The inside story of how Queen Elizabeth II planned her last days

For her final offical royal duty on September 6, 2022, Queen Elizabeth II greeted Liz Truss as she arrives at Balmoral Castle for an audience where she was invited to become prime minister and form a new government. The Queen broke with the tradition of meeting the new prime minister at Buckingham Palace after needing to remain at Balmoral Castle due to mobility issues. She wore an outfit that characterised her off-duty wardrobe - a blouse, cardigan and a tartan skirt. Photo / Getty Images

Prince William said it best, days after the death of his grandmother. Somehow capturing the feelings of the nation, he admitted: “I knew this day would come, but it will be some time before the reality of life without Grannie will truly feel real.”

The public also knew the 96-year-old Queen, enduring growing mobility problems, would not go on forever.

So the words of her daughter, the Princess Royal, spelling out for the first time that the late Queen was able to plan for her final days in comfort, will be most reassuring. “I think there was a moment when she felt it would be more difficult if she died at Balmoral,” the Princess Royal said in Charles III: The Coronation Year – a BBC documentary about her brother’s Coronation.

“I think we did try to persuade her that that shouldn’t be part of the decision-making process. So I hope she felt that was right in the end, because we did.”

Princess Anne, Princess Royal attends day three of Royal Ascot 2023. Photo / Getty Images

That the Queen was thinking of other people until the very end came as no surprise to her many admirers in Britain and around the world.

Her concerns are thought to have been about logistics, plans for a royal death in Scotland requiring rather more administrative effort than one in London or Windsor. It is to the royal family’s credit that they gently overrode them.

Paying tribute to his mother in September 2022, Prince Edward said it had been “lovely to have spent time saying our own farewell privately at Balmoral”. Those words now seem even more poignant.

A glance back at the unofficial royal diary over that summer shows the Queen’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren making their annual pilgrimage to the Balmoral estate.

The then-Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their three children stayed in late August, as Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward and their families came and went to keep their mother company. They are said by friends to have spoken of memories of their happy summers past.

A photograph taken by the Princess of Wales shows Elizabeth II at the heart of a cosy family scene, perched on the sofa with Prince George, Princess Charlotte, Prince Louis, Lady Louise Mountbatten-Windsor and her brother James (then Viscount Severn), Mia, Lena and Lucas Tindall, and Isla and Savannah Phillips.

Queen’s diary scaled back

The Queen’s diary had already been drastically scaled back after heroic efforts to overcome mobility problems to greet the crowds at her Platinum Jubilee.

Until now, those decisions had been painted as being made on doctors’ advice. That more personal conversations were happening within the royal family too only highlights the Queen’s determination to finish her duties.

She put Scotland at the heart of it. In July, she arrived in Edinburgh on the royal train within days of Nicola Sturgeon’s latest “roadmap to independence” being published.

Looking slender but beaming in a powder blue coat, hat and an Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders brooch for the Ceremony of the Keys, aware that her cherished union was once again under threat.

Duty done – a public reminder of her feelings towards Scotland – she retired for what we now know to be her final summer in the home she loved best.

She had already had her last meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, in June, of which he has said: “I came away thinking, ‘There is someone who has no fear of death, has hope in the future, knows the rock on which she stands and that gives her the strength … to be that sense of permanence and of continuity.”

She had ridden her Fell pony Emma for the final time, slowing down – it has been reported – into a daily routine of puzzles and a post-lunch nap. She hosted friends and family, insisting they continue with their walks and picnics even when she could not join in.

“We always enjoyed being at Balmoral,” the Princess Royal says in the documentary, to be broadcast on BBC One on Boxing Day. “We spent a lot of time there in our youth, and a lot of it was probably a more independent life than anywhere else. That’s probably still true.”

Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales, Prince Edward, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and the Duke of Edinburgh on board the Royal Yacht Britannia during a visit to Norway. Photo / PA Images via Getty Images

Guests who stayed at Balmoral close to the end spoke of the Queen in a “very contemplative state”, in between her typical generous conversation and twinkly-eyed wit.

The Rt Rev Dr Iain Greenshields, who stayed at the castle over the late Queen’s final weekend, having been invited to hold a sermon at Crathie Parish Church, said she had been talking about the afterlife and eating icecream made with berries from the estate.

“She was just talking about some of the remarkable people she’d met. And she was just reflecting on that and reflecting on life, and where this life leads to, and we just talked about that and eternal life and resurrection, and what these things meant.”

A Sunday night dinner with visiting family, her Bowes-Lyons cousins, is said to have given a clue all was not well. The traditional piper had been stood down and the dress code would be informal.

On Tuesday, September 6, the Queen received her 14th and 15th prime ministers, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, at Balmoral. By Wednesday, a virtual Privy Council was cancelled at the last minute, as she needed to rest.

For her final offical royal duty on September 6, 2022, Queen Elizabeth invited Liz Truss to become the UK's new prime minister and form a government. Photo / Getty Images

On Thursday, as the world now knows, the Queen died at 3.10pm with her eldest son and daughter by her side.

“In my case, it was purely serendipity that I was there,” Princess Anne says. “I’d been two days up on the west coast, and I was coming back to stay the night and going south.”

Prince Charles was at Dumfries House, and made a dash to Balmoral by helicopter in time. Other members of the family arrived later that evening to pay their respects.

Codename “London Bridge” became “Operation Unicorn”, the term used for a death in Scotland. And while the Queen herself may have worried about logistical difficulties, the reality turned out to be just what the nation needed.

The slower time scale allowed the royal family to remain in their bubble a little longer. The people of Ballater, so loyal to the Queen and fiercely protective of her privacy, were given the chance to pay their respects in person before the world descended.

Thousands of mourners line the Long Walk in Windsor Great Park to view the procession of Queen Elizabeth II's coffin.

The long journey of the coffin from Aberdeenshire to an Edinburgh vigil saw a line-up of 32 beautifully turned-out horses and a guard of honour formed of newly cleaned tractors.

An idea to transport the coffin via the royal train had already been vetoed in plans rubber-stamped by the late Queen.

Instead it was flown south by a RAF Globemaster C-17, accompanied by the Princess Royal.

By choosing to die in Scotland, the Queen had “saved the union”, hyperbolic headlines declared at the time. Within them, we now know, is a grain of truth.

As she cherished the union in life, so she ensured its people were front and centre at the end. At a time when they could have fractured, the nations drew together.

For Robert Hardman, who wrote Charles III: The Coronation Year and a forthcoming book, the documentary shows not only the Princess Royal as a “voice of common sense and reality” but the “very human experience” at the centre of “this extraordinary moment of transition”.

The late Queen, who had her life planned out minute by minute from her earliest days, was able – with her loved ones – to plan for the end as well.

For family and nation, what could be more comforting than that?