Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was lively nearly to the end at 101

Twenty-one years after her death on Holy Saturday of Easter weekend, remembering a special moment of her remarkable vitality less than a month earlier

Like her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II at 96, and her son-in-law, the Duke of Edinburgh at 99, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother died of old age. Her niece and longtime lady-in-waiting, Margaret Rhodes, spent every day with the Queen Mum in March 2002, and was with her when she died on the 30^th at 3:15 in the afternoon.  

As we talked in her sitting room at Garden House in Windsor Great Park six years later, eighty-three-year-old Margaret (she insisted I call her that rather than Mrs. Rhodes) had vivid memories of her aunt’s final days. “She had been getting progressively weaker, and the last few days she would come into the dining room in her wheelchair. She would have lunch in her dressing gown,” she told me.

On the Saturday morning before Easter, the Queen Mother’s doctors came as usual. “They detected a sign that it was nearly the end,” Margaret recalled. She went over to her aunt’s house, Royal Lodge, arriving shortly after Elizabeth II hastened there in her riding clothes. The Queen was able to say goodbye to her beloved mother before she lost consciousness.

“I never heard her speak at all,” Margaret told me. “Her eyes were shut. The Queen came back with Sarah Chatto and David Linley [ the children of the Queen Mum’s younger daughter, Princess Margaret].”  The Reverend Canon John Ovenden, Queen Elizabeth II’s chaplain, held the Queen Mother’s hand and said prayers that included a Highland lament. “We were all with her and all in tears,” Margaret remembered. “It was the only time I ever saw the Queen in tears.”   

But there is a spirit-lifting prelude to the Queen Mother’s tranquil end that I discovered while doing research for my book, George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy. at Eton College, down the road from Windsor Castle.

On March 5^th, the Queen Mother had her final “Lawn Meet” of the Eton Beagles, a group of students who helped to breed and care for a pack of beagles that competed in dog shows and participated in “beagling”—hunting hares and rabbits. She had been entertaining the boys and their hounds every year during February or March since 1972, and despite her declining health, she was determined to do it again.

Some of the Eton Beagles and their pack, on their way to meet the Queen Mother