  He asserted that "it is possible, and important in human terms, to respect old buildings, street plans and traditional scales and at the same time not to feel guilty about a preference for facades, ornaments and soft materials," called for local community involvement in architectural choices, and asked: 

His book and BBC documentary A Vision of Britain (1987) was also critical of modern architecture, and he has continued to campaign for traditional urbanism, human scale, restoration of historic buildings, and sustainable design,  despite criticism in the press. Two of his charities (The Prince's Regeneration Trust and The Prince's Foundation for Building Community) promote his views, and the village of Poundbury was built on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall to a master plan by Léon Krier under the guidance of Prince Charles and in line with his philosophy.

Charles helped establish a national trust for the built environment in Canada after lamenting, in 1996, the unbridled destruction of many of the country's historic urban cores. He offered his assistance to the Department of Canadian Heritage in creating a trust modelled on Britain's National Trust, a plan that was implemented with the passage of the 2007 Canadian federal budget.  In 1999, the Prince agreed to the use of his title for the Prince of Wales Prize for Municipal Heritage Leadership, awarded by the Heritage Canada Foundation to municipal governments that have shown sustained commitment to the conservation of historic places.  While visiting the United States and surveying the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, Charles received the National Building Museum's Vincent Scully Prize in 2005, for his efforts in regard to architecture; he donated $25,000 of the prize money towards restoring storm-damaged communities.  

From 1997, the Prince of Wales has visited Romania to view and highlight the destruction of Orthodox monasteries and Transylvanian Saxon villages during the Communist rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu.    Charles is patron of the Mihai Eminescu Trust, a Romanian conservation and regeneration organisation,  and has purchased a house in Romania.  Historian Tom Gallagher wrote in the Romanian newspaper România Liberă in 2006 that Charles had been offered the Romanian throne by monarchists in that country; an offer that was reportedly turned down,  but Buckingham Palace denied the reports.  Charles also has "a deep understanding of Islamic art and architecture", and has been involved in the construction of a building and garden at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies that combine Islamic and Oxford architectural styles.

Charles has occasionally intervened in projects that employ architectural styles such as modernism and functionalism. In 2009, Charles wrote to the Qatari royal family, the developers of the Chelsea Barracks site, labelling Lord Rogers's design for the site "unsuitable". Subsequently, Rogers was removed from the project and The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment was appointed to propose an alternative. Rogers claimed the Prince had also intervened to block his designs for the Royal Opera House and Paternoster Square, and condemned Charles's actions as "an abuse of power" and "unconstitutional". Lord Foster, Zaha Hadid, Jacques Herzog, Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, and Frank Gehry, among others, wrote a letter to The Sunday Times complaining that the Prince's "private comments" and "behind-the-scenes lobbying" subverted the "open and democratic planning process".  Piers Gough and other architects condemned Charles's views as "elitist" in a letter encouraging colleagues to boycott a speech given by Charles to RIBA in 2009.

In 2010, The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment decided to help reconstruct and redesign buildings in Port-au-Prince, Haiti after the capital was destroyed by the 2010 Haiti earthquake.  The foundation is known for refurbishing historic buildings in Kabul, Afghanistan and in Kingston, Jamaica. The project has been called the "biggest challenge yet" for the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment. 

Livery company commitments

The Worshipful Company of Carpenters installed Charles as an Honorary Liveryman "in recognition of his interest in London's architecture."  The Prince of Wales is also Permanent Master of the Worshipful Company of Shipwrights, a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Drapers, an Honorary Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Musicians, an Honorary Member of the Court of Assistants of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, and a Royal Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners. 

Natural environment

Since the early 1980s, Charles has promoted environmental awareness.  Upon moving into Highgrove House, he developed an interest in organic farming, which culminated in the 1990 launch of his own organic brand, Duchy Originals, which now sells more than 200 different sustainably produced products, from food to garden furniture; the profits (over £6 million by 2010) are donated to The Prince's Charities.  Documenting work on his estate, Charles co-authored (with Charles Clover, environment editor of The Daily Telegraph) Highgrove: An Experiment in Organic Gardening and Farming, published in 1993, and offers his patronage to Garden Organic. Along similar lines, the Prince of Wales became involved with farming and various industries within it, regularly meeting with farmers to discuss their trade. Although the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic in England prevented Charles from visiting organic farms in Saskatchewan, he met the farmers at Assiniboia town hall.   In 2004, he founded the Mutton Renaissance Campaign, which aims to support British sheep farmers and make mutton more attractive to Britons.  His organic farming has attracted media criticism: According to The Independent in October 2006, "the story of Duchy Originals has involved compromises and ethical blips, wedded to a determined merchandising programme." 

In 2007, he received the 10th annual Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment, the director of which, Eric Chivian, stated: "For decades the Prince of Wales has been a champion of the natural world ... He has been a world leader in efforts to improve energy efficiency and in reducing the discharge of toxic substances on land, and into the air and the oceans".  Charles's travels by private jet drew criticism from Plane Stupid's Joss Garman.  

In 2007, Charles launched The Prince's May Day Network, which encourages businesses to take action on climate change. Speaking to the European Parliament on 14 February 2008, he called for European Union leadership in the war against climate change. During the standing ovation that followed, Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), remained seated and went on to describe Charles's advisers as "naive and foolish at best."  In a speech to the Low Carbon Prosperity Summit in a European Parliament chamber on 9 February 2011, Charles said that climate change sceptics are playing "a reckless game of roulette" with the planet's future and are having a "corrosive effect" on public opinion. He also articulated the need to protect fisheries and the Amazon rain forest, and to make low-carbon emissions affordable and competitive. 

In 2011, Charles received the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Medal for his engagement with the environment, such as the conservation of rainforests. 

On 27 August 2012, the Prince of Wales addressed the International Union for Conservation of Nature - World Conservation Congress, supporting the view that grazing animals are needed to keep soils and grassland productive:

"I have been particularly fascinated, for example, by the work of a remarkable man called Allan Savory, in Zimbabwe and other semi arid areas, who has argued for years against the prevailing expert view that is the simple numbers of cattle that drive overgrazing and cause fertile land to become desert. On the contrary, as he has since shown so graphically, the land needs the presence of feeding animals and their droppings for the cycle to be complete, so that soils and grassland areas stay productive. Such that, if you take grazers off the land and lock them away in vast feedlots, the land dies." 

In February 2014, Charles visited Somerset levels to meet residents affected by winter flooding. During his visit, Charles remarked that, "There's nothing like a jolly good disaster to get people to start doing something. The tragedy is that nothing happened for so long." He pledged a £50,000 donation,  provided by the Prince's Countryside Fund, to help families and their businesses.   

Alternative medicine

Charles has controversially championed alternative medicine.  The Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health attracted opposition from the scientific and medical community over its campaign encouraging general practitioners to offer herbal and other alternative treatments to National Health Service patients,   and in May 2006, Charles made a speech at the World Health Assembly in Geneva, urging the integration of conventional and alternative medicine and arguing for homeopathy.  

In April 2008, The Times published a letter from Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter, which asked the Prince's Foundation to recall two guides promoting alternative medicine, saying "the majority of alternative therapies appear to be clinically ineffective, and many are downright dangerous." A speaker for the foundation countered the criticism by stating: "We entirely reject the accusation that our online publication Complementary Healthcare: A Guide contains any misleading or inaccurate claims about the benefits of complementary therapies. On the contrary, it treats people as adults and takes a responsible approach by encouraging people to look at reliable sources of information ... so that they can make informed decisions. The foundation does not promote complementary therapies."  That year, Ernst published a book with Simon Singh, mockingly dedicated to "HRH the Prince of Wales" called Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial. The last chapter is highly critical of Charles's advocacy of complementary and alternative treatments. 

The Prince's Duchy Originals produce a variety of complementary medicinal products including a "Detox Tincture" that Edzard Ernst has denounced as "financially exploiting the vulnerable" and "outright quackery". In 2009, the Advertising Standards Authority criticised an email that Duchy Originals had sent out to advertise its Echina-Relief, Hyperi-Lift and Detox Tinctures products saying that it was misleading. The Prince personally wrote at least seven letters  to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) shortly before they relaxed the rules governing labelling of such herbal products, a move that has been widely condemned by scientists and medical bodies.  In October 2009, it was reported that Charles had personally lobbied the Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, regarding greater provision of alternative treatments in the NHS. In 2016 Charles said in a speech that he used homeopathic veterinary medicines to reduce antibiotic use at his farm. 

In April 2010, following accounting irregularities, a former official at the foundation and his wife were arrested for fraud believed to total £300,000.  Four days later, the foundation announced its closure, claiming that it "has achieved its key objective of promoting the use of integrated health."  The charity's finance director, accountant George Gray, was convicted of theft totalling £253,000 and sentenced to three years in prison. The Prince's Foundation was re-branded and re-launched later in 2010 as The College of Medicine.  

Religious and philosophical interests

The Prince of Wales was confirmed at age 16 by Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey at Easter 1965, in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. He attends services at various Anglican churches close to Highgrove,  and attends the Church of Scotland's Crathie Kirk with the rest of the royal family when staying at Balmoral Castle. In 2000, he was appointed as Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. The Prince of Wales has visited (amid some secrecy) Orthodox monasteries several times on Mount Athos  as well as in Romania. Charles is also patron of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford. 

Sir Laurens van der Post became a friend of Charles in 1977; he was dubbed his "spiritual guru" and was godfather to Charles's son, Prince William.  From van der Post, the Prince of Wales developed a focus on philosophy, especially that of Asian and Middle Eastern nations. He has praised Kabbalistic artworks,  and wrote a memorial for Kathleen Raine, the Neoplatonist poet who died in 2003. 

Charles expressed his philosophical views in his 2010 book, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World,    which won the Nautilus Book Award.  Although it had been rumoured that Charles would vow to be "Defender of the Faiths" or "Defender of Faith" as king, he stated in 2015 that he will retain the monarch's traditional title of "Defender of the Faith", whilst "ensuring that other people's faiths can also be practised", which he sees as a duty of the Church of England. 

Official duties

In 2008, The Daily Telegraph declared Charles the "hardest-working member of the royal family." He carried out 560 official engagements in 2008, 499 in 2010,  and over 600 in 2011.

As Prince of Wales, Charles undertakes official duties on behalf of his mother and the Commonwealth realms. He officiates at investitures and attends the funerals of foreign dignitaries. At the funeral of Pope John Paul II, Charles unintentionally caused controversy when he shook hands with Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, who had been seated next to him. Charles's office subsequently released a statement saying: "The Prince of Wales was caught by surprise and not in a position to avoid shaking Mr Mugabe's hand. The Prince finds the current Zimbabwean regime abhorrent. He has supported the Zimbabwe Defence and Aid Fund which works with those being oppressed by the regime. The Prince also recently met Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo, an outspoken critic of the government." 

Prince Charles makes regular tours of Wales, fulfilling a week of engagements in the principality each summer, and attending important national occasions, such as opening the Senedd.  The six Trustees of the Royal Collection Trust meet three times a year under his chairmanship. 

The Prince of Wales travels abroad on behalf of the United Kingdom. The Prince has been regarded as an effective advocate of the country, with his visit to the Republic of Ireland in 1995, he delivered a personally researched and written speech on Anglo-Irish affairs that was warmly received by Irish politicians and the media, being cited as an example.
In 2000, Charles revived the tradition of the Prince of Wales having an official harpist, in order to foster Welsh talent at playing the harp, the national instrument of Wales. He and the Duchess of Cornwall also spend one week each year in Scotland, where the Prince is patron of several Scottish organisations.  His service to the Canadian Armed Forces permits him to be informed of troop activities, and allows him to visit these troops while in Canada or overseas, taking part in ceremonial occasions.  For instance, in 2001, the Prince placed a specially commissioned wreath, made from vegetation taken from French battlefields, at the Canadian Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,  and in 1981 he became the patron of the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum. 

In 2010, he represented the Queen at the opening ceremony of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, India.  He attends official events in the United Kingdom in support of Commonwealth countries, such as the Christchurch earthquake memorial service at Westminster Abbey in 2011.    From 15 to 17 November 2013, he represented the Queen for the first time at a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, in Colombo, Sri Lanka.  

Letters sent by the Prince of Wales to government ministers—the so-called black spider memos—during 2004 and 2005 have presented potential embarrassment following a challenge by The Guardian newspaper to release the letters under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. In March 2015, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom decided that the Prince's letters must be released. The letters were published by the Cabinet Office on 13 May 2015.    The Prince and the Duchess of Cornwall made their first joint trip to the Republic of Ireland in May 2015. The trip was called an important step in "promoting peace and reconciliation" by the British Embassy.  During the trip, Charles shook hands with Sinn Féin and supposed IRA leader Gerry Adams in Galway which was described by the media as a "historic handshake" and a "significant moment for Anglo-Irish relations".   

Hobbies and personal interests

Sports

From his youth the Prince was an avid player of competitive polo until 1992. He continued to play informally, including for charity, until 2005.  Charles also frequently took part in fox hunting, before the sport was banned in the United Kingdom in 2005. By the late 1990s, as opposition to the activity was growing, the Prince's participation was viewed as a "political statement" by those opposed to it, such as the League Against Cruel Sports, which launched an attack against Charles after he took his sons on the Beaufort Hunt in 1999, when the government was trying to ban hunting with hounds.  

Charles has been a keen salmon angler since youth, and supports Orri Vigfússon's efforts to protect the North Atlantic salmon. He frequently fishes the River Dee in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, while he claims his most special angling memories are from his time in Vopnafjörður, Iceland.  Charles is a supporter of Burnley Football Club. 

Visual, performing and contemporary arts

The Prince is President or Patron of more than 20 performing arts organisations, including the Royal College of Music, the Royal Opera, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Welsh National Opera, and the Purcell School. In 2000, he revived the tradition of appointing harpists to the Royal Court, by appointing an Official Harpist to the Prince of Wales. As an undergraduate at Cambridge he played cello, and has sung with the Bach Choir twice.

He founded The Prince's Foundation for Children and The Arts in 2002, to help more children experience the arts first-hand. He is President of the Royal Shakespeare Company and attends performances in Stratford-Upon-Avon, supports fundraising events and attends the company's annual general meeting. He enjoys comedy,  and is interested in illusionism, becoming a member of The Magic Circle after passing his audition in 1975 by performing the "cups and balls" effect. 

A keen and accomplished watercolourist, Charles has exhibited and sold a number of his works, and published books on the subject. In 2001, 20 lithographs of his watercolour paintings illustrating his country estates were exhibited at the Florence International Biennale of Contemporary Art.  Charles was awarded the 2011 Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award by the Montblanc Cultural Foundation for his support and commitment to the arts, particularly in regard to young people. 

On 23 April 2016, the Prince appeared in a comedy sketch for the Royal Shakespeare Company's Shakespeare Live!  at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death in 1616. Attended by the Prince with the Duchess of Cornwall, the gala was televised live by the BBC. Like Paapa Essiedu, Tim Minchin, Benedict Cumberbatch, David Tennant, Harriet Walter, Rory Kinnear, Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench  the Prince made a surprise entrance to settle the disputed delivery of Hamlet's celebrated line, "To be or not to be, that is the question". 

Publications

The Prince of Wales is an author of several books reflecting his own interests. He has also contributed a foreword or preface to books by other writers and has also written, presented and has been featured in documentary films.     

Media image

Since his birth, Prince Charles has undergone close media attention, which increased as he matured. It has been an ambivalent relationship, largely impacted by his marriages to Diana and Camilla and its aftermath, but also centred on his future conduct as king, such as the 2014 play King Charles III. 

Impact of marriage to Diana

Described as the "world's most eligible bachelor" in the late 1970s,  Prince Charles was subsequently overshadowed by Diana. After her death, the media regularly breached Charles's privacy and printed exposés.

In 2006, the Prince filed a court case against the Mail on Sunday, after excerpts of his personal journals were published, revealing his opinions on matters such as the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong to China in 1997, in which Charles described the Chinese government officials as "appalling old waxworks". Mark Bolland, his ex-private secretary, declared in a statement to the High Court that Charles "would readily embrace the political aspects of any contentious issue he was interested in ... He carried it out in a very considered, thoughtful and researched way. He often referred to himself as a 'dissident' working against the prevailing political consensus." Jonathan Dimbleby reported that the Prince "has accumulated a number of certainties about the state of the world and does not relish contradiction." 

Others formerly connected with the Prince have betrayed his confidence. An ex-member of his household handed the press an internal memo in which Charles commented on ambition and opportunity, and which was widely interpreted as blaming meritocracy for creating a combative atmosphere in society. Charles responded: "In my view, it is just as great an achievement to be a plumber or a bricklayer as it is to be a lawyer or a doctor". 

Reaction to press treatment

Charles's anguish was recorded in his private comments to Prince William, caught on a microphone during a press photo-call in 2005 and published in the national press. After a question from the BBC's royal reporter, Nicholas Witchell, Charles muttered: "These bloody people. I can't bear that man. I mean, he's so awful, he really is." 

In 2002, Charles, "so often a target of the Press, got his chance to return fire" when addressing "scores of editors, publishers and other media executives" gathered at St Bride's Fleet Street to celebrate 300 years of journalism.   Defending public servants from "the corrosive drip of constant criticism", he noted that the press had been "awkward, cantankerous, cynical, bloody-minded, at times intrusive, at times inaccurate and at times deeply unfair and harmful to individuals and to institutions." But, he concluded, regarding his own relations with the press, "from time to time we are probably both a bit hard on each other, exaggerating the downsides and ignoring the good points in each."

Guest appearances on television

The Prince of Wales has occasionally appeared on television. In 1984, he read his children's book The Old Man of Lochnagar for the BBC's Jackanory series. The UK soap opera Coronation Street featured an appearance by Charles during the show's 40th anniversary in 2000,  as did the New Zealand young adult cartoon series bro'Town (2005), after he attended a performance by the show's creators during a tour of the country.  

Charles was interviewed with Princes William and Harry by Ant & Dec to mark the 30th anniversary of The Prince's Trust in 2006  and in 2016 was interviewed by them again along with his sons and the Duchess of Cornwall to mark the 40th anniversary.  

His saving of the Scottish stately home Dumfries House was the subject of Alan Titchmarsh's documentary Royal Restoration, which aired on TV in May 2012.  Also in May 2012, Charles tried his hand at being a weather presenter for the BBC, reporting the forecast for Scotland as part of their annual week at Holyrood Palace alongside Christopher Blanchett. He injected humour in his report, asking, "Who the hell wrote this script?" as references were made to royal residences. 

In December 2015 Channel 4 News revealed that interviews with Charles were subject to a contract that restricts questions to those previously approved, and gives his staff oversight of editing and the right to "remove the contribution in its entirety from the programme". Channel 4 News decided not to proceed with an interview on this basis, which some journalists believed would put them at risk of breaching the Ofcom Broadcasting Code on editorial independence and transparency.

Residences and finance

Clarence House in London is the Prince of Wales's current official residence. Previously, he had an apartment at St James's Palace. Charles also has two private homes: Highgrove House in Gloucestershire and Birkhall near Balmoral Castle. Both Clarence House and Birkhall were previously the residences of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.  His primary source of income is generated from the Duchy of Cornwall, which owns 133,658 acres of land (around 54,090 hectares), including farming, residential, and commercial properties, as well as an investment portfolio. Highgrove is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, having been purchased for his use in 1980, and which Prince Charles rents for £336,000 per annum.  The Public Accounts Committee published its 25th report into the Duchy of Cornwall accounts in November 2013 noting that the Duchy performed well in 2012–13, increasing its total income and producing an overall surplus of £19.1 million. 

In 2007 the Prince purchased a 192-acre property (150 acres of grazing and parkland, and 40 acres of woodland) in Carmarthenshire, and applied for permission to convert the farm into a Welsh home for him and the Duchess of Cornwall, to be rented out as holiday flats when the royal couple is not in residence.  A neighbouring family said the proposals flouted local planning regulations, and the application was put on hold temporarily while a report was drafted on how the alterations would affect the local bat population.  Charles and Camilla first stayed at the new property, called Llwynywermod, in June 2008. 

Starting in 1993, the Prince of Wales has paid tax voluntarily under the Memorandum of Understanding on Royal Taxation, updated 2013.  In December 2012, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs were asked to investigate alleged tax avoidance by the Duchy of Cornwall. 

Titles, styles, honours and arms

Titles and styles

Charles has held titles throughout his life, as the grandson of the monarch, the son of the monarch and in his own right. There has been speculation as to what regnal name the Prince will choose upon his succession to the throne. If he keeps his current first name, he will be known as Charles III. However, it was reported in 2005 that Charles has suggested he may choose to reign as George VII in honour of his maternal grandfather, and to avoid association with the Stuart kings Charles I (who was beheaded) and Charles II (who was known for his playboy lifestyle),  as well as to be sensitive to the memory of Bonnie Prince Charlie, who was called "Charles III" by his supporters. Charles's office responded that "no decision has been made". 

Honours and military appointments

Charles has held substantive ranks in the armed forces of a number of countries since he was made a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force in 1972. Charles's first honorary appointment in the armed forces was as Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Regiment of Wales in 1969; since then, the Prince has also been installed as Colonel-in-Chief, Colonel, Honorary Air Commodore, Air Commodore-in-Chief, Deputy Colonel-in-Chief, Royal Honorary Colonel, Royal Colonel, and Honorary Commodore of at least 32 military formations throughout the Commonwealth, including the Royal Gurkha Rifles, which is the only foreign regiment in the British army.  Since 2009, Charles holds the second-highest ranks in all three branches of the Canadian Forces and, on 16 June 2012, the Queen awarded the Prince of Wales honorary five-star rank in all three branches of the British Armed Forces, "to acknowledge his support in her role as Commander-in-Chief", installing him as Admiral of the Fleet, Field Marshal and Marshal of the Royal Air Force.   

He has been inducted into seven orders and received eight decorations from the Commonwealth realms, and has been the recipient of 20 different honours from foreign states, as well as nine honorary degrees from universities in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

Arms

Issue

Ancestry

Notes

Footnotes

Citations

Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; born 21 April 1926) is, and has been since her accession in 1952, Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and Head of the Commonwealth. She is also Queen of 12 countries that have become independent since her accession: Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Kitts and Nevis.

Elizabeth was born in London to the Duke and Duchess of York, later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and was the elder of their two daughters. She was educated privately at home. Her father acceded to the throne on the abdication of his brother Edward VIII in 1936, from which time she was the heir presumptive. She began to undertake public duties during the Second World War, serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. In 1947, she married Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, with whom she has four children: Charles, Anne, Andrew, and Edward.

Elizabeth's many historic visits and meetings include a state visit to the Republic of Ireland and reciprocal visits to and from the Pope. She has seen major constitutional changes, such as devolution in the United Kingdom, Canadian patriation, and the decolonisation of Africa. She has also reigned through various wars and conflicts involving many of her realms. She is the world's oldest reigning monarch as well as Britain's longest-lived. In 2015, she surpassed the reign of her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, to become the longest-reigning British monarch and the longest-reigning queen regnant and female head of state in world history.

Times of personal significance have included the births and marriages of her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, her coronation in 1953, and the celebration of milestones such as her Silver, Golden and Diamond Jubilees in 1977, 2002, and 2012, respectively. Moments of sadness for her include the death of her father, aged 56; the assassination of Prince Philip's uncle, Lord Mountbatten; the breakdown of her children's marriages in 1992 (her annus horribilis); the death in 1997 of her son's ex-wife, Diana, Princess of Wales; and the deaths of her mother and sister in 2002. Elizabeth has occasionally faced republican sentiments and severe press criticism of the royal family but support for the monarchy remains high, as does her personal popularity. 

Early life

Elizabeth was born at 02:40 (GMT) on 21 April 1926, during the reign of her paternal grandfather, King George V. Her father, Prince Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI), was the second son of the King. Her mother, Elizabeth, Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth), was the youngest daughter of Scottish aristocrat Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. She was delivered by Caesarean section at her maternal grandfather's London house: 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair.  She was baptised by the Anglican Archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang, in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace on 29 May,  and named Elizabeth after her mother, Alexandra after George V's mother, who had died six months earlier, and Mary after her paternal grandmother.  Called "Lilibet" by her close family,  based on what she called herself at first,  she was cherished by her grandfather George V, and during his serious illness in 1929 her regular visits were credited in the popular press and by later biographers with raising his spirits and aiding his recovery. 

Elizabeth's only sibling, Princess Margaret, was born in 1930. The two princesses were educated at home under the supervision of their mother and their governess, Marion Crawford, who was casually known as "Crawfie".  Lessons concentrated on history, language, literature and music.  Crawford published a biography of Elizabeth and Margaret's childhood years entitled The Little Princesses in 1950, much to the dismay of the royal family.  The book describes Elizabeth's love of horses and dogs, her orderliness, and her attitude of responsibility.  Others echoed such observations: Winston Churchill described Elizabeth when she was two as "a character. She has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant."  Her cousin Margaret Rhodes described her as "a jolly little girl, but fundamentally sensible and well-behaved". 

Heir presumptive

During her grandfather's reign, Elizabeth was third in the line of succession to the throne, behind her uncle Edward, Prince of Wales, and her father, the Duke of York. Although her birth generated public interest, she was not expected to become queen, as the Prince of Wales was still young. Many people believed that he would marry and have children of his own.  When her grandfather died in 1936 and her uncle succeeded as Edward VIII, she became second-in-line to the throne, after her father. Later that year Edward abdicated, after his proposed marriage to divorced socialite Wallis Simpson provoked a constitutional crisis.  Consequently, Elizabeth's father became king, and she became heir presumptive. If her parents had had a later son, she would have lost her position as first-in-line, as her brother would have been heir apparent and above her in the line of succession. 

Elizabeth received private tuition in constitutional history from Henry Marten, Vice-Provost of Eton College,  and learned French from a succession of native-speaking governesses. A Girl Guides company, the 1st Buckingham Palace Company, was formed specifically so that she could socialise with girls her own age.  Later, she was enrolled as a Sea Ranger.

In 1939, Elizabeth's parents toured Canada and the United States. As in 1927, when her parents had toured Australia and New Zealand, Elizabeth remained in Britain, since her father thought her too young to undertake public tours.Pimlott, p. 54 Elizabeth "looked tearful" as her parents departed.Pimlott, p. 55 They corresponded regularly, and she and her parents made the first royal transatlantic telephone call on 18 May.

Second World War

In September 1939, Britain entered the Second World War, which lasted until 1945. During the war, many of London's children were evacuated to avoid the frequent aerial bombing. The suggestion by senior politician Lord Hailsham  that the two princesses should be evacuated to Canada was rejected by Elizabeth's mother, who declared, "The children won't go without me. I won't leave without the King. And the King will never leave."  Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret stayed at Balmoral Castle, Scotland, until Christmas 1939, when they moved to Sandringham House, Norfolk.  From February to May 1940, they lived at Royal Lodge, Windsor, until moving to Windsor Castle, where they lived for most of the next five years.  At Windsor, the princesses staged pantomimes at Christmas in aid of the Queen's Wool Fund, which bought yarn to knit into military garments.  In 1940, the 14-year-old Elizabeth made her first radio broadcast during the BBC's Children's Hour, addressing other children who had been evacuated from the cities. She stated: "We are trying to do all we can to help our gallant sailors, soldiers and airmen, and we are trying, too, to bear our share of the danger and sadness of war. We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well."

In 1943, at the age of 16, Elizabeth undertook her first solo public appearance on a visit to the Grenadier Guards, of which she had been appointed colonel the previous year.  As she approached her 18th birthday, parliament changed the law so that she could act as one of five Counsellors of State in the event of her father's incapacity or absence abroad, such as his visit to Italy in July 1944.  In February 1945, she joined the Women's Auxiliary Territorial Service as an honorary second subaltern with the service number of 230873.  She trained as a driver and mechanic and was promoted to honorary junior commander five months later.  

At the end of the war in Europe, on Victory in Europe Day, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret mingled anonymously with the celebratory crowds in the streets of London. Elizabeth later said in a rare interview, "We asked my parents if we could go out and see for ourselves. I remember we were terrified of being recognised ... I remember lines of unknown people linking arms and walking down Whitehall, all of us just swept along on a tide of happiness and relief." 

During the war, plans were drawn up to quell Welsh nationalism by affiliating Elizabeth more closely with Wales. Proposals, such as appointing her Constable of Caernarfon Castle or a patron of Urdd Gobaith Cymru (the Welsh League of Youth), were abandoned for various reasons, which included a fear of associating Elizabeth with conscientious objectors in the Urdd, at a time when Britain was at war.  Welsh politicians suggested that she be made Princess of Wales on her 18th birthday. Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison supported the idea, but the King rejected it because he felt such a title belonged solely to the wife of a Prince of Wales and the Prince of Wales had always been the heir apparent.  In 1946, she was inducted into the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards at the National Eisteddfod of Wales. 

In 1947, Princess Elizabeth went on her first overseas tour, accompanying her parents through southern Africa. During the tour, in a broadcast to the British Commonwealth on her 21st birthday, she made the following pledge: "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." 

Marriage and family

Elizabeth met her future husband, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, in 1934 and 1937.  They are second cousins once removed through King Christian IX of Denmark and third cousins through Queen Victoria. After another meeting at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth in July 1939, Elizabeth – though only 13 years old – said she fell in love with Philip and they began to exchange letters.  She was 21 when their engagement was officially announced on 9 July 1947. 

The engagement was not without controversy: Philip had no financial standing, was foreign-born (though a British subject who had served in the Royal Navy throughout the Second World War), and had sisters who had married German noblemen with Nazi links.  Marion Crawford wrote, "Some of the King's advisors did not think him good enough for her. He was a prince without a home or kingdom. Some of the papers played long and loud tunes on the string of Philip's foreign origin."  Later biographies reported that Elizabeth's mother initially opposed the union, dubbing Philip "The Hun".  In later life, however, the Queen Mother told biographer Tim Heald that Philip was "an English gentleman". 

Before the marriage, Philip renounced his Greek and Danish titles, converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Anglicanism, and adopted the style Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, taking the surname of his mother's British family.  Just before the wedding, he was created Duke of Edinburgh and granted the style His Royal Highness. 

Elizabeth and Philip were married on 20 November 1947 at Westminster Abbey. They received 2500 wedding gifts from around the world. Because Britain had not yet completely recovered from the devastation of the war, Elizabeth required ration coupons to buy the material for her gown, which was designed by Norman Hartnell.  In post-war Britain, it was not acceptable for the Duke of Edinburgh's German relations, including his three surviving sisters, to be invited to the wedding.  The Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, was not invited, either. 

Elizabeth gave birth to her first child, Prince Charles, on 14 November 1948. One month earlier, the King had issued letters patent allowing her children to use the style and title of a royal prince or princess, to which they otherwise would not have been entitled as their father was no longer a royal prince.  A second child, Princess Anne, was born in 1950. 

Following their wedding, the couple leased Windlesham Moor, near Windsor Castle, until July 1949, when they took up residence at Clarence House in London. At various times between 1949 and 1951, the Duke of Edinburgh was stationed in the British Crown Colony of Malta as a serving Royal Navy officer. He and Elizabeth lived intermittently, for several months at a time, in the hamlet of Gwardamanġa, at Villa Guardamangia, the rented home of Philip's uncle, Lord Mountbatten. The children remained in Britain. 

Reign

Accession and coronation

During 1951, George VI's health declined and Elizabeth frequently stood in for him at public events. When she toured Canada and visited President Harry S. Truman in Washington, D.C., in October 1951, her private secretary, Martin Charteris, carried a draft accession declaration in case the King died while she was on tour.  In early 1952, Elizabeth and Philip set out for a tour of Australia and New Zealand by way of Kenya. On 6 February 1952, they had just returned to their Kenyan home, Sagana Lodge, after a night spent at Treetops Hotel, when word arrived of the death of the King and consequently Elizabeth's immediate accession to the throne. Philip broke the news to the new Queen.  Martin Charteris asked her to choose a regnal name; she chose to remain Elizabeth, "of course".  She was proclaimed queen throughout her realms and the royal party hastily returned to the United Kingdom.  She and the Duke of Edinburgh moved into Buckingham Palace. 

With Elizabeth's accession, it seemed probable that the royal house would bear her husband's name, becoming the House of Mountbatten, in line with the custom of a wife taking her husband's surname on marriage. The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and Elizabeth's grandmother, Queen Mary, favoured the retention of the House of Windsor, and so on 9 April 1952 Elizabeth issued a declaration that Windsor would continue to be the name of the royal house. The Duke complained, "I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children."  In 1960, after the death of Queen Mary in 1953 and the resignation of Churchill in 1955, the surname Mountbatten-Windsor was adopted for Philip and Elizabeth's male-line descendants who do not carry royal titles. 

Amid preparations for the coronation, Princess Margaret informed her sister that she wished to marry Peter Townsend, a divorcé‚ 16 years Margaret's senior, with two sons from his previous marriage. The Queen asked them to wait for a year; in the words of Martin Charteris, "the Queen was naturally sympathetic towards the Princess, but I think she thought—she hoped—given time, the affair would peter out."  Senior politicians were against the match and the Church of England did not permit remarriage after divorce. If Margaret had contracted a civil marriage, she would have been expected to renounce her right of succession.  Eventually, she decided to abandon her plans with Townsend.  In 1960, she married Antony Armstrong-Jones, who was created Earl of Snowdon the following year. They divorced in 1978; she did not remarry. 

Despite the death of Queen Mary on 24 March, the coronation on 2 June 1953 went ahead as planned, as Mary had asked before she died.  The ceremony in Westminster Abbey, with the exception of the anointing and communion, was televised for the first time.  Elizabeth's coronation gown was embroidered on her instructions with the floral emblems of Commonwealth countries:  English Tudor rose; Scots thistle; Welsh leek; Irish shamrock; Australian wattle; Canadian maple leaf; New Zealand silver fern; South African protea; lotus flowers for India and Ceylon; and Pakistan's wheat, cotton, and jute. 

Continuing evolution of the Commonwealth

From Elizabeth's birth onwards, the British Empire continued its transformation into the Commonwealth of Nations.  By the time of her accession in 1952, her role as head of multiple independent states was already established.  In 1953, the Queen and her husband embarked on a seven-month round-the-world tour, visiting 13 countries and covering more than 40,000 miles by land, sea and air.  She became the first reigning monarch of Australia and New Zealand to visit those nations.Marr, p. 126 During the tour, crowds were immense; three-quarters of the population of Australia were estimated to have seen her.  Throughout her reign, the Queen has made hundreds of state visits to other countries and tours of the Commonwealth; she is the most widely travelled head of state. 

In 1956, the British and French prime ministers, Sir Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet, discussed the possibility of France joining the Commonwealth. The proposal was never accepted and the following year France signed the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community, the precursor to the European Union.  In November 1956, Britain and France invaded Egypt in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to capture the Suez Canal. Lord Mountbatten claimed the Queen was opposed to the invasion, though Eden denied it. Eden resigned two months later. 

The absence of a formal mechanism within the Conservative Party for choosing a leader meant that, following Eden's resignation, it fell to the Queen to decide whom to commission to form a government. Eden recommended that she consult Lord Salisbury, the Lord President of the Council. Lord Salisbury and Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, consulted the British Cabinet, Winston Churchill, and the Chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, resulting in the Queen appointing their recommended candidate: Harold Macmillan. 

The Suez crisis and the choice of Eden's successor led in 1957 to the first major personal criticism of the Queen. In a magazine, which he owned and edited,  Lord Altrincham accused her of being "out of touch".  Altrincham was denounced by public figures and slapped by a member of the public appalled by his comments.  Six years later, in 1963, Macmillan resigned and advised the Queen to appoint the Earl of Home as prime minister, advice that she followed.Hardman, p. 22; Pimlott, pp. 324–335; Roberts, p. 84 The Queen again came under criticism for appointing the prime minister on the advice of a small number of ministers or a single minister. In 1965, the Conservatives adopted a formal mechanism for electing a leader, thus relieving her of involvement. 

In 1957, she made a state visit to the United States, where she addressed the United Nations General Assembly on behalf of the Commonwealth. On the same tour, she opened the 23rd Canadian Parliament, becoming the first monarch of Canada to open a parliamentary session. Two years later, solely in her capacity as Queen of Canada, she revisited the United States and toured Canada.  In 1961, she toured Cyprus, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Iran.  On a visit to Ghana the same year, she dismissed fears for her safety, even though her host, President Kwame Nkrumah, who had replaced her as head of state, was a target for assassins. Harold Macmillan wrote, "The Queen has been absolutely determined all through ... She is impatient of the attitude towards her to treat her as ... a film star ... She has indeed 'the heart and stomach of a man' ... She loves her duty and means to be a Queen."Macmillan, pp. 466–472 Before her tour through parts of Quebec in 1964, the press reported that extremists within the Quebec separatist movement were plotting Elizabeth's assassination.   No attempt was made, but a riot did break out while she was in Montreal; the Queen's "calmness and courage in the face of the violence" was noted. 

Elizabeth's pregnancies with Princes Andrew and Edward, in 1959 and 1963, mark the only times she has not performed the State Opening of the British parliament during her reign.  In addition to performing traditional ceremonies, she also instituted new practices. Her first royal walkabout, meeting ordinary members of the public, took place during a tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1970. 

Acceleration of decolonisation

The 1960s and 1970s saw an acceleration in the decolonisation of Africa and the Caribbean. Over 20 countries gained independence from Britain as part of a planned transition to self-government. In 1965, however, the Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, in opposition to moves toward majority rule, declared unilateral independence from Britain while still expressing "loyalty and devotion" to Elizabeth. Although the Queen dismissed him in a formal declaration, and the international community applied sanctions against Rhodesia, his regime survived for over a decade.  As Britain's ties to its former empire weakened, the British government sought entry to the European Community, a goal it achieved in 1973. 

In February 1974, the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, advised the Queen to call a general election in the middle of her tour of the Austronesian Pacific Rim, requiring her to fly back to Britain.  The election resulted in a hung parliament; Heath's Conservatives were not the largest party, but could stay in office if they formed a coalition with the Liberals. Heath only resigned when discussions on forming a coalition foundered, after which the Queen asked the Leader of the Opposition, Labour's Harold Wilson, to form a government. 

A year later, at the height of the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, the Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, was dismissed from his post by Governor-General Sir John Kerr, after the Opposition-controlled Senate rejected Whitlam's budget proposals.Bond, p. 96; Marr, p. 257; Pimlott, p. 427; Shawcross, p. 110 As Whitlam had a majority in the House of Representatives, Speaker Gordon Scholes appealed to the Queen to reverse Kerr's decision. She declined, stating that she would not interfere in decisions reserved by the Constitution of Australia for the governor-general.  The crisis fuelled Australian republicanism.

Silver Jubilee

In 1977, Elizabeth marked the Silver Jubilee of her accession. Parties and events took place throughout the Commonwealth, many coinciding with her associated national and Commonwealth tours. The celebrations re-affirmed the Queen's popularity, despite virtually coincident negative press coverage of Princess Margaret's separation from her husband.  In 1978, the Queen endured a state visit to the United Kingdom by Romania's communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and his wife, Elena,  though privately she thought they had "blood on their hands".  The following year brought two blows: one was the unmasking of Anthony Blunt, former Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, as a communist spy; the other was the assassination of her relative and in-law Lord Mountbatten by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. 

According to Paul Martin, Sr., by the end of the 1970s the Queen was worried that the Crown "had little meaning for" Pierre Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister. Tony Benn said that the Queen found Trudeau "rather disappointing". Trudeau's supposed republicanism seemed to be confirmed by his antics, such as sliding down banisters at Buckingham Palace and pirouetting behind the Queen's back in 1977, and the removal of various Canadian royal symbols during his term of office. In 1980, Canadian politicians sent to London to discuss the patriation of the Canadian constitution found the Queen "better informed ... than any of the British politicians or bureaucrats". She was particularly interested after the failure of Bill C-60, which would have affected her role as head of state. Patriation removed the role of the British parliament from the Canadian constitution, but the monarchy was retained. Trudeau said in his memoirs that the Queen favoured his attempt to reform the constitution and that he was impressed by "the grace she displayed in public" and "the wisdom she showed in private". 

1980s

During the 1981 Trooping the Colour ceremony, six weeks before the wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer, six shots were fired at the Queen from close range as she rode down The Mall on her horse, Burmese. Police later discovered that the shots were blanks. The 17-year-old assailant, Marcus Sarjeant, was sentenced to five years in prison and released after three.  The Queen's composure and skill in controlling her mount were widely praised. 

From April to September 1982, the Queen was anxious  but proud  of her son, Prince Andrew, who was serving with British forces during the Falklands War. On 9 July, the Queen awoke in her bedroom at Buckingham Palace to find an intruder, Michael Fagan, in the room with her. Remaining calm and through two calls to the Palace police switchboard, she spoke to Fagan while he sat at the foot of her bed until assistance arrived seven minutes later.  After hosting US President Ronald Reagan at Windsor Castle in 1982 and visiting his California ranch in 1983, the Queen was angered when his administration ordered the invasion of Grenada, one of her Caribbean realms, without informing her. 

Intense media interest in the opinions and private lives of the royal family during the 1980s led to a series of sensational stories in the press, not all of which were entirely true.  As Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of The Sun, told his staff: "Give me a Sunday for Monday splash on the Royals. Don't worry if it's not true—so long as there's not too much of a fuss about it afterwards."  Newspaper editor Donald Trelford wrote in The Observer of 21 September 1986: "The royal soap opera has now reached such a pitch of public interest that the boundary between fact and fiction has been lost sight of ... it is not just that some papers don't check their facts or accept denials: they don't care if the stories are true or not." It was reported, most notably in The Sunday Times of 20 July 1986, that the Queen was worried that Margaret Thatcher's economic policies fostered social divisions and was alarmed by high unemployment, a series of riots, the violence of a miners' strike, and Thatcher's refusal to apply sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. The sources of the rumours included royal aide Michael Shea and Commonwealth Secretary-General Shridath Ramphal, but Shea claimed his remarks were taken out of context and embellished by speculation.  Thatcher reputedly said the Queen would vote for the Social Democratic Party – Thatcher's political opponents.  Thatcher's biographer John Campbell claimed "the report was a piece of journalistic mischief-making".  Belying reports of acrimony between them, Thatcher later conveyed her personal admiration for the Queen,  and the Queen gave two honours in her personal gift – membership in the Order of Merit and the Order of the Garter – to Thatcher after her replacement as prime minister by John Major.  Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said Elizabeth was a "behind the scenes force" in ending apartheid.

In 1987, in Canada, Elizabeth publicly supported politically divisive constitutional amendments, prompting criticism from opponents of the proposed changes, including Pierre Trudeau. The same year, the elected Fijian government was deposed in a military coup. As monarch of Fiji, Elizabeth supported the attempts of the Governor-General, Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau, to assert executive power and negotiate a settlement. Coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka deposed Ganilau and declared Fiji a republic.  By the start of 1991, republican feeling in Britain had risen because of press estimates of the Queen's private wealth – which were contradicted by the Palace – and reports of affairs and strained marriages among her extended family.  The involvement of younger members of the royal family in the charity game show It's a Royal Knockout was ridiculed,  and the Queen was the target of satire. 

1990s

In 1991, in the wake of coalition victory in the Gulf War, the Queen became the first British monarch to address a joint meeting of the United States Congress. 

In a speech on 24 November 1992, to mark the 40th anniversary of her accession, Elizabeth called 1992 her annus horribilis, meaning horrible year.  In March, her second son, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and his wife, Sarah, separated; in April, her daughter, Princess Anne, divorced Captain Mark Phillips;  during a state visit to Germany in October, angry demonstrators in Dresden threw eggs at her;  and, in November, a large fire broke out at Windsor Castle, one of her official residences. The monarchy came under increased criticism and public scrutiny.  In an unusually personal speech, the Queen said that any institution must expect criticism, but suggested it be done with "a touch of humour, gentleness and understanding".  Two days later, the Prime Minister, John Major, announced reforms to the royal finances planned since the previous year, including the Queen paying income tax from 1993 onwards, and a reduction in the civil list.  In December, Prince Charles and his wife, Diana, formally separated.  The year ended with a lawsuit as the Queen sued The Sun newspaper for breach of copyright when it published the text of her annual Christmas message two days before it was broadcast. The newspaper was forced to pay her legal fees and donated £200,000 to charity. 

In the years to follow, public revelations on the state of Charles and Diana's marriage continued.  Even though support for republicanism in Britain seemed higher than at any time in living memory, republicanism was still a minority viewpoint, and the Queen herself had high approval ratings.  Criticism was focused on the institution of the monarchy itself and the Queen's wider family rather than her own behaviour and actions.  In consultation with her husband and the Prime Minister, John Major, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, and her private secretary, Robert Fellowes, she wrote to Charles and Diana at the end of December 1995, saying that a divorce was desirable. 

In 1997, a year after the divorce, Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. The Queen was on holiday with her extended family at Balmoral. Diana's two sons by Charles – Princes William and Harry – wanted to attend church and so the Queen and Prince Philip took them that morning.  After that single public appearance, for five days the Queen and the Duke shielded their grandsons from the intense press interest by keeping them at Balmoral where they could grieve in private,  but the royal family's seclusion and the failure to fly a flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace caused public dismay.  Pressured by the hostile reaction, the Queen agreed to return to London and do a live television broadcast on 5 September, the day before Diana's funeral.  In the broadcast, she expressed admiration for Diana and her feelings "as a grandmother" for the two princes.Bond, p. 134; Brandreth, p. 359; Lacey, pp. 13–15; Pimlott, pp. 623–624 As a result, much of the public hostility evaporated.

Golden Jubilee

In 2002, Elizabeth marked her Golden Jubilee. Her sister and mother died in February and March respectively, and the media speculated whether the Jubilee would be a success or a failure.  She again undertook an extensive tour of her realms, which began in Jamaica in February, where she called the farewell banquet "memorable" after a power cut plunged the King's House, the official residence of the governor-general, into darkness.  As in 1977, there were street parties and commemorative events, and monuments were named to honour the occasion. A million people attended each day of the three-day main Jubilee celebration in London,  and the enthusiasm shown by the public for the Queen was greater than many journalists had expected. 

Though generally healthy throughout her life, in 2003 she had keyhole surgery on both knees. In October 2006, she missed the opening of the new Emirates Stadium because of a strained back muscle that had been troubling her since the summer. 

In May 2007, The Daily Telegraph, citing unnamed sources, reported that the Queen was "exasperated and frustrated" by the policies of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, that she was concerned the British Armed Forces were overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that she had raised concerns over rural and countryside issues with Blair.  She was, however, said to admire Blair's efforts to achieve peace in Northern Ireland.  On 20 March 2008, at the Church of Ireland St Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh, the Queen attended the first Maundy service held outside England and Wales.  At the invitation of the Irish President, Mary McAleese, the Queen made the first state visit to the Republic of Ireland by a British monarch in May 2011. 

The Queen addressed the United Nations for a second time in 2010, again in her capacity as Queen of all Commonwealth realms and Head of the Commonwealth. The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, introduced her as "an anchor for our age". During her visit to New York, which followed a tour of Canada, she officially opened a memorial garden for the British victims of the September 11 attacks. The Queen's visit to Australia in October 2011 – her sixteenth visit since 1954 – was called her "farewell tour" in the press because of her age. 

Diamond Jubilee and beyond

Her Diamond Jubilee in 2012 marked 60 years on the throne, and celebrations were held throughout her realms, the wider Commonwealth, and beyond. In a message released on Accession Day, Elizabeth wrote:

She and her husband undertook an extensive tour of the United Kingdom, while her children and grandchildren embarked on royal tours of other Commonwealth states on her behalf.   On 4 June, Jubilee beacons were lit around the world.  On 18 December, she became the first British sovereign to attend a peacetime Cabinet meeting since George III in 1781. 

The Queen, who opened the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, also opened the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in London, making her the first head of state to open two Olympic Games in two different countries.  For the London Olympics, she played herself in a short film as part of the opening ceremony, alongside Daniel Craig as James Bond.  On 4 April 2013, she received an honorary BAFTA for her patronage of the film industry and was called "the most memorable Bond girl yet" at the award ceremony. 

On 3 March 2013, Elizabeth was admitted to the King Edward VII's Hospital as a precaution after developing symptoms of gastroenteritis. She returned to Buckingham Palace the following day.  Because of her age and the need for her to limit travelling, in 2013 she chose not to attend the biennial meeting of Commonwealth heads of government for the first time in 40 years. She was represented at the summit in Sri Lanka by her son, Prince Charles. 

The Queen surpassed her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, to become the longest-lived British monarch in December 2007, and the longest-reigning British monarch on 9 September 2015.  She was celebrated in Canada as the "longest-reigning sovereign in Canada's modern era".  (King Louis XIV of France reigned over part of Canada for longer.)  She is the longest-reigning queen regnant in history,  the world's oldest reigning monarch and second-longest-serving current head of state after King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand.

The Queen does not intend to abdicate,  though Prince Charles is expected to take on more of her workload as Elizabeth, who celebrated her ninetieth birthday in 2016, carries out fewer public engagements.Marr, p. 395

Public perception and character

Since Elizabeth rarely gives interviews, little is known of her personal feelings. As a constitutional monarch, she has not expressed her own political opinions in a public forum. She does have a deep sense of religious and civic duty, and takes her coronation oath seriously.Shawcross, pp. 194–195 Aside from her official religious role as Supreme Governor of the established Church of England, she is personally a member of that church and the national Church of Scotland.  She has demonstrated support for inter-faith relations and has met with leaders of other churches and religions, including five popes: Pius XII, John XXIII, John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis. A personal note about her faith often features in her annual Christmas message broadcast to the Commonwealth. In 2000, she spoke about the theological significance of the millennium marking the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Jesus:

She is patron of over 600 organisations and charities.  Her main leisure interests include equestrianism and dogs, especially her Pembroke Welsh Corgis.  Her lifelong love of corgis began in 1933 with Dookie, the first corgi owned by her family.   Scenes of a relaxed, informal home life have occasionally been witnessed; she and her family, from time to time, prepare a meal together and do the washing up afterwards. 

In the 1950s, as a young woman at the start of her reign, Elizabeth was depicted as a glamorous "fairytale Queen".  After the trauma of the Second World War, it was a time of hope, a period of progress and achievement heralding a "new Elizabethan age".  Lord Altrincham's accusation in 1957 that her speeches sounded like those of a "priggish schoolgirl" was an extremely rare criticism.  In the late 1960s, attempts to portray a more modern image of the monarchy were made in the television documentary Royal Family and by televising Prince Charles's investiture as Prince of Wales.  In public, she took to wearing mostly solid-colour overcoats and decorative hats, which allow her to be seen easily in a crowd. 

At her Silver Jubilee in 1977, the crowds and celebrations were genuinely enthusiastic,  but in the 1980s, public criticism of the royal family increased, as the personal and working lives of Elizabeth's children came under media scrutiny.  Elizabeth's popularity sank to a low point in the 1990s. Under pressure from public opinion, she began to pay income tax for the first time, and Buckingham Palace was opened to the public.  Discontent with the monarchy reached its peak on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, though Elizabeth's personal popularity and support for the monarchy rebounded after her live television broadcast to the world five days after Diana's death. 

In November 1999, a referendum in Australia on the future of the Australian monarchy favoured its retention in preference to an indirectly elected head of state.  Polls in Britain in 2006 and 2007 revealed strong support for Elizabeth, and in 2012, her Diamond Jubilee year, approval ratings hit 90 percent.  Referenda in Tuvalu in 2008 and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in 2009 both rejected proposals to become republics. 

Elizabeth has been portrayed in a variety of media by many notable artists, including painters Lucian Freud, Peter Blake, Juliet Pannett, Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy, Terence Cuneo, Tai-Shan Schierenberg and Pietro Annigoni. Notable photographers of Elizabeth have included Cecil Beaton, Yousuf Karsh, Lord Lichfield, Terry O'Neill, Annie Leibovitz and John Swannell. The first official portrait of Elizabeth was taken by Marcus Adams in 1926.

Finances

Elizabeth's personal fortune has been the subject of speculation for many years. Jock Colville, who was her former private secretary and a director of her bank, Coutts, estimated her wealth in 1971 at £2 million (equivalent to about £ today).   In 1993, Buckingham Palace called estimates of £100 million "grossly overstated".  She inherited an estimated £70 million estate from her mother in 2002.  The Sunday Times Rich List 2015 estimated her private wealth at £340 million, making her the 302nd richest person in the UK. 

The Royal Collection, which includes thousands of historic works of art and the Crown Jewels, is not owned by the Queen personally but is held in trust, as are her official residences, such as Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, and the Duchy of Lancaster, a property portfolio valued in 2014 at £442 million.  Sandringham House and Balmoral Castle are privately owned by the Queen. The British Crown Estate – with holdings of £9.4 billion in 2014  – is held in trust by the sovereign and cannot be sold or owned by Elizabeth in a private capacity. 

Titles, styles, honours and arms

Titles and styles

Elizabeth has held many titles and honorary military positions throughout the Commonwealth, is Sovereign of many orders in her own countries, and has received honours and awards from around the world. In each of her realms she has a distinct title that follows a similar formula: Queen of Jamaica and her other realms and territories in Jamaica, Queen of Australia and her other realms and territories in Australia, etc. In the Channel Islands and Isle of Man, which are Crown dependencies rather than separate realms, she is known as Duke of Normandy and Lord of Mann, respectively. Additional styles include Defender of the Faith and Duke of Lancaster. When in conversation with the Queen, the practice is to initially address her as Your Majesty and thereafter as Ma'am. 

Arms

From 21 April 1944 until her accession, Elizabeth's arms consisted of a lozenge bearing the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom differenced with a label of three points argent, the centre point bearing a Tudor rose and the first and third a cross of St George.  Upon her accession, she inherited the various arms her father held as sovereign. The Queen also possesses royal standards and personal flags for use in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, and elsewhere. 

Issue

Ancestry

Queen Elizabeth II is gran again - CNN.com
Queen Elizabeth II is gran again
Story Highlights
Prince Edward, the Queen Elizabeth II's youngest son, becomes father again
Child, Queen Elizabeth II's eighth grandchild, is eighth in line to the throne
Prince and wife have a daughter, Lady Louise Windsor, who was born in 2003
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LONDON, England (CNN) -- The wife of Prince Edward, the Queen Elizabeth II's youngest son, gave birth to a baby boy Monday, Buckingham Palace confirmed in a statement.
The boy was delivered by caesarean section at Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey and weighed 6 pounds 2 ounces, the statement said. Prince Edward was with his wife -- the Countess of Wessex -- at the birth, it added.
The baby boy, who has not yet been named, will be the Queen's eighth grandchild and is eighth in line to the throne.
Edward, 43, and his wife Sophie, 42, already have a daughter, three-year-old Lady Louise Windsor, who was born four weeks premature in 2003.
Sophie had suffered a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy in 2001 before becoming pregnant with Lady Louise.
The couple married in June 1999 after they met at a tennis event six years earlier. E-mail to a friend

Prince Edward | Britroyals
Title: Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex
Full Name: Edward Antony Richard Louis
Father: Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
Mother: Queen Elizabeth II
Relation to Elizabeth II: Son
Born: March 10, 1964 at  Buckingham Palace, London
Current Age: 52 years, 9 months,  and 30 days
Married: Sophie Rhys-Jones on  June 19, 1999 at  St. George's Chapel, Windsor
Children: Lady Louise Windsor, Viscount Severn
Prince Edward is the third son and youngest child of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. He was born at Buckingham Palace on 10 March 1964, and christened at Windsor Castle on 2 May 1964.  He was educated at Heatherdown Preparatory School, Ascot, and like his father and two brothers went on to Gordonstoun School in Scotland where he was head boy in his last term.
In 1982 he spent a gap year as a house tutor at the Collegiate School, Wanganui, in New Zealand. On his return he attended Jesus College, University of Cambridge and graduated in 1986 with a degree in History.  His interests included theatrical productions. On leaving Cambridge he joined the Royal Marines but did not take to the army life. He resigned his army commission in 1987, and joined Andrew Lloyd Weber�s Really Useful theatrical company. In 1993 he formed  the Ardent Television company and was involved in documentaries about the Royal Family, but in 2002 stepped down to concentrate on his royal duties in support of the Queen.
He met Sophie Rhys-Jones in 1993 while she was working in public relations, and they were married at St George�s Chapel, Windsor Castle, on 19 June 1999.  On their wedding Edward was created Earl of Wessex, and Sophie became Countess of Wessex. They have two children Lady Louise Windsor born 8 November 2003, and James Viscount Severn born 17 December 2007.  Edward has taken over several of the public roles of his father including President of the Commonwealth games, and the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme founded by his father Prince Philip.  It is believed that Prince Edward will eventually inherit the title Duke of Edinburgh

Queen Elizabeth II's Life Through the Years Photos - ABC News
ABC News
Queen Elizabeth II's Life Through the Years
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This portrait of Queen Elizabeth II was released, April 20, 2014 to mark her majesty's 88th birthday, April 21. The photograph was taken at Buckingham Palace in March and was commissioned on behalf of the British Government's GREAT Britain campaign.
David Bailey/WPA/Getty Images
This portrait of Queen Elizabeth II was released, April 20, 2014 to mark her majesty's 88th birthday, April 21. The photograph was taken at Buckingham Palace in March and was commissioned on behalf of the British Government's GREAT Britain campaign.
David Bailey/WPA/Getty Images
The Duke and Duchess of York with their baby daughter Princess Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace at Princess Elizabeth's christening, 1926. Princess Elizabeth was born April 21, 1926.
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Princess Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeth II), daughter of The Duke and Duchess of York circa 1930.
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Princess Elizabeth the eldest daughter of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth celebrated her 13th birthday, April 21, 1939. The Princess was allowed to plan her own day, as it was her birthday, and after opening her presents in the morning, she went riding in Windsor Great Park with the King and Princess Margaret, her younger sister.
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Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen Elizabeth II, in the state apartments at Buckingham Palace during her engagement to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, July 1947.
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Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh pose for the press at Buckingham Palace in London after their wedding ceremony at Westminster Abbey in this Nov. 20, 1947 file photo.
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Britain's Queen Elizabeth II is shown on her Coronation Day, in 1953.
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Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, wave at the crowds from the balcony at Buckingham Palace in this June 2, 1953 file photo in London, England.
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Princess Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeth II) holding her son Prince Charles after his christening ceremony at Buckingham Palace. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
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Queen Elizabeth II plays with Princes Edward and Andrew at Windsor Castle in this June, 1965 photo.
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Queen Elizabeth II is shown with her youngest son, Prince Edward, 15 months, in a picture taken recently by Lisa Sheridan in a sitting room at Windsor Castle, Berkshire, June 11, 1965 in England.
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Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten are photographed with their daughter Anne and son Charles in 1951.
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Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh with their children, Prince Andrew (center), Princess Anne (left) and Charles, Prince of Wales sitting on a picnic rug outside Balmoral Castle in Scotland, Sept. 9, 1960.
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Queen Elizabeth II with one of her corgis at Sandringham, 1970.
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President Gerald Ford dances with Queen Elizabeth II during the state dinner in honor of the Queen and Prince Philip at the White House, July 17, 1976, in Washington.
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Queen Elizabeth II crowns her son Charles, Prince of Wales, during his investiture ceremony at Caernarvon Castle, July 1, 1969.
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Lady Diana, Prince Charles And Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, London.
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Queen Elizabeth II and British Prime Minister Edward Heath join President Richard Nixon and first lady Patricia at Chequers, Heath's official country residence, Oct. 3, 1970.
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Pope John Paul II Visits Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in London, May, 1982.
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Queen Elizabeth II smiles at Prince Harry as she inspects soldiers at their passing-out Sovereign's Parade at Sandhurst Military Academy, April 12, 2006, in Surrey, England.
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Britain's Queen Elizabeth II looks up and waves to members of staff of The Foreign and Commonwealth Office as she ends an official visit, which is part of her Jubilee celebrations in London, Dec. 18, 2012.
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Family and members of the Royal Wedding party are shown in this April 29, 2011 file photo, with Britain's Prince William and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge.
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Queen Elizabeth II is seated at her desk in her private audience room at Buckingham Palace with one of her official red boxes in this photo released Sept. 8, 2015.
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Queen Elizabeth Meets a Robot
Britain's Queen Elizabeth II smiles as a little robot waves to the her during a reception at the 'Technische Universitaet' (Technical University) in Berlin, June 24, 2015. Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip are on an official visit to Germany until Friday, June 26.
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The Royal Family is seen in a family photo during the summer of 2015 in the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace.
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Prince George of Cambridge talks to Queen Elizabeth II outside the Church of St Mary Magdalene on the Sandringham Estate for the Christening of Princess Charlotte of Cambridge, July 5, 2015, in King's Lynn, England.
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Queen Elizabeth II returns to Buckingham Palace in the new Diamond Jubilee state coach following the State Opening of Parliament, June 4, 2014, in London.
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The official christening photo of Britain's Prince George in the Morning Room at Clarence House in London, Oct. 23, 2013. Kate Duchess of Cambridge holds her son Prince George seated next to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince William, back row from left, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, and the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Harry, Pippa Middleton, James Middleton, Carole and Michael Middleton.
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Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh pictured at Windsor Castle just after Easter in 2016, in this photo taken by Annie Leibovitz.
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Queen Elizabeth II Oversees a Royal Review
Queen Elizabeth II, Captain-General of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, oversees a Royal Review on the occasion of their Tercentenary at Knighton Down, May 26, 2016, in Lark Hill, England. Queen Eliabeth II has been Captain-General of the Royal Regiment of Artillery since 6 February 1952.
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Britain's Queen Elizabeth II walks through a field of ceramic poppies at The Tower of London, Oct. 16, 2014.
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BBC - History - Elizabeth II's wedding (pictures, video, facts & news)
Elizabeth II's wedding
Elizabeth II's wedding
20 November 1947
Princess Elizabeth's wedding to Philip Mountbatten took place at Westminster Abbey and was broadcast to 200 million radio listeners around the world. After the ceremony, the pair waved to large crowds from the balcony of Buckingham Palace.
Photo: Princess Elizabeth leaves Westminster Abbey in London, with her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, after their wedding ceremony, 20 November 1947. (Press Association)
Introduction
Highlights from the Queen's wedding to the Duke of Edinburgh. Includes Pathe footage.
Highlights from the Queen's wedding to the Duke of Edinburgh at Westminster Abbey, London. Includes Pathe footage.
This event features in:
More information about: Elizabeth II's wedding
How they met
Princess Elizabeth, born 21 April 1926, was the first child of Albert, Duke of York, and his wife, formerly Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.
The abdication of her uncle, Edward VIII, in December 1936 meant her father became king and she became heir.
Elizabeth was educated at home. In 1940, she and her sister Margaret were evacuated to Windsor Castle to escape the Blitz. Their parents remained at London's Buckingham Palace - a promise made to the nation at the start of World War II.
Philip Mountbatten was born 10 June 1921 on the Greek island of Corfu, the youngest child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg. His early years were spent in France, but he came to England in 1928.
He attended Gordonstoun boarding school in Scotland, after which he joined the Royal Navy and saw active service in WWII.
Elizabeth and Philip were distant cousins, and first met at a wedding in 1934. After meeting again in 1939, they began to exchange letters. The pair became secretly engaged in 1946, but the formal engagement was delayed until Elizabeth turned 21 in April 1947.
The wedding day
Elizabeth and Philip were married at Westminster Abbey on 20 November 1947, in front of 2,000 invited guests. The ceremony was broadcast on radio, to 200 million listeners worldwide.
The wedding dress was designed by Norman Hartnell - a duchesse satin bridal gown with motifs of star lilies and orange blossoms. Princess Elizabeth had to use ration coupons to obtain the material.
More than 2,500 wedding presents arrived from around the world, and 10,000 telegrams of congratulations.
The couple went to Buckingham Palace after the ceremony where they waved from the balcony to large crowds. They spent their wedding night in Broadlands, Hampshire, the home of Philip's uncle, Earl Mountbatten. The rest of their honeymoon was spent at Birkhall on the Balmoral Estate.
Life after the wedding
The couple's first child, Prince Charles, was born in 1948 and Princess Anne arrived in 1950.
In February 1952, King George VI died and Elizabeth, his daughter, immediately became Queen. In June 1953, her coronation was held at Westminster Abbey, televised by the BBC to a worldwide audience of millions.
Prince Andrew was born in 1960, and four years later came Prince Edward.
For decades, the Queen has been performing public duties including ceremonies, receptions and visits. She has also supported numerous charities, and encouraged public and voluntary service. Weekly audiences with prime ministers have been held throughout her reign.
The Duke of Edinburgh abandoned his Royal Navy ambitions in order to take on more public duties and support the Queen. In 1956 he launched the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme.
Prince Philip has earned a reputation for speaking his mind, which has sometimes landed him in trouble. Prince William said in 2004 that his grandfather "will tell me something I don't want to hear and doesn't care if I get upset about it. He knows it is the right thing to say".
In 2007 the Queen became the first British monarch to celebrate a diamond wedding anniversary.

1927 - Britain's longest reigning monarch - Queen Elizabeth II through the years - Pictures - CBS News
Queen Elizabeth II through the years
Happy 90th, Queen Elizabeth II
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth marked her 90th birthday on April 21, 2016.
In this photo, the queen views a painting of herself by British artist Henry Ward at Windsor Castle, on October 14, 2016. The painting was commissioned to commemorate the Queen’s six decades of patronage to the British Red Cross.
Credit: Dominic Lipinski/AFP/Getty Images
Governor Generals celebrate Queen Elizabeth II
Governor Generals during a family photograph (L-R back row) Sir Tapley Seaton Saint Kitts and Nevis, Dame Marguerite Pindling The Bahamas, Dame Cecile La Grenade Grenada, Sir Jerry Mateparae New Zealand, Rt Hon David Johnston Canada, Sir Iakoba Italeli Tuvalu, Grand Chief Sir Michael Ogio Papua New Guinea, Sir Elliott Belgrave Barbados, Sir Peter Cosgrove Australia, Sir Rodney Williams Antigua and Barbuda, (L-R front row) Sir Patrick Allen Jamaica, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Dame Pearlette Louisy St Lucia, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Elizabeth II, Sir Colville Young Belize, Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Sir Frederick Ballantyne St Vincent and the Grenadines, Sir Frank Kabui Soloman Islands, ahead of a  lunch at Buckingham Palace on June 10, 2016 in London, United Kingdom.
Credit: John Stillwell - WPA Pool/Getty Images
Birthday parade
(L-R) Anne, Princess Royal, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Charles, Prince of Wales, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Princess Charlotte of Cambridge, Prince George of Cambridge, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Prince Harry, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh watch a fly past during the Trooping the Colour, this year marking the Queen’s 90th birthday at The Mall on June 11, 2016 in London, England. The ceremony is Queen Elizabeth II’s annual birthday parade and dates back to the time of Charles II in the 17th Century when the Colours of a regiment were used as a rallying point in battle.
Credit: Ben A. Pruchnie/Getty Images
Birthday lunch
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh wave to guests attending “The Patron’s Lunch” celebrations for The Queen’s 90th birthday on The Mall on June 12, 2016 in London, England.
10,000 guests have gathered on The Mall for a lunch to celebrate The Queen’s Patronage of more than 600 charities and organisations. The lunch is part of a weekend of celebrations marking Queen Elizabeth II’s 90th birthday and 63 year reign. The Duke of Edinburgh and other members of The Royal Family are also in attendance. During the lunch a carnival parade will travel down The Mall and around St James’s Park.
Credit: Toby Melville - WPA Pool/Getty Images
Vanity Fair cover for Queen Elizabeth II
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II turned 90 on April 21, 2016. To mark the milestone, she posed for a series of portraits at Windsor Castle by photographer Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair , including this cover photograph. The queen is seen here with her beloved corgis Holly (being held) and (from L-R) Willow, Vulcan and Candy. It must be said that Vulcan and Candy are actually dorgis, a breed the queen created. The issue of the magazine, which includes photos of the royal family is available Thursday, June 2, 2016.
Click through for a look at Britain’s longest serving monarch from childhood to the present day.
Credit: Annie Leibovitz/Vanity Fair
2016 Queen Elizabeth
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her 90th birthday in a giant extravaganza on May 15. She become the longest serving British monarch on September 9, 2015, surpassing the record set by her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria with more than 63 years on the throne. Now at 90-years-old, Elizabeth is also the country’s oldest ever monarch.
The Queen delivers the Queen’s Speech during the State Opening of Parliament in central London, on May 18, 2016.
Credit: Justin Tallis/Pool/REUTERS
2016
Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge along with Queen Elizabeth II during the final night of the Queen’s 90th Birthday Celebrations at Windsor on May 15, 2016 in Windsor.
Credit: Chris Jackson/Pool/REUTERS
1927
Princess Elizabeth is taken for a ride in the grounds of Windsor Castle, with her cousin, the honorable Gerald Lascelles, right, son of Princess Royal in 1927.
Credit: AP
May 1933
Princess Elizabeth, is introduced by her mother Elizabeth, the Duchess of York, to disabled soldiers at an exhibition of their work in London, May 16, 1933.
Credit: AP
May 1935
Queen Elizabeth II, then Princess Elizabeth, center, waves as she stands on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in London with her grandparents King George V and Queen Mary, May 6, 1935. Her sister, Princess Margaret, is just visible over the balcony edge.
Credit: AP
June 1938
Queen Elizabeth II, then Princess Elizabeth, and her companion Shaun Plunket take the penguins for a walk at London Zoo, June 30, 1938.
Credit: AP
August 1943
Queen Elizabeth II, then Princess Elizabeth, right, and her sister, Princess Margaret, in their Girl Guide uniforms, practice their bandaging skills, August 1943. Princess Elizabeth is wearing the badge of the swallow patrol and two white stripes, which indicates that she is patrol leader.
Credit: AP
August 1946
Queen Elizabeth II, then Princess Elizabeth, right, enjoys a joke with her father, King George VI, in the grounds of the Royal Lodge in Windsor, England, August 20, 1946.
Credit: AP
April 1947
Queen Elizabeth II, then Princess Elizabeth, sits in Natal National Park, South Africa on her 21st birthday, April 21, 1947. In the background are the Drakenberg Mountains.
Credit: CBS
November 1947
Queen Elizabeth II, then Princess Elizabeth, and her husband Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, wave to the crowd from the balcony of Buckingham Palace in London, after their wedding on November 20, 1947. From left to right, King George VI, Princess Margaret, Lady Mary Cambridge, the bride and bridegroom, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary.
Credit: AP
August 1949
Queen Elizabeth II, then Princess Elizabeth, wears a silver gown with a diamond tiara and pearl necklace on August 30, 1949.
Credit: AP
August 1951
Queen Elizabeth II, then Princess Elizabeth, front left, helps her daughter Princess Anne stand on a wall, watched by King George VI, behind left, Queen Elizabeth, right, and Princess Margaret at Balmoral Castle, Scotland, in August 1951.
Credit: AP
August 1951
Queen Elizabeth II, then Princess Elizabeth, stands with her husband Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and their children, Prince Charles and Princess Anne, at Clarence House, the royal couple’s London residence, in August 1951.
Credit: AP
February 1952
Queen Elizabeth II, left, stands with her grandmother, Queen Mary, center, and her mother, Queen Elizabeth, at the entrance to London’s Westminster Hall as her father’s coffin arrives to lie in state on February 11, 1952.
Upon the death of her father, Elizabeth ascended the throne at the age of 25 on February 6, 1952.
Credit: Ron Case, Pool/AP
June 1953
Britain’s Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, kneeling, places his hands between those of his wife, Queen Elizabeth II, as he swears homage, during her coronation ceremony in Westminster Abbey on June 2, 1953.
The coronation was postponed more than a year for an appropriate period of mourning for King George VI.
Credit: AP
June 1953
Queen Elizabeth II, wearing the Imperial Crown, carries the symbols of authority, the orb and the sceptre, as she leaves Westminster Abbey on June 2, 1953, at the end of her coronation ceremony.
Credit: AP
April 1953
Queen Elizabeth II, center, laughs with the Duke of Gloucester, left, while Princess Margaret smokes a cigarette in a long holder, behind, as they watch the Olympic horse trials at Badminton, Gloucestershire on April 23, 1953.
Credit: AP
January 1961
Queen Elizabeth II addresses a vast gathering of more than 250,000 people at the Ramlila Grounds, a huge public meeting place, outside the walls of Old Delhi, India on January 28, 1961.
Credit: Alexander Chadwick/AP
April 1966
Queen Elizabeth II is seen during the State Opening of Parliament in London in April 1966.
Credit: CBS
June 1977
Queen Elizabeth II receives congratulations from well-wishers during a brief walkabout in London on June 7, 1977.
Credit: AP Photo/Pool
June 1982
U.S. President Ronald Reagan, left, on Centennial, and Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, on Burmese, go horseback riding on the grounds of Windsor Castle, England on June 8, 1982.
Credit: AP Photo/Bob Daugherty
August 1997
Queen Elizabeth II -- the Queen Mother -- with her daughters, The Queen (in blue) and Princess Margaret (left) and Prince Harry (youngest son of Diana Princess of Wales) on right with other members of the Royal family watch an honor guard in London, August 4, 1997.
Credit: Adrian Dennis/Getty Images
September 1997
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, look at the mass of floral tributes laid outside Buckingham Palace in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales, September 5, 1997.
Credit: Ian Waldie/Reuters
April 2002
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles walk behind the Queen Mother’s coffin following her funeral at Westminster Abbey in central London, April 9, 2002.
Royal dignitaries and politicians from around the world gathered at Westminster Abbey to pay their respects to the Queen Mother who died March 30, aged 101.
Credit: Dan Chung/Reuters
June 2002
Queen Elizabeth II waves from the Gold State Coach during Golden Jubilee procession, London, June 4, 2002.
Credit: AP
April 2003
Queen Elizabeth II watches as a swarm of bees encircle chairs on the lawn of Windsor Castle in Berkshire April 15, 2003.
The Queen was amused when a swarm of bees delayed proceedings during her review of the Grenedier Guards at Windsor.
Credit: Chris Young/Pool/Reuters
April 2006
Queen Elizabeth II sits in the Regency Room at Buckingham Palace in London on April 19, 2006, as she looks at some of the cards which have been sent to her for her 80th birthday, which she celebrated two days later.
Credit: AP Photo/Fiona Hanson
April 2006
Queen Elizabeth II smiles with Prince Harry during the Sovereign’s Parade at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, England, April 12, 2006.
Credit: Dylan Martinez/Reuters
2007
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, walk at Broadlands in Romsey, southern England in 2007.
Credit: Fiona Hanson/Pool/Reuters
March 2009
Britain’s Prince Charles kisses the hand of his mother, Queen Elizabeth, during a visit to the Chelsea Flower Show in London in this May 18, 2009 file photo.
Credit: Sang Tan/Pool/REUTERS
April 2007
Queen Elizabeth ll receives a bouquet of flowers during a walkabout outside Manchester Cathedral following the traditional Royal Maundy Service on April 5, 2007, in Manchester, England.
Credit: Pool/Anwar Hussein Collection/Getty
April 2009
President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama pose with Queen Elizabeth II during an audience at Buckingham Palace in London, April 1, 2009.
Credit: AP Photo/John Stillwell
October 2009
Queen Elizabeth leaves after attending a service of commemoration to mark the end of combat operations in Iraq at St Paul’s Cathedral, London in this October 9, 2009.
Credit: Luke MacGregor/Reuters
November 2009
Queen Elizabeth II walks with her husband Prince Philip through the Royal Gallery after delivering her speech during the State Opening of Parliament at the Houses of Parliament in London, November 18, 2009.
Credit: Carl De Souza/Pool/Reuters
May 2010
Queen Elizabeth II leaves Buckingham Palace in a horse drawn carriage to attend the State Opening of Parliament in London, May 25, 2010.
Credit: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters
April 2011
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, attend the Royal Wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton (now Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge) in London, April 29, 2011.
Credit: Getty Images
October 2011
Queen Elizabeth II accepts flowers from people crowding the banks for the Brisbane River after a river cruise in Brisbane, Australia, Octoer 24, 2011. The queen was on her first visit to Australia since 2006.
Credit: Jodie Richter/AP
June 2011
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Edward watch the winners enclosure after the Queen’s horse lost in the Epsom Derby at Epsom Racecourse in southern England, June 4, 2011.
Credit: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters
Queen Elizabeth in London, February 29, 2012.
Credit: Eddie Mulholland/Pool/F/Reuters
June 2012
Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (L) laughs as Queen Elizabeth gestures during a visit to Vernon Park in Nottingham, England, June 13, 2012.
Credit: Phil Noble/Reuters
May 2013
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth leaves after the State Opening of Parliament at the Palace of Westminster in London, May 8, 2013.
Credit: Dan Kitwood/Pool/Reuters
June 2013
Members of the British royal family (L-R) Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, Prince Harry, and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, watch the fly-past on the balcony at Buckingham Palace following the Queen’s Birthday parade, ‘Trooping the Colour,’ in central London on June 15, 2013.
Credit: Carl Court/Getty Images
December 2014
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II is pictured after recording her Christmas Day broadcast in the State Dining Room at Buckingham Palace in central London on December 10, 2014. She spent Christmas Day at her Sandringham estate in Norfolk, England.
Credit: John Stillwell/AFP/Getty Images
March 2015
Queen Elizabeth II looks at a Corgi dog as television presenter Paul O’Grady (2nd R) smiles during the Queen’s visit to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home in London, March 17, 2015.
Credit: Ben Stansall/pool/Reuters
June 2015
Senior members of Britain’s royal family stand on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in the annual Trooping of the Colour ceremony to celebrate the Queen’s official birthday in central London, June 13, 2015.
Credit: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters
July 2015
Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Princess Charlotte of Cambridge and Prince George of Cambridge talk to Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Phillip, Duke of Cambridge and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall arrive at the Church of St Mary Magdalene on the Sandringham Estate for the christening of Princess Charlotte of Cambridge on July 5, 2015 in King’s Lynn, England.
Credit: Chris Jackson/Getty Images
September 2015
Queen Elizabeth II sits in her private audience room in Buckingham Palace next to one of her official red boxes in which she receives documents and papers from government officials in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth in London on September 8, 2015 in a photo taken to mark the moment she becomes Britain’s longest reigning monarch.
Credit: Mary McCartney/Reuters
September 2015
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth boards her carriage as she travels on the new Scottish Borders railway line, in Scotland, September 9, 2015.
Queen Elizabeth officially opened the new Scottish Borders Railway on the day she became Britain’s longest reigning monarch.
Credit: Andrew Milligan/Pool/REUTERS
March 2016
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth leaves after attending a Maundy Thursday service at St George’s Chapel in Windsor, Britain on March 24, 2016.
Credit: Toby Melville/REUTERS
The line of succession
Four generations of the Royal family, from left, Prince Charles, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince George and Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge. The image, released wednesday April 20, 2016, is from a photo shoot for the Royal Mail in the summer of 2015 in the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace in London for a stamp sheet to mark the 90th birthday of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.
Credit: Ranald Mackechnie/Royal Mail via AP
Queen Elizabeth II - 90th birthday
Queen Elizabeth II is greeted by Prince Charles, Prince of Wales as she arrives for the final night of her week-long 90th birthday celebrations at Windsor on May 15, 2016 in England.
Credit: Chris Jackson/Pool/REUTERS
90th birthday
Scenes from the life of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II are shown during the final night of The Queen’s 90th Birthday Celebrations at the Royal Windsor Horseshow in the grounds of Windsor Castle, west of London on May 15, 2016.
The event tells the remarkable story of the Queen’s life encompassing a reign spanning more than 60 years. The sovereign last year overtook her great-great-grandmother queen Victoria to become Britain’s longest-serving monarch
Credit: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images
Queen Elizabeth II - 90th birthday
Queen Elizabeth laughs as she attends the final night of her week-long 90th birthday celebrations at Windsor on May 15, 2016 in England.
Credit: Chris Jackson/Pool/REUTERS

The queen poses with the littlest royals
The queen poses with the littlest royals
Buckingham Palace shares photos of monarch with her sister, great-grandchildren and dogs.
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The queen poses with the littlest royals Buckingham Palace shares photos of monarch with her sister, great-grandchildren and dogs. Check out this story on USATODAY.com: http://usat.ly/1Suqt3G
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The queen poses with the littlest royals
Jayme Deerwester , USA TODAY 12:44 p.m. EDT April 21, 2016
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Wellwishers and fans gather at Windsor Castle hoping to catch a glimpse of Queen Elizabeth II amid ongoing festivities for her 90th birthday.Video provided by AFP Newslook
Queen Elizabeth and daughter Princess Anne, the Princess Royal.
(Photo: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, AFP/Getty Images)
Looks like that royal family photo featuring Prince George was just the beginning.
On Wednesday evening, Buckingham Palace unleashed more photos ahead of Queen Elizabeth's 90th birthday on Thursday.
Queen Elizabeth II to mark 90th birthday on Thursday
The new batch of shots from Annie Leibovitz includes a portrait of the monarch with daughter Princess Anne, as well as one with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Shot in the Green Drawing Room at Windsor Castle, it gathers her grandchildren from her youngest son, Prince Edward, as well as the grandchildren of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips (by son Peter and daughter Zara) and Prince Charles (by Prince William).
 (Photo: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, AFP/Getty Images)
And there's even one with the queen's fur children —the corgis. It was also taken by Leibovitz on the east terrace of the garden at Windsor.
 (Photo: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, AFP/Getty Images)

Inside the Dynastic Struggle That Rocked Queen Elizabeth II’s Marriage | Vanity Fair
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PERFECT COUPLE Philip and Elizabeth on their honeymoon, at Broadlands, the Mountbatten estate in Hampshire, November 1947., Photograph FROM TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES; DIGITAL COLORIZATION BY LORNA CLARK.
There was a whole battalion of lively young men,” recalled Lady Anne Glenconner, whose family were friends and neighbors of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Sandringham, their estate in Norfolk. But Princess Elizabeth, the heiress presumptive to the British throne, “realized her destiny and luckily set her heart on Prince Philip at an early age. He was ideal—good-looking and a foreign prince.”
Her choice was in some respects traditional, because the princess and Philip were relatives, but not too close to raise eyebrows. They were third cousins, sharing the same great-great-grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Philip was in fact more royal than Elizabeth, whose mother was mere British nobility (with distant links to English and Scottish kings), while his parents were Princess Alice of Battenberg (a great-grandchild of Queen Victoria) and Prince Andrew of Greece, the descendant of a Danish prince recruited for the Greek throne in the mid-19th century. Elizabeth and Philip were both connected to most of Europe’s reigning families, where consanguinity had been common for centuries. Queen Victoria and her husband had been even closer: first cousins who shared the same grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg.
In other ways, Philip was an outlier with a decidedly unconventional background. Queen Elizabeth had made no secret of her preference for one of her daughter’s aristocratic English friends from a family similar to her own English-Scottish Strathmores—the future Dukes of Grafton, Rutland, and Buccleuch, or Henry Porchester, the future Earl of Carnarvon. Philip could boast none of their extensive landholdings, and in fact had very little money.
Although he was born on June 10, 1921, on the isle of Corfu, Philip spent scarcely a year in Greece before the entire royal family was expelled in a coup. His parents took him, along with his four older sisters, to Paris, where they lived rent-free in a house owned by wealthy relatives. A proud professional soldier with an extroverted personality and a quick wit, Prince Andrew found himself at loose ends, while Alice (properly known as Princess Andrew of Greece after her wedding) had difficulty managing a large family, not least because she was congenitally deaf.
After Philip’s parents sent him at the age of eight to Cheam, a boarding school in England, his mother had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a sanitarium for several years, which precipitated his parents’ permanent separation. She eventually moved to Athens and established a Greek Orthodox order of nuns.
Prince Andrew was mostly absent from his son’s life as well, living as a “boulevardier” in Monte Carlo with a mistress, and subsisting on a small annuity, while beneficent relatives and friends paid Philip’s school fees. He left Cheam in 1933 to spend one year at Salem, a boarding school in Germany run by a progressive Jewish educator named Kurt Hahn. After the Nazis briefly detained Hahn, he fled in 1934 to the North Sea coast of Scotland and founded Gordonstoun School, where Philip soon enrolled.
Once in the United Kingdom, Philip came under the wing of his relatives there, chiefly his Battenberg grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, who lived in a grace-and-favor apartment in Kensington Palace, and his mother’s younger brother, Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten, later the first Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who assiduously cultivated his royal relatives.
Six feet tall, with intense blue eyes, chiseled features, and blond hair, Philip was an Adonis as well as athletic and engaging, exuding confidence and a touch of impudence. He was a resourceful and energetic self-starter, yet he was also something of a loner, with a scratchy defensiveness that sprang from emotional deprivation. “Prince Philip is a more sensitive person than you would appreciate,” said his first cousin Patricia Mountbatten, Dickie’s older daughter. “He had a tough childhood, and his life constrained him into a hard exterior in order to survive.”
As cousins, Philip and young Elizabeth had crossed paths twice, first at a family wedding in 1934 and then at the coronation of King George VI in 1937. But it wasn’t until July 22, 1939, when the King and Queen took their daughters to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, that the 13-year-old princess spent any time with 18-year-old Philip, who was a cadet in training at the school.
At the behest of Dickie Mountbatten, an officer in the Royal Navy, Philip was invited to have lunch and tea with the royal family. Marion “Crawfie” Crawford, Princess Elizabeth’s governess, observed the sparks, later writing that Lilibet, as she was called, “never took her eyes off him,” although he “did not pay her any special attention”—no surprise, since he was already a man of the world, and she only on the cusp of adolescence. While everything else in the life of Lilibet was laid out for her, she made the most important decision on her own. “She never looked at anyone else,” said Elizabeth’s cousin Margaret Rhodes.
During the war years, Philip came to visit his cousins occasionally at Windsor Castle, and he and the princess corresponded when he was at sea, serving with the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Friends and relatives detected a flutter of romance between Philip and Elizabeth by December 1943, when he was on leave at Windsor for Christmas and watched Elizabeth, then 17, perform in the “Aladdin” pantomime. The King was quite taken by Philip, telling his mother the young man was “intelligent, has a good sense of humour and thinks about things in the right way.” But both the King and Queen thought that Lilibet was too young to consider a serious suitor.
Philip visited Balmoral, the royal family’s estate in the Scottish Highlands, in the summer of 1944, and he wrote Queen Elizabeth about how he savored “the simple enjoyment of family pleasures and amusements and the feeling that I am welcome to share them.” That December, while Philip was away on active duty, his father died of cardiac arrest at age 62 in the room where he lived at the Hotel Metropole, in Monte Carlo. All he left his 23-year-old son were some trunks containing clothing, an ivory shaving brush, cuff links, and a signet ring that Philip would wear for the rest of his life.
While Philip was completing his deployment in the Far East, Lilibet enjoyed the freedom of the postwar period. At a party given by the Grenfell family at their Belgravia home in February 1946 to celebrate the peace, the princess impressed Laura Grenfell as “absolutely natural … she opens with a very easy and cosy joke or remark She had everyone in fits talking about a sentry who lost his hat while presenting arms.” Elizabeth “danced every dance Thoroughly enjoying herself” as the “Guardsmen in uniform queued up.”
Philip finally returned to London in March 1946. He took up residence at the Mountbatten home on Chester Street, where he relied on his uncle’s butler to keep his threadbare wardrobe in good order. He was a frequent visitor to Buckingham Palace, roaring into the side entrance in a black MG sports car to join Lilibet in her sitting room for dinner, with Crawfie acting as duenna. Lilibet’s younger sister, Margaret, was invariably on hand as well, and Philip included her in their high jinks, playing ball and tearing around the long corridors. Crawfie was taken with Philip’s breezy charm and shirtsleeve informality—a stark contrast to the fusty courtiers surrounding the monarch.
During a month-long stay at Balmoral late in the summer of 1946, Philip proposed to Elizabeth, and she accepted on the spot, without even consulting her parents. Her father consented on the condition that they keep their engagement a secret until it could be announced after her 21st birthday, the following April. Like the princess, Philip didn’t believe in public displays of affection, which made it easy to mask his feelings. But he revealed them privately in a touching letter to Queen Elizabeth in which he wondered if he deserved “all the good things which have happened to me,” especially “to have fallen in love completely and unreservedly.”
A Royal Wedding
Palace courtiers and aristocratic friends and relatives of the royal family viewed Philip suspiciously as a penniless interloper. They were irked that he seemed to lack proper deference toward his elders. But mostly they viewed him as a foreigner, specifically a “German” or, in their less gracious moments, a “Hun,” a term of deep disparagement after the bloody conflict so recently ended. Even though his mother had been born in Windsor Castle, and he had been educated in England and served admirably in the British Navy, Philip had a distinctly Continental flavor, and he lacked the clubby proclivities of the Old Etonians. What’s more, the Danish royal family that had ruled in Greece was in fact predominantly German, as was his maternal grandfather, Prince Louis of Battenberg.
None of the criticisms of Philip’s German blood or cheeky attitude was of any concern to Princess Elizabeth. A man of ideas and appealing complexity, he was a breath of fresh air to the heiress presumptive. It was clear that he would not be easy, but he would certainly not be boring. He shared her commitment to duty and service, but he also had an irreverence that could help lighten her official burdens at the end of a tiring day. His life had been as unfettered as hers had been structured, and he was unencumbered by the properties and competing responsibilities of a landed British aristocrat. According to their mutual cousin, Patricia Mountbatten, the princess also saw that, behind his protective shell, “Philip had a capacity for love which was waiting to be unlocked, and Elizabeth unlocked it.”
The princess “would not have been a difficult person to love,” said Patricia Mountbatten. “She was beautiful, amusing and gay. She was fun to take dancing or to the theater.” In the seven years since their first meeting, Lilibet (which is what Philip now called her, along with “darling”) had indeed become a beauty, her appeal enhanced by being petite. She did not have classical features but rather what Time magazine described as “pin-up” charm: big bosom (taking after her mother), narrow shoulders, a small waist, and shapely legs. Her curly brown hair framed her porcelain complexion, with cheeks that the photographer Cecil Beaton described as “sugar-pink,” vivid blue eyes, an ample mouth that widened into a dazzling smile, and an infectious laugh. “She sort of expands when she laughs,” said Margaret Rhodes. “She laughs with her whole face.”
The press caught wind of the cousins’ romance as early as October 1946, at the wedding of Patricia Mountbatten to Lord Brabourne at Romsey Abbey. Philip was an usher, and when the royal family arrived, he escorted them from their car. The princess turned as she removed her fur coat, and the cameras caught them gazing at each other lovingly. But no official confirmation followed, and the couple kept up an active social life. Elizabeth’s guardsmen friends served as her escorts to restaurants and fashionable clubs, and Philip would take Elizabeth and Margaret out to a party or a play. But he was only one among many young men to dance with the heiress presumptive.
He had been working as an instructor at the Naval Staff College, in Greenwich, and with the help of Dickie Mountbatten had secured his British citizenship in February 1947, giving up his title as H.R.H. Prince Philip of Greece. Since he had no surname, Philip decided on Mountbatten, the English version of his mother’s Battenberg.
The long-delayed engagement announcement came on July 9, 1947, followed by the happy couple’s introduction at a Buckingham Palace garden party the next day. Philip’s mother retrieved a tiara from a bank vault, and he used some of the diamonds to design an engagement ring created by Philip Antrobus, Ltd., a London jeweler. Several months later Philip was confirmed in the Church of England by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Just before his daughter’s wedding, the King gave his future son-in-law a collection of grand titles—Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth, and Baron Greenwich—and decreed that he should be addressed as “His Royal Highness.” He would be called the Duke of Edinburgh, although he would continue to be known popularly as Prince Philip and would use his Christian name for his signature.
On November 18, the King and Queen had a celebratory ball at Buckingham Palace that dramatist Noël Coward called a “sensational evening Everyone looked shiny and happy.” Elizabeth and Philip were “radiant The whole thing was pictorially, dramatically and spiritually enchanting.” As was his habit, the King led a conga line through the staterooms of the palace, and the festivities ended after midnight. Philip was in charge of distributing gifts to his fiancée’s attendants: silver compacts in the Art Deco style with a gold crown above the bride’s and groom’s entwined initials and a row of five small cabochon sapphires. With typical insouciance, “he dealt them out like playing cards,” recalled Lady Elizabeth Longman, one of the two non-family members among the eight bridesmaids.
The morning of the wedding, two days later, Philip gave up smoking, a habit that had kept his valet, John Dean, “busy refilling the cigarette boxes.” But Philip knew how anguished Elizabeth was by her father’s addiction to cigarettes, so he stopped, according to Dean, “suddenly and apparently without difficulty.” Patricia Brabourne, who was also with her cousin that morning, said that Philip wondered if he was being “very brave or very foolish” by getting married, although not because he doubted his love for Lilibet. Rather, he worried that he would be relinquishing other aspects of his life that were meaningful. “Nothing was going to change for her,” his cousin recalled. “Everything was going to change for him.”
Outside Westminster Abbey, tens of thousands of spectators gathered in freezing temperatures to welcome the princess and her father in the Irish State Coach. Two thousand guests enjoyed the splendor of the 11:30 A.M. ceremony in the abbey, an event that Winston Churchill called “a flash of colour on the hard road we have to travel.” Elizabeth’s dress, which had been designed by Norman Hartnell, was of pearl-and-crystal-encrusted ivory silk satin, with a 15-foot train held by the two five-year-old pages, Prince William of Gloucester and Prince Michael of Kent, who wore Royal Stewart tartan kilts and silk shirts. Her tulle veil was embroidered with lace and secured by Queen Mary’s diamond tiara, and Philip’s naval uniform glinted with his new Order of the Garter insignia pinned to his jacket. The Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, presided, telling the young couple that they should have “patience, a ready sympathy, and forbearance.”
After the hour-long service, the bride and groom led a procession down the nave that included the crowned heads of Norway, Denmark, Romania, Greece, and Holland. Noticeably absent was the King’s brother, former King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, and his wife, for whom he had abdicated the throne. The estranged Windsors were living in Paris, unwelcome in London except for periodic visits. Although their exile may have seemed harsh, George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and their advisers had seen no alternative. A king and former king living in the same country would have resulted in two rival courts.
While the bells of the abbey pealed, Elizabeth and Philip were driven to Buckingham Palace in the Glass Coach, preceded and followed by two regiments of the Household Cavalry on horseback. It was the most elaborate public display since the war, and the crowds responded with ecstatic cheers.
As a concession to Britain’s hard times, only 150 guests attended the “wedding breakfast,” which was actually luncheon in the Ball Supper Room. The “austerity” menu featured filet de sole Mountbatten, perdreau en casserole, and bombe glacée Princess Elizabeth. The tables were decorated with pink and white carnations, as well as small keepsake bouquets of myrtle and white Balmoral heather at each place setting. The bride and groom cut the wedding cake—four tiers standing nine feet high—with Philip’s Mountbatten sword.
The King didn’t subject himself to the strain of making a speech, celebrating the moment instead with a raised glass of champagne to “the bride.” After being showered with rose petals in the palace forecourt, the newlyweds were transported in an open carriage drawn by four horses—“the bride snugly ensconced in a nest of hot-water bottles”—to Waterloo Station.
They spent a week at Broadlands, the Mountbatten estate in Hampshire, and two weeks in snowbound seclusion at Birkhall, an early-18th-century white stone lodge on the Balmoral estate, set in the woods on the banks of the river Muick. With its Victorian décor and memories of childhood summers before her parents became King and Queen, Elizabeth could relax in a place she considered home. Dressed in army boots and a sleeveless leather jacket lined with wool, she went deerstalking with her husband, feeling “like a female Russian commando leader followed by her faithful cut-throats, all armed to the teeth with rifles,” she wrote to Margaret Rhodes.
She also sent her parents tender letters thanking them for all they had given her, and the example they had set. “I only hope that I can bring up my children in the happy atmosphere of love and fairness which Margaret and I have grown up in,” she wrote, adding that she and her new husband “behave as though we had belonged to each other for years! Philip is an angel—he is so kind and thoughtful.” Philip revealed his carefully cloaked emotions when he wrote to his mother-in-law, “Cherish Lilibet? I wonder if that word is enough to express what is in me.” He declared that his new wife was “the only ‘thing’ in this world which is absolutely real to me and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will also have a positive existence for the good.”
A Sailor’s Wife
The honeymooners were back in London in time for the 52nd birthday of King George VI, on December 14, ready to begin their new life. They chose to live in Clarence House, the 19th-century residence adjacent to St. James’s Palace, just down the Mall from her parents. But the house needed extensive renovations, so they moved temporarily into an apartment in Buckingham Palace. Philip had a paper-pushing job at the Admiralty, to which he would walk on weekdays. Elizabeth was kept busy by her private secretary, John “Jock” Colville.
By May 1948, Elizabeth was four months pregnant, and behind closed doors was suffering from nausea. Even so, she and Philip kept up an active social life. They went to the races at Epsom and Ascot and joined friends at restaurants, nightclubs, and dances. For a costume party at Coppins, the home of the Duchess of Kent, Elizabeth dressed “in black lace, with a large comb and mantilla, as an Infanta,” wrote diarist Chips Channon, and “danced every dance until nearly 5 A.M.” Philip “was wildly gay,” Channon observed, in a “policeman’s hat and hand-cuffs. He leapt about and jumped into the air as he greeted everybody.”
When they were with friends such as Rupert and Camilla Nevill and John and Patricia Brabourne, the royal couple showed an easy affection toward each other. During a visit to the Brabournes in Kent, John said to Philip, “I never realized what lovely skin she has.” “Yes,” Philip replied, “she’s like that all over.”
In the early evening of November 14, 1948, word went out that Princess Elizabeth had gone into labor in her second-floor bedroom at Buckingham Palace, where a hospital suite had been prepared for the baby’s arrival. Philip passed the time playing squash with three courtiers. Senior members of the household gathered in the Equerry’s Room, a ground-floor drawing room that was equipped with a well-stocked bar, and shortly afterward were told that Elizabeth had given birth to a seven-pound-six-ounce son at 9:14. They set to work writing “Prince” on telegrams and calling the Home Office, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and Winston Churchill, the leader of the opposition. “I knew she’d do it!” exclaimed Commander Richard Colville, press secretary to the King, exultant over the arrival of a male heir. “She’d never let us down.”
Sir John Weir, one of the official physicians to the royal family, confided to Queen Elizabeth’s private secretary, Major Thomas Harvey, that he’d “never been so pleased to see a male organ in all his life.” Queen Elizabeth was “beaming with happiness,” and George VI was “simply delighted by the success of everything.” Philip, still dressed in sneakers and sports clothes, joined his wife as her anesthesia wore off, presented her with a bouquet of roses and carnations, and gave her a kiss.
Elizabeth and Philip named their son Charles Philip Arthur George. “I had no idea that one could be kept so busy in bed—there seems to be something happening all the time!,” Elizabeth wrote to her cousin Lady Mary Cambridge two weeks after giving birth. “I still find it hard to believe that I really have a baby of my own!” The new mother was particularly taken with her son’s “fine, long fingers—quite unlike mine and certainly unlike his father’s,” as she described them in a letter to her former music teacher, Mabel Lander. For nearly two months the princess breast-fed her son, until she fell ill with measles—one of several childhood diseases she had missed by being tutored at home rather than going to school with classmates—and Charles had to be sent away temporarily so that he wouldn’t catch the illness.
When the family moved into Clarence House, early in the summer of 1949, Elizabeth and Philip had adjacent, connecting bedrooms. “In England the upper class always have had separate bedrooms,” explained their cousin Lady Pamela Mountbatten (later Hicks). “You don’t want to be bothered with snoring, or someone flinging a leg around. Then when you are feeling cozy you share your room sometimes. It is lovely to be able to choose.”
That October, Philip resumed active service when he was appointed first lieutenant and second-in-command of the destroyer H.M.S. Chequers, based on the small island nation of Malta, in the Mediterranean, which had been part of the British Empire since 1814 and served as an important shipping center and outpost for the Mediterranean Fleet. According to John Dean, the royal couple “were advised that conditions [in Malta] were not suitable for the infant Prince.” Elizabeth could have stayed in London with her son, but she decided instead to spend as much time as possible with her husband. She had been accustomed to long parental absences while she was growing up, so her decision to leave Charles wouldn’t have raised eyebrows. She had expert nannies in charge, not to mention her own parents, who were eager to keep their grandson company. Elizabeth would visit Malta for long stretches of time, returning at intervals to Clarence House.
She left six days after Charles’s first birthday, in time to join Philip for their second wedding anniversary. Beyond minimal royal obligations, Elizabeth was given unaccustomed freedom and anonymity. “I think her happiest time was when she was a sailor’s wife in Malta,” said Margaret Rhodes. “It was as nearly an ordinary a life as she got.” She socialized with other officers’ wives, went to the hair salon, chatted over tea, carried and spent her own cash—although shopkeepers “noticed that she was slow in handling money,” according to biographer Elizabeth Longford. The royal couple lived a significant cut above the ordinary, however, in Earl Mountbatten’s Villa Guardamangia, a spacious sandstone house built into a hill at the top of a narrow road, with romantic terraces, orange trees, and gardens. Dickie Mountbatten was commanding the First Cruiser Squadron, and his wife, Edwina, accompanied Elizabeth on her first flight to Malta.
Philip and Elizabeth spent Christmas of 1949 on the island, while their son stayed with his grandparents at Sandringham. After Chequers sailed out for duty in the Red Sea at the end of December, the princess flew back to England. She stopped first for several days in London, with a detour to Hurst Park to see her steeplechaser, Monaveen, win a race, before she was re-united with Charles in Norfolk after five weeks apart.
When Philip returned from naval maneuvers, Elizabeth rejoined him in Malta at the end of March 1950 for an idyllic six weeks. Much to Uncle Dickie’s delight, he and his wife spent a lot of time with the royal couple, exploring the island’s coves by boat, sunbathing, and picnicking. They cheered the Mountbattens’ younger daughter, Pamela, when she won the ladies’ race at the riding club, and in the evenings they went to the Phoenicia Hotel for dinner and dancing.
During these weeks, Elizabeth grew closer to the uncle who had taken such a prominent role in her husband’s life. He gave her a polo pony and went riding with her, encouraging her to perfect her skills at sidesaddle, which she “loathed,” recalled Pamela, “because she felt out of touch with the horse. She felt marooned up there and much preferred to ride astride.” But in part because of Uncle Dickie’s persistence, “she was a very good sidesaddle rider.”
Also at Dickie’s urging, Philip took up polo—“a very fast, very dangerous, very exciting game.” Elizabeth shrewdly advised him how to persuade her husband: “Don’t say anything. Don’t push it. Don’t nag. Just leave it alone.”
On May 9 she flew back to London, six months pregnant and ready to resume some of her royal duties. Jock Colville had left the household the previous autumn to return to the diplomatic corps, and his replacement was 36-year-old Martin Charteris, who was enraptured by the princess on their first meeting.
Elizabeth gave birth at Clarence House on August 15, 1950, at 11:50 A.M., to her second child, Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise. Philip had returned to London two weeks earlier, which gave him time to get re-acquainted with his 21-month-old son after almost a year away. But his first command, of the frigate H.M.S. Magpie—and a promotion to lieutenant commander—sent him back to Malta in early September. As she had with Charles, Elizabeth breast-fed her daughter for several months. She celebrated Charles’s second birthday and left shortly thereafter for Malta. Yet again the family was split at Christmas, with mother and father celebrating on their own while the children were at Sandringham with their grandparents, who unabashedly doted on them. Queen Elizabeth sent regular letters to her daughter, reporting Charles “giving himself an ecstatic hug,” Anne “so pretty & neat & very feminine,” and “Everybody loves them so, and they cheer us up more than I can say.”
But the couple’s time in the Mediterranean was coming to an end. King George VI had been in declining health since 1948, increasingly plagued by pain and numbness resulting from arteriosclerosis. In March 1949 he had undergone surgery to improve circulation in his legs. He continued to carry out his duties, but his appearance was gaunt, and by May 1951 he was seriously ill with a chronic cough that did not respond to treatment.
Elizabeth came home to stand in for her father at a variety of events, and Philip returned to London in July when it became clear that the royal couple would be needed full-time to represent the sovereign. He took an open-ended leave from the navy, but in effect the 30-year-old duke was ending his military career after only 11 months of enjoying the satisfaction of his own command—“the happiest of my sailor life.” Much later Philip would say philosophically, “I thought I was going to have a career in the Navy but it became obvious there was no hope… . There was no choice. It just happened. You have to make compromises. That’s life. I accepted it. I tried to make the best of it.”
In September, George VI had a biopsy that revealed a malignancy, and surgeons removed his left lung in a three-hour operation. The cancer diagnosis was not openly discussed and certainly not given out to the press, but the family understood the severity of the King’s condition.
From Heiress Presumptive to Queen
Elizabeth and Philip had been scheduled to leave for a state visit to Canada and the United States, which they postponed by two weeks until they were reassured that her father was in no imminent danger. They departed at midnight on October 8, 1951, and arrived 16 hours later in Montreal—the beginning of a 35-day trek of more than 10,000 miles to the Pacific and back.
The essential public routine that the royal couple would use over the decades took shape in those long days: Elizabeth was the restrained presence, her smiles tentative and infrequent, which prompted criticism in some press accounts. “My face is aching with smiling,” she complained to Martin Charteris when she heard the reports on her dour demeanor. Philip, always at a discreet distance behind, was already providing comic relief. Once, he went over the line, committing the first of his famous “gaffes” when he jokingly observed that Canada was “a good investment”—a remark that stuck in the Canadians’ craw for its neo-imperial implication.
The scope and pace of the trip were punishing. They made more than 70 stops, and on a single day in Ontario they visited eight towns. Through it all, Elizabeth worried about the health of her father. Philip tried to keep the atmosphere light, but he clearly found the journey stressful. “He was impatient. He was restless,” recalled Martin Charteris. “He hadn’t yet defined his role He was certainly very impatient with the old-style courtiers and sometimes, I think, felt that the Princess paid more attention to them than to him. He didn’t like that. If he called her a ‘bloody fool’ now and again, it was just his way. I think others would have found it more shocking than she did.”
For much of the trip, Philip wore his naval uniform, and Elizabeth favored discreetly tailored suits and close-fitting hats, as well as fur coats and capes. During their visit to Niagara Falls, they had to wear oilskin suits on the spray-lashed observation deck. Pulling her hood tight, Elizabeth exclaimed, “This will ruin my hair!”
Several weeks later, the royal couple boarded a plane for Washington and set foot on American soil for the first time on October 31. President Harry S. Truman observed that his daughter, Margaret, who had met the princess during a visit to England, “tells me when everyone becomes acquainted with you, they immediately fall in love with you.” The 67-year-old president counted himself among them, calling Elizabeth a “fairy princess.” Elizabeth enunciated every word of her reply, her high voice a model of cut-glass precision, proclaiming that “free men everywhere look towards the United States with affection and with hope.”
At a Rose Garden ceremony, the royal couple presented the Trumans with a mirror adorned with a painting of flowers, to be hung in the refurbished Blue Room as a “welcome ornament … a mark of our friendship.” Their visit ended with a white-tie dinner in honor of the Trumans at the Canadian Embassy.
They had a rough return trip across the North Atlantic aboard the Empress of Scotland. Only Elizabeth managed to avoid seasickness and show up regularly at mealtimes, and veteran sailor Philip was furious about his own weakness. On arrival at the Liverpool dockyards three days after Prince Charles’s third birthday, they boarded the Royal Train for London’s Euston Station. Waiting on the platform were Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, and Prince Charles, who had not seen his parents in more than a month.
When the princess and duke stepped off the train, Elizabeth rushed to hug her mother and kiss her on both cheeks. For tiny Charles, she simply leaned down and gave him a peck on the top of his head before turning to kiss Margaret. “Britain’s heiress presumptive puts her duty first,” explained a newsreel announcer. “Motherly love must await the privacy of Clarence House.” Prince Philip was even less demonstrative, touching his son on the shoulder to indicate they should move along to the waiting limousines. As they passed through the station, Prince Charles was again with his grandmother, while his parents walked ahead.
After Christmas, the ailing King deputed Elizabeth and Philip to represent him on a long-planned six-month tour of Australia, New Zealand, and Ceylon. The couple decided to add several days in the beginning of the trip to visit the British colony of Kenya, which had given them a retreat at the foot of Mount Kenya called Sagana Lodge as a wedding gift. After settling into the lodge, Elizabeth and Philip spent a night at Treetops Hotel, a three-bedroom cabin built among the branches of a large fig tree above an illuminated salt lick in a game preserve. Dressed in khaki trousers and a bush scarf, Elizabeth excitedly filmed the animals with her movie camera. At sunset, she and Philip spotted a herd of 30 elephants. “Look, Philip, they’re pink!” she said, not realizing that the gray pachyderms had been rolling in pink dust.
Back at Sagana on the morning of February 6, the princess’s aides learned that the 56-year-old King had died from a blood clot in his heart. Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was now Queen, at age 25. When Philip was told, he muttered that it would be “the most appalling shock” for his wife, then walked into her bedroom and broke the news to her. She shed no tears, but looked “pale and worried.”
“What are you going to call yourself?” asked Martin Charteris as Elizabeth came to grips with the loss of her father. “My own name, of course. What else?” she replied. But some clarification was necessary, since her mother had been called Queen Elizabeth. The new monarch would be Queen Elizabeth II (following her 16th-century predecessor, Elizabeth I), but she would be known as the Queen. Her mother would become Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, rather than the fustier Dowager Queen. Elizabeth II would be Queen Regnant, and her royal cypher E II R.
“It was all very sudden,” she recalled four decades later. Her task, she said, was “kind of taking it on, and making the best job you can. It’s a question of maturing into something that one’s got used to doing, and accepting the fact that here you are, and it’s your fate, because I think continuity is important.”
Dressed in a simple black coat and hat, she held her composure as she arrived at the airport in London near dusk on February 7, 1952, after a 19-hour flight. Waiting on the tarmac was a small delegation led by her uncle the Duke of Gloucester and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. She slowly shook hands with each of them, and they gave her deep bows. A Daimler bearing the sovereign’s coat of arms on its roof drove her to Clarence House, where 84-year-old Queen Mary honored her by reversing roles, curtsying and kissing her hand, although she couldn’t help adding, “Lilibet, your skirts are much too short for mourning.”
The next day, the new Queen went to St. James’s Palace, where she appeared for 20 minutes before several hundred members of the Accession Council, a ceremonial body including the Privy Council—the principal advisory group to the monarch, drawn from senior ranks of politicians, the clergy, and the judiciary—along with other prominent officials from Britain and the Commonwealth. She had been monarch since the moment of her father’s death, but the council was convened to hear her proclamation and religious oath. She would not be crowned until her coronation, in 16 months, but she was fully empowered to carry out her duties as sovereign.
The men of the council bowed to the 40th monarch since William the Conqueror took the English throne after the Battle of Hastings, in 1066. Elizabeth II declared in a clear voice that “by the sudden death of my dear father, I am called to assume the duties and responsibilities of sovereignty. My heart is too full for me to say more to you today than I shall always work, as my father did throughout his reign, to advance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples, spread as they are the world over.... I pray that God will help me to discharge worthily this heavy task that has been lain upon me so early in my life.” As her husband escorted her out, she was in tears.
By April, the royal family had moved to Buckingham Palace, and the new Queen adapted to an office schedule that has scarcely varied throughout her reign. Adjusting to his position as the Queen’s consort proved troublesome for Philip. “For a real action man, that was very hard to begin with,” said Patricia Brabourne. While everything was mapped out for Elizabeth II, he had to invent his job under the scrutiny of her courtiers, and he had no role model to follow.
Prince Philip was still considered an outsider by some senior officials of the court. “Refugee husband,” he mockingly referred to himself. “Philip was constantly being squashed, snubbed, ticked off, rapped over the knuckles,” said John Brabourne. Much of the wariness stemmed from Philip’s closeness to Dickie Mountbatten. “My father was considered pink—very progressive,” Patricia Brabourne recalled. “The worry was that Prince Philip would bring into court modern ideas and make people uncomfortable.”
The Consort’s Role
The most hurtful rebuff had occurred in the days following the King’s death, after Queen Mary heard that Dickie Mountbatten had triumphantly announced that “the House of Mountbatten now reigned.” She and her daughter-in-law the Queen Mother were angered by his presumption, and the Queen shared their view that she should honor the allegiance of her grandfather and her father to the House of Windsor by keeping the Windsor name rather than taking that of her husband. Churchill and his Cabinet agreed. Philip responded with a memo to Churchill vigorously objecting to the prime minister’s advice and pressing instead for the House of Mountbatten, which was ironic. It was his mother’s family name, since his father had given him no surname.
The Queen failed to foresee that her actions would have a profound impact on Philip, leading to strains in their marriage. “She was very young,” said Patricia Brabourne. “Churchill was elderly and experienced, and she accepted his constitutional advice. I felt that if it had been later she would have been able to say, ‘I don’t agree.’ ”
“I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children,” Philip fumed to friends. “I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.” Dickie Mountbatten was even more outspoken, blaming “that old drunk Churchill” who “forced” the Queen’s position. The prime minister mistrusted and resented Earl Mountbatten, largely because as India’s last Viceroy, appointed by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, he had presided over that country’s move to independence. “Churchill never forgave my father for ‘giving away India,’ ” said Patricia Brabourne.
Behind the scenes, Dickie continued a campaign to reverse the decision, with his nephew’s acquiescence. Meanwhile, Philip resolved to support his wife while finding his own niche, which would lead in the following decades to the active patronage of more than 800 different charities embracing sports, youth, wildlife conservation, education, and environmental causes.
Within the family, Philip also took over management of all the royal estates, to “save her a lot of time,” he said. But even more significantly, as Prince Charles’s official biographer Jonathan Dimbleby wrote in 1994, the Queen “would submit entirely to the father’s will” in decisions concerning their children.
She made Philip the ultimate domestic arbiter, Dimbleby wrote, because “she was not indifferent so much as detached.” Newspaper editor and Conservative politician William Deedes saw in Elizabeth’s detachment “her struggle to be a worthy head of state, which was a heavy burden for her. The Queen in her own quiet way is immensely kind, but she had too little time to fulfill her family care. I find it totally understandable, but it led to problems.”
Following her coronation, on June 2, 1953, the Queen turned her full attention to an ambitious five-and-a-half-month world tour covering 43,000 miles, from Bermuda to the Cocos Islands, by plane and ship. It was her first extended trip as sovereign, and the first time a British monarch had circled the globe.
Five-year-old Prince Charles and three-year-old Princess Anne spoke to the Queen and Prince Philip by radiotelephone, but otherwise news of their progress came in regular letters from the Queen Mother, who had them for weekends at Royal Lodge, her house in Windsor Great Park. Just as Elizabeth and Margaret had followed their parents’ travels on maps, Prince Charles traced his parents’ route on a globe in his nursery.
The crowds everywhere were enormous and enthusiastic. Masses of welcoming boats jammed Sydney Harbor, and by one count, three-quarters of Australia’s population came out to see the Queen. At age 27 she was hailed as the “world’s sweetheart.” But the royal couple refused to let their celebrity go to their heads. “The level of adulation, you wouldn’t believe it,” Philip recalled. “It could have been corroding. It would have been very easy to play to the gallery, but I took a conscious decision not to do that. Safer not to be too popular. You can’t fall too far.”
The Duke of Edinburgh also helped his wife stay on an even keel when she became frustrated after endless hours of making polite conversation. Meeting and greeting thousands of people at receptions and garden parties actually gave her a temporary facial tic. But when she was watching a performance or a parade, and her face was in repose, she looked grumpy, even formidable. As the Queen herself once ruefully acknowledged, “The trouble is that, unlike my mother, I don’t have a naturally smiley face.” From time to time, Philip would jolly his wife. “Don’t look so sad, Sausage,” he said during an event in Sydney. Or he might provoke a grin by reciting Scripture at odd moments, once inquiring sotto voce, “What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep?”
At Tobruk, in Libya, the Queen and Prince Philip transferred to Britannia, the new, 412-foot royal yacht with a gleaming deep-blue hull, which they had designed together with architect Sir Hugh Casson. For its maiden voyage, Britannia took Prince Charles and Princess Anne to be re-united with their parents in early May 1954 for the first time in nearly half a year. The Queen was pleased that she would be seeing her children earlier than she had anticipated, but she worried that they wouldn’t know their parents.
Still, when the moment came and the Queen was piped aboard, her strict control and conformity to protocol prevailed as it had when she met her son after her Canada trip. “No, not you, dear,” she said as she greeted dignitaries first, then shook the five-year-old’s extended hand. The private reunion was warm and affectionate as Charles showed his mother all around the yacht, where he had been living for more than a week. The Queen told her mother how happy she was to be with her “enchanting” children again. They had both “gravely offered us their hands,” she wrote, “partly I suppose because they were somewhat overcome by the fact that we were really there and partly because they have met so many new people recently! However the ice broke very quickly and we have been subjected to a very energetic routine and innumerable questions which have left us gasping!”
In the autumn of 1957, the royal couple set off for their second trip to the United States, a state visit hosted by the 67-year-old president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, with whom the Queen had an affectionate relationship that dated back to World War II, when he was in London as supreme allied commander. Unlike the Queen’s lightning visit in 1951, this would be a full-dress affair: six days in Washington, New York, and Jamestown, Virginia, where she would celebrate the 350th anniversary of the founding of the first British colony in America.
After a day-long visit to Williamsburg and Jamestown on October 16, the royal couple flew to Washington on Eisenhower’s aircraft, the Columbine III, a swift and sleek propeller plane with four powerful engines. As they waited to take off, Philip immersed himself in a newspaper while Elizabeth unlocked her monogrammed leather writing case and began writing postcards to her children. “Philip?” she suddenly said. Her husband kept reading. “Philip!” she repeated. He glanced up, startled. “Which engines do they start first on a big plane like this?” Her husband looked momentarily perplexed. “Come on now,” she said with a laugh. “Don’t wait until they actually start them, Philip!” He offered a guess, which turned out to be correct. (They went in sequence, first on one wing from the inner engine to the outer, then the inner followed by the outer on the other wing.) “He was flustered,” recalled Ruth Buchanan, wife of Wiley T. Buchanan Jr., Eisenhower’s chief of protocol, who sat nearby. “It was so like what an ordinary wife would do when her husband wasn’t paying attention.”
Riding into the capital with the president and his wife, Mamie, in a bubbletop limousine, accompanied by 16 bands, they were cheered along the route into Washington by more than a million people, who were undaunted by intermittent rain showers. The royal couple spent their four nights in the most elegant guest quarters in the recently renovated White House—the Rose Suite, furnished in Federal style, for the Queen, and the Lincoln Bedroom for the Duke of Edinburgh.
Much of the visit was given over to the usual receptions, formal dinners at the White House and British Embassy (complete with gold plates flown over from Buckingham Palace), and tours of local sights. It was evident to Ruth Buchanan that the Queen was “very certain, and very comfortable in her role She was very much in control of what she did, although she did laugh at my husband’s jokes.” Once, when Buchanan was waiting for her husband to escort the royal couple to their limousine, “I could hear her guffawing. You didn’t realize she had that hearty laugh. But the minute she rounded the corner and saw us, she just straightened up.”
Vice President Richard Nixon treated the royal couple to a luncheon with 96 guests in the orchid-bedecked Old Supreme Court Chamber, in the Capitol. Elizabeth had specifically asked to see an American football “match,” so the White House arranged for her to sit in a “royal box” at the 50-yard line at the University of Maryland’s Byrd Stadium for a game against the University of North Carolina. On the way she spotted a Giant supermarket and asked if a visit might be arranged so she “could see how American housewives shop for food.”
To the cheers of 43,000 spectators, the Queen walked onto the field to chat with two opposing players. Dressed in a $15,000 mink coat given to her by the Mutation Mink Breeders Association, a group of American fur farmers, she watched the game intently but seemed “perturbed” whenever the players threw blocks. While the royal pair was being entertained at halftime, security men raced back to the supermarket to arrange for a royal visit on the fly. After Maryland’s 21–7 victory, the motorcade arrived at the Queenstown Shopping Center at five P.M., to the amazement of hundreds of shoppers. Elizabeth and Philip had never before seen a supermarket, a phenomenon then unknown in Britain.
With the curiosity of anthropologists and an informality they had not displayed publicly in Britain, they spent 15 minutes shaking hands, quizzing customers, and inspecting the contents of shopping carts. “How nice that you can bring your children along,” said Elizabeth, nodding toward the little seat in one housewife’s cart. She took a particular interest in frozen chicken pot pies, while Philip nibbled on sample crackers with cheese and joked, “Good for mice!”
An exuberant welcome awaited them in New York City. The Queen had asked specifically to see Manhattan “as it should be approached,” from the water, a vista she had been dreaming about since childhood. “Wheeeee!” she exclaimed as she caught her first glimpse of the Lower Manhattan skyline from the deck of a U.S. Army ferryboat. A crowd of 1.25 million lined the streets from Battery Park to City Hall and northward to the Waldorf-Astoria for their ticker-tape parade.
She had only 15 hours in the city to fulfill her wish list and shake some 3,000 hands. Wearing a dark-blue satin cocktail dress and close-fitting pink velvet hat, she addressed the representatives of 82 countries at the United Nations General Assembly. At the conclusion of her six-minute speech, the audience of 2,000 responded with “a thunderous standing ovation.” During a reception with delegates, Philip talked to Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko about the recently launched Sputnik satellite.
The royal couple were fêted at two meals at the Waldorf: a luncheon for 1,700 hosted by Mayor Robert Wagner and a dinner for 4,500 given by the English-Speaking Union and the Pilgrims of the United States. In between, the Queen took in the “tremendous” view from the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building at twilight—another specific request. As the white-tie banquet began, in the Grand Ballroom, the punishing schedule was beginning to take its toll, even on an energetic 31-year-old Queen. The New York Times noted that her speech was the “one time during the program … when the fatigue showed through … She made no effort to force a smile … and although she stumbled over her text only once, her voice plainly showed it.”
Her final stop that night was a Royal Commonwealth ball for another 4,500 guests at the Seventh Regiment Armory, on Park Avenue. One aviator blinded in World War I tried to get up from his wheelchair to greet her. “She put a gentle hand on his shoulder and told him that he should not rise,” recalled Wiley Buchanan. “She spoke to him for several moments, then moved on.”
“You both have captivated the people of our country by your charm and graciousness,” Eisenhower wrote in his farewell letter to the royal couple.
Happy Ever Since
After a hiatus of six years, the 31-year-old monarch was keen to have more children, as was her husband. Dickie Mountbatten blamed the delay on Philip’s anger over the Queen’s rejection of his family name after the accession. But by her own account, she had postponed her dream of having a large family primarily because she wanted to concentrate on establishing herself as an effective monarch.
During a visit to Buckingham Palace in 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt met with Elizabeth for nearly an hour the day after Prince Charles had undergone a tonsillectomy. The former First Lady found her to be “just as calm and composed as if she did not have a very unhappy little boy on her mind.” Elizabeth reported that Charles had already been fed ice cream to soothe his painful throat, yet it was 6:30 in the evening, and she was compelled to entertain the widow of a former U.S. president rather than sit at the bedside of her eight-year-old son.
While the Queen certainly loved her children, she had fallen into professional habits that kept her apart from them much of the time. They benefited from nurturing nannies and a doting grandmother. But because of her dogged devotion to duty, amplified by her natural inhibitions and aversion to confrontation, Elizabeth had missed out on many maternal challenges as well as satisfactions.
In May 1959, after Philip’s return from a four-month goodwill tour aboard Britannia, Elizabeth got pregnant at last. Once she hit the six-month mark, she withdrew from her official duties. But one bit of unfinished business needed to be resolved. When Prime Minister Harold Macmillan visited her at Sandringham in early January 1960, she told him that she needed to revisit the issue of her family name, which had been irritating her husband since she decided in 1952 to use Windsor rather than Mountbatten. “The Queen only wishes (properly enough) to do something to please her husband—with whom she is desperately in love,” the prime minister wrote in his diary. “What upsets me … is the Prince’s almost brutal attitude to the Queen over all this.” Somewhat cryptically he added, “I shall never forget what she said to me that Sunday night at Sandringham.”
Macmillan left shortly afterward for a trip to Africa, leaving the resolution of the Queen’s tricky family problem to Rab Butler, his deputy prime minister, and Lord Kilmuir, who served as the government’s legal arbiter as the lord chancellor. Butler sent a telegram to Macmillan in Johannesburg on January 27, saying that the Queen had “absolutely set her heart” on making a change for Philip’s sake. By one account, Butler confided to a friend that Elizabeth had been “in tears.”
Following discussions among her private secretaries and government ministers, a formula emerged in which the royal family would continue to be called “the House and Family of Windsor,” but the Queen’s “de-royalised” descendants—starting with any grandchildren who lacked the designation of “royal highness”—would adopt the surname “Mountbatten-Windsor.” Those in the immediate line of succession, including all of the Queen’s children, would continue to be called “Windsor.” It seemed clear-cut, but 13 years later Princess Anne, at the urging of Dickie and Prince Charles, would contravene the policy on her wedding day by signing the marriage register as “Mountbatten-Windsor.”
Elizabeth announced the compromise in a statement on February 8, 1960, saying, “The Queen has had this in mind for a long time and it is close to her heart.” On February 19, at 33, she gave birth to her second son. In a gesture of wifely devotion, Elizabeth named the boy Andrew, after the father Philip had lost 15 years earlier.
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