Aged 96, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was Britain's and New Zealand's longest-serving monarch, coming to the throne after the death of her father, King George VI, on February 6 1952.
Her reign coincided with the decline of the British Empire and the rise of the Commonwealth.
While her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria ruled over more than 70 countries during her 63 years on the throne, Elizabeth in her later years headed just 16 states, although as the symbolic figurehead of the Commonwealth, she brought together 38 more 54 countries in total.
But the monarch will be most remembered for her lifelong devotion to duty and public service. In her second Queen's Christmas Day message broadcast from Government House in Auckland during the wildly popular 1953-54 Commonwealth tour she spoke of a new "worldwide fellowship of nations of a type never seen before".
The crown was "not merely an abstract symbol of our unity but a personal and living bond between you and me".
"Some people have expressed the hope that my reign may mark a new Elizabethan age. Frankly I do not myself feel at all like my great Tudor forbear, who was blessed with neither husband nor children, who ruled as a despot and was never able to leave her native shores."
Instead, she outlined her "conception of an equal partnership of nations and races". "To that … I shall give myself, heart and soul, every day of my life".
The new Queen "paced up and down, up and down", according to India Hicks, whose mother Lady Pamela Hicks, a cousin of Prince Philip, was travelling with the royal couple.
"Finally when the Queen had gathered herself, she said, 'I'm so sorry, but we are going to have to go back to England", Hicks told People magazine. "That was so indicative of the Queen, that she would have apologised for something like that."
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.She was now sovereign of almost 140 million people, but she was also a 25-year-old wife and mother-of-two (Charles and Anne) in a time when women were, for the most part, largely relegated to the kitchen and the nursery.
"The royal visitors stepped off into the hot sunshine in Nairobi," gushed a newsreel announcer over footage showing Elizabeth, wearing a brown polka dot dress and a broad smile, descending the steps of a BOAC 22 C-4 Argonaut aircraft five days before her father's death.
"No one knew then that the girl who'd arrived here as Princess Elizabeth would leave again five days later as Queen."
Attitudes towards women, and opportunities for them, changed enormously across the decades of her reign, including in the British monarchy, with hundreds of years of inequality dispatched to the dustbin of history after Commonwealth leaders voted in 2011 to change the rules of royal succession so the eldest child always became monarch, regardless of sex.
While it was not officially her decision, the Queen signalled her approval by allowing her private secretary to attend the meeting of the leaders of her realms. At the opening of the summit where the vote took place, she said women should have a greater role in society, as she noted Commonwealth Day 2011's theme Women as Agents of Change.
"It reminds us of the potential in our societies that is yet to be fully unlocked, and it encourages us to find ways to allow girls and women to play their full part."
She spoke, in part, from experience decades earlier a teenaged Princess Elizabeth became the first female member of the royal family to join the armed services as a full-time active member, learning to drive and maintain vehicles in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during WWII.
She'd later describe another vehicle the four-tonne gold state coach which took her to Westminster Abbey for her coronation as "horrible".
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME."It's only sprung on leather … not very comfortable," she told royal commentator Alastair Bruce in what he called a "conversation" for 2018's The Coronation documentary.
The "conversation" the Queen refused all interview requests during her reign took 22 years to secure and also saw the monarch reflect, with a smile, on the challenge of wearing the "unwieldy" 2.26 kilogram, diamond-packed coronation crown.
You had to keep your head up while wearing it, "because if you didn't your neck would break, it would fall off", the Queen told Bruce.
"So there are some disadvantages to crowns", she said, before adding tactfully, "but otherwise they're quite important things."
She had decades to hone her diplomatic skills including at times within her own family. The length of her reign saw her work with 14 United Kingdom prime ministers and meet a dozen US presidents, four popes and countless other leaders, including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in 2018.
A frequent traveller until her last years, she undertook more than 270 overseas trips, and in 2011 became the first British monarch to visit Ireland.
There were 10 visits to New Zealand and, as always, she favoured the brightly-coloured outfits she chose for all her public duties. Daughter-in-law, Sophie, Countess of Wessex explained why in 2016's Our Queen at Ninety.
"When she turns up somewhere, the crowds are two, three, four, 10, 15 deep, and someone wants to be able to say they saw a bit of the Queen's hat as she went past. She needs to stand out for people to be able to say, 'I saw the Queen'."
As well as her royal commitments, the Queen who had two more children, Andrew and Edward, in the 1960s loved horses and corgis and bred both, branching out into "dorgis" with the help of a dachshund owned by her sister Princess Margaret.
The Queen's approach to monarchy buoyed the public's perception of the royal family, with few rumblings of republicanism in the latter years of her reign, but the 1990s proved a low point starting with her self-declared "annus horribilis" in 1992, when heir Charles and second-born son Andrew separated from their wives, daughter Anne divorced Mark Phillips and a major fire damaged Windsor Castle, one of her homes.
A long-lasting UK recession bolstered resentment towards the lifestyles of the royal family, and the same year the Queen agreed to pay taxes on her private income despite being personally exempt.
When Princess Diana died in a Paris car crash five years later, the Queen faced perhaps her greatest criticism with some accusing her of being unfeeling for initially refusing to allow the national flag to fly at half-mast over Buckingham Palace and for not immediately returning to London from Balmoral Castle, where grandsons William and Harry were holidaying when their mother was killed.
Prince William would later tell Diana, 7 Days documentary makers how his grandmother "deliberately removed the newspapers" and otherwise tried to protect her grieving grandsons, and he was grateful for the "privacy to mourn".
Fourteen years later, at the 2011 national memorial for victims of the Christchurch earthquake, the Duke of Cambridge would quote the words of solace offered by his grandmother after the September 11 2001 attacks. "My grandmother once said that grief is the price we pay for love."
The turn of the following decade would bring a series of fresh challenges for the monarch.
In late 2019 son Andrew, Duke of York, suspended and later resigned from his public duties after a disastrous TV interview relating to sexual abuse allegations against him, and his connections to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Early the next year, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, announced they were quitting their royal roles.
A year later, in a bombshell interview with talk show giant Oprah Winfrey from their new home in the duchess' native California, the couple made claims of racism within the royal family, revealed the duchess had suicidal thoughts while working as a royal, and said son Archie wasn't eligible for the title of prince or to receive security.
The revelations rocked the royal family and dominated news outlets and water cooler conversations worldwide, thanks in part to Netflix smash hit The Crown sparking new interest in the House of Windsor.
Within weeks attention would turn to the man the Queen, on their golden wedding anniversary, called "my strength and stay all these years".
Prince Philip's death in April 2021 left the Queen alone in the last years of her reign. Covid-19 rules provided a bleak preview of her isolated status during his funeral at Windsor Castle's St George's Chapel.
Masked and socially distanced from her loved ones, the Queen put into action her words of a year earlier, when she spoke directly to the public in the early months of the pandemic and acknowledged the "painful sense of separation" many were feeling as lockdowns spread around the world.
Evoking the British wartime spirit of her teen years, she assured listeners "better days will return".
"We will be with our friends again, we will be with our families again, we will meet again."
