Queen Elizabeth: A Life in Photos

Bettmann

There is perhaps no way to measure the number of photos taken of Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-serving British monarchy in history. But here’s an idea: Getty Images and Alamy—two of the largest online visual databases in the world—each has well over 100,000.

After all, the Queen was publicly known from the moment she was born: her father, the Duke of York, stood second in line to the British throne, making her newsworthy even in the earliest days of her life. Yet she likely never imagined that one day her image would take over the world—on newspapers, on television, even on money as the Queen of England. She was, after all, never supposed to be monarch at all.

But then the abdication of Edward VIII on December 11, 1936, changed everything. Suddenly, a reserved 10-year-old girl was the heir presumptive and shoved into the brightest of spotlights, under which she remained for the next 86 years. Amid it all, Britain changed dramatically, going from a global empire to the Commonwealth of Nations and just one of the world s many players. There was the Suez Canal Crisis, the Falklands War, the Iraq War, and many other conflicts. There was Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, and 10 other prime ministers. And there was the Swinging Sixties, the free love 1970s, the punk 1980s, and the dawn of the millennium. “The Queen has been a constant in our lives,” former prime minister Sir John Major told biographer Robert Hardman for his book, Queen of Our Times.

Indeed, President Obama once remarked that she was the type of leader whose life had spanned “such momentous epochs, that they find no need to posture or traffic in what’s popular in the moment; people who speak with depth and knowledge, not in sound bites. They find no interest in polls or fads.”

On the occasion of the first anniversary of her passing, take a look back at her extraordinary life and reign in photos—stretching from a few months before she became the heir presumptive to her last public appearance meeting new prime minister Liz Truss. It would be her 15th, and final, British premier.