Behind Palace gates with Juliet Rieden

The next 12 months are going to be awash with firsts in the royal world and many will bring a pall of sadness. Last month we saw the first Remembrance Day without Queen Elizabeth II and the first with her son, Charles, as King.

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This annual royal duty was one of the most important and treasured in his late mother’s calendar when the sovereign honoured the royal defence forces who served in her name. Queen Elizabeth II represented a powerful living link with World War II, a time she lived through when her father, King George VI, led the country against Nazi Germany to peacetime – surely the most defining period of his reign. Princess Elizabeth joined the war effort personally as a teenager in February 1945 with the Auxiliary Territorial Service as Second Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor, working as a mechanic, and frequently referenced the sacrifices the nation faced in that war in her speeches.

In honour of that service, this year’s remembrance included a temporary plot with a black wooden cross with the words “In Memoriam. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 1926 – 2022” alongside two monochrome photographs of the monarch. It was set up within the Westminster Abbey Field of Remembrance where those who fought and died in the war also had crosses and where members of the public could leave tributes to their late Queen.

Since 2017 Charles had laid his mother’s wreath at the Cenotaph in London as the monarch watched on from a balcony in the Foreign Office, but last year Her Majesty was unable to attend due to back strain – an early indicator that her strength was waning.