Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was not just Queen Elizabeth II. She was simply The Queen.

For billions of people, she was the one constant in a world of bewildering change, an omnipresent matriarch linking the past with the present.

Against the tide of history and logic, she made a medieval anachronism somehow modern, a stoic old lady in a hat onto whom so much could be projected. The unknowable mystique she cultivated in a world ever more demanding of transparency may well die with her.

Time and again, Elizabeth proved that she was infinitely worthy — the first and perhaps the “last global monarch”, as the New York Times put it in 2021.

Here is a look into her life through the decades:

Header image: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth leaves after attending a service for the Order of the British Empire, at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, Britain, March 7, 2012. — Reuters