The final hours of Queen Elizabeth’s life have been shared in a tell-all new book about the royals, detailing how Her Majesty was forced to pull out of an important meeting before she died.

In his book, Charles III: New King, New Court, author Robert Hardman shared that the day before her death, Queen Elizabeth had met the departing British prime minister, Boris Johnson, and his replacement, Liz Truss, at Balmoral and attended a drinks party that same evening.

Hardman wrote that the Queen felt “buzzy” at the event, but her health quickly took a turn for the worst.

“She was quite buzzy over pre-dinner drinks,” one guest at the party told Hardman.

“But then she said she was going upstairs to have dinner alone.”

The monarch then spent the next day in bed, but reportedly arranged with the Privy Council to dial in via video link for an important meeting.

As her health deteriorated throughout the day, that was changed to allow for her to call from her bedroom in an audio-only capacity, according to Hardman.

But just moments before the meeting was set to get underway, the Queen reportedly made the difficult decision to cancel entirely on “medical advice”.

It was that evening that then-Prince Charles was advised by Princess Anne and his private secretary to make his way urgently to his mother’s bedside, with fears that the end was near.

Hardman writes that the following day, Charles was told his mother had died over the phone, having briefly left her bedside to have a moment to himself outside.

Sadly, most of the royal family didn’t make it to Balmoral in time to see the Queen before she passed, with Prince William, Prince Andrew, and Prince Edward and his wife Sophie all landing 40 minutes later.

Prince Harry shared in his own memoir Spare that he learned of his grandmother’s death by reading it in a BBC breaking news alert, moments after his own flight landed.

The Queen died at 3:10pm on September 8th 2022, after more than 70 years on the throne.

Image credits: Shutterstock 

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