The Queen was on the throne for longer than any other monarch in British history.
In seven decades, Britain lived through the Cold War and 9/11, while countries in the Commonwealth fought for their independence.
In her family, the Queen saw three of her children get divorced, the death of Princess Diana, and one of her grandsons sensationally accusing the Royal Family of racism.
Here Sky News looks backs at six moments that defined her reign.
1952 – When ‘everything changed’
Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip were in Kenya on their way to a tour of Australia and New Zealand when King George VI died.
The news broke on 6 February, but because of the couple’s remote location, in a treetop hotel 100 miles from Nairobi, it took longer than usual to reach them. Philip was tasked with informing the Queen.
The 56-year-old King had been in bad health for some time and had undergone a lung operation four months before.
“He had suffered ill health for years, but it didn’t seem like his death was imminent,” historian Professor Anna Whitelock told Sky News.
“Everything changed at that point.”
And as the British hunter Jim Corbett, who was staying at the same lodge as the royal couple, put it: “For the first time in the history of the world, a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience she climbed down from the tree the next day a Queen.”
Elizabeth and Philip flew home the next day, landing at London Airport, where she had waved goodbye to her father just a week before.
“It would have been a pretty stressful and traumatic flight for her,” Prof Whitelock said.
“At that time she was only 25 – she was coming home to mourn her father, but also landing as Queen.”
She was met by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his deputies Clement Attlee and Anthony Eden.
Twenty-four hours later, following a 20-minute meeting of the Accession Council at St James’s Palace, formally announced her as Queen and Philip as royal consort.
They moved into Buckingham Palace and the line of succession was given the new name of Windsor.
But Elizabeth still had a lot to prove.
“It was Britain in the 1950s – a patriarchal society where women were still seen as second class to men,” Professor Whitelock said.
“Not only was a woman taking the throne, but also her husband was being told he always had to be one step behind her, which wasn’t the norm.
“She had to get used to the idea of becoming Queen, but so did Winston Churchill and the other ‘men of the day’, who weren’t sure how a young woman with young children was going to be able to play the role.”
Months later, in November, the nation got their first glimpse of Queen Elizabeth when she opened parliament for the first time.
But it wasn’t until 2 June 1953 that she was officially crowned.
The Duke of Edinburgh fought for the coronation to be televised, while Churchill had reservations.
“Prince Philip saw the importance of the coronation as a national event and the value of television at its advent,” Prof Whitelock said.
“The Queen was initially quite shy, so he was that supportive and encouraging presence for her.”
With almost three million people camped out in London on the day, and many more watching around the world, the coronation was an “intimidating spectacle” for the new Queen.
But not long after, she sought to prove herself with one of the biggest royal tours to date.
“It was one of the most ambitious tours ever seen, which was quite remarkable,” Prof Whitelock added.
1977 – The Silver Jubilee
By the time the Queen reached her Silver Jubilee in 1977, she had spent more years as sovereign than her father had.
The celebrations began quietly, exactly 25 years after his death and her accession on 6 February, with church services and family time at Windsor.
After she revealed to parliament that the theme of her jubilee would be unity of the nation, in May she set off on the busiest royal tour in history.
No other king or queen had visited so much of the UK – 36 counties across Britain and Northern Ireland – in just three months.
Record-breaking crowds turned out, with more than a million in Lancashire on a single day.
In February, she began an international tour that took her across the South Pacific to Australia and New Zealand and, months later, to Canada and the Caribbean.
In total, her Silver Jubilee tours saw the Queen travel 56,000 miles.
“She was a Commonwealth Queen,” Prof Whitelock said. “That was a defining motif of her reign.”
At that time, several Commonwealth countries were seeking their independence, but this did not appear to take away from the Queen’s role as their head of state.
Back in England, the Jubilee celebrations began in earnest on the evening of 6 June, when the Queen lit a bonfire beacon in Windsor, sparking a chain around the country.
The following day she travelled by the Gold State Coach to St Paul’s Cathedral in central London for a thanks-giving service.
In spite of poor weather, thousands camped out overnight to see her pass down the Mall and towards the City, cementing the Queen’s popularity.
After the service, she said: “When I was 21 I pledged my life to the service of our people and I asked for God’s help to make good that vow.”
“Although that vow was made in my salad days, when I was green in judgement, I do not regret nor retract one word of it.”
The Silver Jubilee broke television audience records, with 500 million tuning in to watch the celebrations across the world.
While the Jubilee saw towns and villages up and down the country covered in bunting for street parties to mark the occasions, a small number in London had other plans.
Following the release of their single God Save the Queen, the manager of the Sex Pistols organised for the punk group to perform the song as they sailed on a boat down the River Thames.
They managed to pass Westminster Pier and the Houses of Parliament, in a mockery of the Queen’s Jubilee boat trip in two days’ time, but the stunt ended in chaos, with police forcing them to dock and many being arrested.
Prof Whitelock said: “The 1970s weren’t a particularly stable period politically. There were strikes, austerity and hardship.
“So there were some people who protested about so much money being spent on that kind of festivity, while others were suffering.
“But the Jubilee being seen as the success that it was is a credit to her. It was a moment of national affirmation of her,” she added.
“She was looking back on her earlier reign, with not just wisdom but also confidence. She felt more secure as Queen.”
1992 – ‘Annus horribilis’
The Queen famously described 1992 – when she marked 40 years on the throne – as her “annus horribilis”.
Three of her four children’s marriage collapse and a fire at Windsor Castle caused more than £36m in damage.
“It was an unrelenting succession of scandals and setbacks,” former BBC royal correspondent Michael Cole said.
“There was a building sense of crisis, which was exacerbated by these royal divorces. You got the sense the monarchy was having major problems.”
In March, Prince Andrew separated from Sarah Ferguson, who was later photographed frolicking with her billionaire lover around a pool in the south of France.
That same month Princess Anne divorced her husband of almost two decades Captain Mark Phillips.
In December, it was announced Charles and Diana were getting a divorce.
Republican sentiment ran high, with widespread dissatisfaction about the public financing of the Royal Family.
In a bid to mitigate some of the ill-feeling, the Queen started paying income tax the following year – and there was a reduction in the civil list.
In May, more details came out as biographer Andrew Morton released his book Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words.
In August, the royals suffered a further setback when The Sun published the so-called ‘Squidgygate tapes’ of a private conversation between Diana and a friend from 1990, in which she made several damning revelations about the Royal Family.
“1992 was a catalogue of woes,” Cole told Sky News.
“The Queen by and large stayed above the fray, but her children and their spouses did not.”
He added: “She wasn’t at all squeamish or coy about these things but the monarch is still the Head of the Church of England – a position where you are supposed to show a good example.”
The fire at Windsor in November was “devastating” for the Queen, he added. But equally difficult was the “public pressure of who should pay for the repairs”.
In an unusually personal speech in November, she said: “1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure.
In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘Annus Horribilis’. I suspect that I am not alone in thinking it so.”
She said criticism is “good” for institutions like the Royal Family, but suggested that the scrutiny that year could have been done with a “touch of gentleness, good humour and understanding”.
1997 – Diana’s death
Up until Princess Diana’s death on 31 August, 1997 had been a “fairly routine year” for the royals.
“Charles and Diana had divorced the previous July,” said Cole, who gave evidence at Diana’s inquest. “So that was that to some extent.”
While there was still controversy around Charles and Diana’s respective love lives, the situation had “stabilised”.
When news of Diana’s death broke from Paris, the Queen was at Balmoral with her sons Harry and William.
They remained in Scotland for five days until the day before the funeral on 6 September. In a BBC documentary the princes later praised their grandmother for taking the “difficult” decision to let them grieve in private.
But the public, who laid flowers outside every royal residence in their thousands, appeared to disagree.
“It sparked the most remarkable, dreadful, appalling week for the Royal Family since the abdication of King Edward VIII,” Cole said.
“There was a most extraordinary feeling in London at that time – a mood of public distaste and anger at the lack of response to Diana’s death.”
The delay in coming back to London, and the refusal, at first, to fly royal flags at half mast, angered Diana’s fans.
The Queen did not think Diana should have a state funeral because she had left the Royal Family. But she was eventually persuaded by the then-prime minister Tony Blair, who captured the national mood when he called Diana’s the “people’s princess”.
“It looked like they were forced to come back to London and that she [the Queen] was forced to give a speech,” Cole said. “That would have been a bitter pill to swallow.”
He says poor advice and the remote location of Balmoral were largely behind the Queen’s “mistakes”.
“Geography had something to do with it,” he said.
“They were removed from the hot house that London had become. And the Queen was poorly advised. She sometimes had a tendency to do what her mother did, which was bury her head in the sand and hope things will go away. But that wasn’t possible.”
At Diana’s funeral, her brother Earl Spencer’s eulogy was damning of the Royal Family, which didn’t help improve the public’s perception of them.
He spoke of her “blood family” being separate to the royals and the “bizarre-like life” she experienced as one of them.
“His criticism was directed straight at her [the Queen] and her children. His message couldn’t have been clearer”.
After the Queen returned to London, made her speech and was seen at the funeral, a large part of the hostility softened.
“It went some way to addressing people’s feelings,” Cole said.
Asked if it had a lasting effect on her reign, he added: “I think she would admit she made those mistakes. She has always been adaptable and prepared to change.”
2002 – A ‘phoenix year’
Although the Queen’s Golden Jubilee year was supposed to be one of celebration, it “couldn’t have got off to a worse start,” former BBC royal correspondent Michael Cole said.
Elizabeth suffered two bereavements in quick succession, with her sister Margaret dying on 9 February 2002 at the age of 70 and her mother on 30 March at 101.
The Queen Mother never remarried following the death of her husband in 1952, so remained extremely close with both her daughters.
“All three women were brought closer together by the early death of King George VI,” Cole said.
“They would speak on the phone every day, wherever they were in the world.”
Although a “major blow” to Elizabeth, she had the sense of duty she had inherited from her father more than 50 years before to keep her going.
Just 72 hours after Princess Margaret’s funeral, the Queen embarked on her Jubilee Commonwealth tour with a visit to Jamaica.
She made her way around the world, with a subsequent trip to a new territory in Canada where she famously began an ice hockey match with a royal “puck drop”.
The Jubilee tour was due to start the previous year but was postponed due to the 9/11 terror attacks.
As a show of their gratitude, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg lit up the Empire State Building in royal purple and gold.
Back home, the Queen continued the Jubilee festivities by visiting every country and region of the UK.
The royals were still suffering the controversies of the 1990s, so it was unclear how the public would react to the first Golden Jubilee since Queen Victoria’s in 1887.
“It had only been a few years since the death of Diana, which brought to the Royal Family the greatest crisis since the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936,” Cole said.
“Prince Charles wasn’t at all popular at that time and neither was Camilla Parker-Bowles. The royals didn’t know how they would be received – there were still live issues.”
While some newspapers and commentators predicted it would be a failure, it proved the opposite.
As the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh made their way through huge crowds in every town and city, it looked as though they couldn’t believe the reception they received.
“You could almost see the joy coming over their faces, they were genuinely surprised at how popular they were – and they didn’t take it for granted,” Cole said.
The Jubilee weekend itself ran from 1 to 4 June, with a million people turning out each day in London.
In addition to the traditional cavalcade and balcony flypast, the Party at the Palace widened the appeal of the Jubilee celebrations to a younger audience.
As well as Brian May playing God Save The Queen on the roof of Buckingham Palace and the likes of Paul McCartney and Tom Jones, younger artists such as S Club 7 and Mis-Teeq also performed.
Reflecting on the success, Cole said: “2002 was very much about the Queen. It was a phoenix year – out of the ashes of what had happened in the years before.
“The Jubilee proved that with a monarch as dutiful as the Queen was, the public were prepared to forgive anything that happened in the week after Diana’s death.”
2020 – A pandemic and family problems
When the Queen began her 73rd year on the throne in January 2020, she, nor anyone else, could have predicted how difficult a year it would be.
Megxit
Prince Harry and his wife Meghan had taken an extended Christmas break to recuperate after the birth of their first child and a year of unrelenting press coverage.
They arrived back in the UK in January and were seen smiling at their first public engagement of the year at Canada House in London.
Although Meghan had hinted at the challenges of becoming one of the ‘Firm’, their announcement on 8 January that they planned to “step back as senior royals” was completely unexpected – and posed a real dilemma for the Queen.
“It was a real shock,” Victoria Murphy, royal journalist and author, told Sky News.
“Nothing had been signed off behind the scenes, and as I understood it, the Royal Family were completely unprepared,” she said.
In a rare move, the Queen issued her own personal statement in response to the couple’s departure, saying: “While all are saddened by their decision, the duke and duchess remain much loved members of the family.”
These two separate statements – one from the Queen, one from Harry and Meghan – signified a defining moment in the life of the Queen and the Royal Family, according to Murphy.
“That was the beginning of us seeing how separate the Sussexes were to the rest of the royals,” she said.
Their departure also proved damaging for the perception of the Royal Family on the world stage.
“Harry and Meghan had a huge support base who were sympathetic to their story globally,” Murphy added.
“The Queen worked so hard for so many years to steady the ship – she had a very acute awareness of how important public opinion was – there was a destabilising of that in 2020.”
The departure of Harry and Meghan ultimately gave a “personal insight” into the Royal Family the public had never seen before.
“The Queen has been so reluctant to talk about life behind closed doors,” Murphy said. “So to have so much information out in the public domain like that was astonishing.”
Although uncomfortable for her to be so open, the Queen “saw the importance of providing a personal narrative”.
“Her statement showed great leadership,” Murphy added.
“The tone she struck with that statement at a time that was so challenging and chaotic for the monarchy showed what kind of leader she was.”
Coronavirus
The coronavirus lockdown imposed by the prime minister on 23 March was the biggest restriction of civil liberties since the Second World War.
Prince Charles tested positive for the virus days after – around the same time as then-prime minister Boris Johnson, who spent time in intensive care, as the nation feared he might not make it.
In response, on 5 April the Queen made a rare speech to the nation, only her fifth – aside from Christmas and the opening of parliament – since 1952.
Evoking the spirit of World War II and the Vera Lynn song, she said: “We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return.
“We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again.”
Murphy said: “It was such a hugely defining speech and one she probably never thought she would have to make.”
As hundreds died in hospitals every day and people were separated from their loved ones, the Queen drew on her experiences of the war and reassured people “we will overcome it”.
“She was so perfectly positioned to make that speech – she alleviated fear and brought the nation together,” Murphy added.
“It was a reminder of what having a leader like her brings.”
The broadcast was filmed by a single cameraman in full personal protective equipment at Windsor Castle, where she and Prince Philip isolated as part of ‘HMS Bubble’.
“What was poignant as well, was that she was so elderly,” Murphy said. “COVID exposed her vulnerability – she was going through it as well.
“She had always appeared so robust and at the helm, but this was the realisation for many that she was very, very elderly.”
The months she spent at Windsor with Philip during lockdown were ultimately some of her last.
“2020 was her last full year with him,” Murphy explained. “The rest of their relationship had been based on them spending a lot of time apart.
“So in spite of the circumstances, that prolonged period of them being together would turn out to be very fortunate.”
The Palace was keen to stress that the Queen was still working through lockdown, which eventually saw her “working from home” on Zoom like much of the nation.
Although her usual timetable was disrupted, the pandemic allowed the elderly Queen to be seen by the nation, without her having to exert herself as she would have previously.
Andrew’s royal career ‘ends for good’
Prince Andrew had already stepped down from royal duties in November 2019 following a disastrous interview with BBC Newsnight about his connections to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In his statement, he said the relationship had become a “major disruption” to the Royal Family and that by withdrawing from public life, the Firm would be back to business as usual.
It said he would still appear at family events, but when his daughter Beatrice got married in the summer, he wasn’t in any of the pictures.
“He didn’t appear at any of the events we would have expected him to. [The wedding] was a very significant sign,” Murphy said.
“2020 was the year that it became increasingly apparent that Andrew’s royal career was ended for good. It was the family’s acknowledgment of how damaging and controversial his presence was.”
But there was further controversy in July, when Epstein’s ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested.
“The Epstein investigation was an enormous story in the US, where there is also a huge audience fascinated by our monarchy,” Murphy said.
“Throughout 2020 we saw the spotlight continue on the Epstein story and further developments such as Ghislaine’s arrest.
“All of it was hugely damaging for Andrew and made it increasingly impossible to see how he could ever return to public life. It also had significant implications for the monarchy’s global reputation.”
In February, Andrew also agreed a settlement with Virginia Giuffre, a woman who had launched a civil sex assault claim in the United States.
The amount of money involved was never confirmed, though news reports at the time suggested some £12m was paid.
Andrew has always denied any wrongdoing.
Although the Queen presided over the decision for Andrew to stay out of public life, they were still seen out together.
“She supported him as his mother, but not as his boss – and in 2020 we saw a collision of those two things because there is only so much you can sever those ties,” Murphy told Sky News.
