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The team at Aimee Provence would like to pay our respects to Queen Elizabeth II; one of the most loved, and respected figures of the modern world who passed away peacefully on 8th September 2022 aged 96.

She delivered the speech quoted above in 1947. It was her twenty-first birthday and she would soon become the 40th monarch of England since William the Conqueror in 1066. That remarkable young woman couldn’t possibly have foreseen that her reign would endure for seventy years, seven months and two days; the longest in what the history of what became the United Kingdom. In all that time, she never wavered from or regretted her vow of service. Through good times or bad, for seventy years, that flame remained a constant in all our lives.

During those seven decades Elizabeth II unstintingly:

• Gave assent to over 4,000 Acts of Parliament
• Had fifteen Prime Ministers, from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss. She also saw fourteen U.S. Presidents, seven Archbishops of Canterbury, and seven Popes. (Astonishingly, the fifteenth Prime Minister, appointed only two days before the Queen’s death, was born 101 years after the first, Winston Churchill)
• Conducted between three and four hundred engagements annually until she was well into her nineties.
• Had four children, eight grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren
• Sent over 175,000 telegrams to people across the Commonwealth celebrating their hundredth birthday
• Owned at least thirty dogs
• Visited a hundred and seventeen nations, including eighty-two state visits and travelling at least 1,661,668 km (1,032,513 miles)
• Gave 97,500 Christmas puddings to Palace staff
• Was patron of six hundred charities and organisations
• Survived four known assassination attempts
• Sat for at least a hundred and twenty-nine portraits
• Hosted more than 1.45 million people at her annual garden parties and
• At the time of her death had 10.3 million followers on her Instagram account.

Elizabeth II was a guiding light in a troubled and turbulent world: dignified, cheerful, caring, unifying and inspiring. Around the Commonwealth and across the world she was, as former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson noted,

The world in which the young Elizabeth acceded to the throne was a very different world to the one she has left to the new King. In many ways, Elizabeth II was a guiding light leading us all through a period of turbulence and transition into the modern age: a bridge between the old world and the new. Through it all (to slightly mis-quote her fifteenth Prime Minister) she was the rock on which modern Britain – and the modern Commonwealth – was built.

The bright and steady light that was Elizabeth II has, indeed, finally gone out. Thank you, Ma’am, for your long life of service to us. We shall never see your light again.