A year ago, at 3.10pm at Balmoral Castle, Doctor Douglas Glass, apothecary to the Royal Household in Scotland, signed the death certificate of Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Wilson, who died on September 8 “of old age” at the age of 96. More than three hours later, at 6:30 p.m., the news was shared with the world: Queen Elizabeth II, the most popular and longest-serving ruler in British history, was dead, and her son Charles was the new king. Under British law, the time of death is the time at which the certificate is signed and we therefore do not know the actual time or cause of his sudden death.
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THE END
Despite the age and frailty he showed in the pictures taken on September 6 as he handed over the job to his 15th prime minister, Liz Truss, no one suspected that his end was imminent. Elizabeth had agreed to bring outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the new one to the handover, a tiring appointment that had occupied her for almost two hours. He hadn’t even given up conferring the Royal Victorian Order on his historic Communications Secretary, Donald McCabe. But on the 7th, the virtual meeting with the Privy Council was canceled and the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Edward Young, called the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, to inform him that Her Majesty was unwell. The Queen had been ill for some time: she lost her sight and hearing, was often confused, was in constant pain and spent most of her time in a wheelchair. According to rumors, confirmed by biographer Gyles Brandreth, she suffered from a serious bone disease and was taking strong painkillers. But Liz Truss focused on her first government commitments and did not really believe that they could be linked to the sovereign’s disappearance. However, she remembered that many of her clothes were still in the house in Greenwich and had sent someone to get her a black one. None of the family members seemed concerned. On the evening of September 7th, Princess Anne was at Balmoral, but did not feel the need to abandon her commitment to a charity for the next morning. Charles was at Dumfries House, a Palladian villa in Ayrshire that was very dear to him. For dinner he received Jenna Bush, the daughter of the former American president, who was supposed to interview the then Duchess Camilla for NBC. The dinner, she and her husband Henry Hager later said, took place in a calm and cheerful atmosphere that did not suggest anything sinister.
THE NEWS
The next morning, according to the Hager couple, Carlo received a call in his study at around 12:20 p.m. in which everyone was asked to remain silent. Immediately after that, he walked out and the sound of a helicopter that was supposed to pick him and Camilla up was heard. At Northolt military airport, not far from Windsor, a jet with Prince William, Prince Andrew and Edward and Sophia of Wessex on board was waiting to take off. The flight was scheduled for 1:30 p.m., but the plane remained on the tarmac until 2:40 p.m. because another family dispute blocked it. Prince Harry, who was in London for his engagements with Meghan, had asked William for a ride with him and his wife and publicly announced that both would be going to Balmoral. William had called his father, who had called Harry and told him that he was welcome, but that Meghan’s presence was not welcome. Furious, Harry finally chartered a private plane which left Luton at 5.30pm and was still flying when the Queen’s death was announced to the world.
THE LAST GREETING
At the time of her death, the only family members close to Elizabeth were Charles and Anne, the two children in the happy photographs taken of the family by Cecil Beaton before she ascended the throne. We don’t know if they exchanged any words, and we’ll never know. The most plausible hypothesis is that late in the morning of September 8, a traumatic event occurred, possibly a fall, as some sources say, which put an end to his suffering and the weariness of a life spent in the service of the nation. William arrived with the others at 5:06 p.m. Harry only at 7.52pm: No one greeted him and later he booked a scheduled flight in his room using his cell phone. Reverend Iain Greenshields, leader of the Church of Scotland, had spent a few days in Balmoral in early September. Elizabeth had talked to him about faith and about her father and mother, as people sometimes do when they feel the end is near. Then she went to a window and looked out over the beautiful countryside at the River Dee, which she loved so much, and said, “Who wouldn’t want to be here?”
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