New details about the final days and hours of Queen Elizabeth II have been revealed in a new book.
The late Queen died aged 96 on September 8, 2022, after over 70 years on the throne.
The monarch had continued working right up until the day before she died, and had to pull out of her final engagement after her health began failing.
Now, further details have been revealed about the Queen’s final days in Robert Hardman’s new book, Charles III: New King, New Court.
The book claims that Queen Elizabeth had been “buzzy” and preparing to join an important meeting from her bedside just two days before her death.
Two days before she died, she had met with the departing British prime minister, Boris Johnson, and his replacement, Liz Truss, at Balmoral and attended a drinks party that same evening.
A guest who’d attended the party told Hardman: “She was quite buzzy over pre-dinner drinks.
“But then she said she was going upstairs to have dinner alone.”
The Queen then spent the following day in bed, but had reportedly arranged to dial in to an important meeting via video link through the Privy Council.
However, as her health declined, it was then amended to be an audio-only call from her bedroom, but minutes before the meeting was set to begin, the decision was made to cancel entirely following “medical advice”.
Later that same evening, on September 7, Princess Anne the then Prince Charles’s private secretary advised him to urgently make his way to his mother’s bedside as the end was approaching.
Charles had visited his mother, but Hardman reports that he was ultimately told that she’d died at 3:10PM on September 8 over the phone, having left her briefly to have a moment to himself outside.
Other members of the Royal Family had also been called to attend Balmoral to see the monarch before her death, but the majority were still en route to Scotland when the Queen died, according to the book as cited by News.com.au.
Prince William, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward, and his wife Sophie were later confirmed to have landed 40 minutes after the Queen’s death.
Prince Harry also revealed in his autobiography, Spare, that he had learned of his grandmother’s passing after receiving a BBC breaking news alert moments after his own flight had landed.
Following Queen Elizabeth’s death, she was laid to rest on September 19 with a state funeral at Westminster Abbey, the first time a monarch’s funeral was held there since that of George II in 1760.
After a committal service at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, later the same day, the Queen’s body was interred alongside her husband Prince Philip’s body in the King George VI Memorial Chapel in a private ceremony attended by her closest family members.
Her son then became King Charles III, the current reigning monarch.
