With all the pageantry and long queues at Westminster, we still don’t know the real cause of Queen Elizabeth II’s death. It’s easy to say that she was 96 and old age finally got her. We may never be told the answer.
But the day before her illness, the Queen saw both her outgoing Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and her incoming Prime Minister, Liz Truss. Many photographs were taken and the queen, although elderly, looked quite well. Royal photographer Jane Barlow told news from heaven, that she “got a lot of smiles from her”.
Now I have been told by royal sources (and who doesn’t have a royal source at this point?) that at 9am the next morning the Queen suffered what was officially called ‘a thrombosis’ or a stroke. “She fell unconscious and never woke up,” the source said. Some think that having had the stroke, she may have hit her head.
A stroke would make sense. First, in November 2021, Elizabeth was hospitalized with a mini-stroke. Second, and more coincidentally, his father, King George VI, despite suffering from lung cancer, also succumbed to thrombosis. The difference, of course, was that he was only 56. Her daughter lived to be 96 and honored her legacy beyond what could have been her wildest imagination.
According to the source, Princess Anne was already at Balmoral Castle and ran alongside her mother. Charles, then a prince, was summoned and arrived immediately. As we have assumed from other reports, the Queen died at 3pm and the announcement was made at 6pm.
If the Queen who some said had cancer, died the same way her father did, so what happened next is all the more poignant. At a church service later at St Genny’s Church, near Crackington Haven, Cornwall, clerk’s staff were shocked when a leaflet from King George’s funeral fell from a King James Bible.
“No one could quite remember when the Bible was last used…but then the flyer fell out the front,” service chief Nick Danks told the BBC.
“It was just one of those wonderful times that had to be.”