Great grandma!
SHE was the most famous head of state on the planet – but to her family, Queen Elizabeth II was simply a wife, mother, granny and great granny.
When she celebrated her 90th birthday in April 2016, the Queen chose to mark the milestone, not in royal regalia, but with a series of intimate family portraits.
Prince George called her “Gan-Gan” and the Duchess of Cambridge told how the Queen always left “a little gift or something in their room” when he and sister Princess Charlotte went to stay.
She also spoke of how “thrilled” the late monarch was when Charlotte was born, adding: “As soon as we came back to Kensington she was one of our first visitors.”
A country woman at heart, the Queen relished walks surrounded by her family at Balmoral every summer, a place Princess Eugenie said she thought her granny was “the most happy”.
She also loved having her family to Sandringham House every Christmas where they would hand out simple, often joke, presents and play games after dinner before the annual Boxing Day shoot on the estate.
Her working week was spent in London at Buckingham Palace, with weekends in Windsor, and Prince William regularly joined her there for Sunday tea when he was at nearby Eton.
The Queen was always willing to support her grandchildren, even in the most unlikely projects, such as a joke video challenging President Obama during Prince Harry’s 2016 Invictus Games. Harry said afterwards: “I think it was almost as though you could see that look in her face, at the age of 90, thinking, ‘Why the hell does nobody ask me to do these things more often?’.”
But William and Harry also described their grandmother as “the boss” and, even as adults, they received the odd telling off.
The Queen told her grandson “stand up, William” at Trooping the Colour in 2016 when he was kneeling on the Buckingham Palace balcony to talk to son George.
William also recalled about one childhood holiday at Balmoral: “We were chasing Zara [Phillips] around who was on a go-cart and Peter [Phillips] and I managed to herd Zara into a lamppost.
“I remember my grandmother came charging over and gave us the most almighty b ****** ing.”
But it was Prince Philip who perhaps best summed up his wife behind the scenes. He once said: “Tolerance is the one essential ingredient in any happy marriage.
“You can take it from me, the Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance.”