Today is the 96th birthday of Her Majesty The Queen and this is to put on my loyal greetings and good wishes to her on this day.
To reach the age of 96 is no mean achievement for anyone. Even with the health care the Royal Family receive it is still that, and although in her mother and the matrilineal lines of Queen Mary and Queen Alexandra Her Majesty has presumably a good genetic inheritance other members of the dynasty have had less lengthy lifespans - and less healthy lifestyles. The Queen is only the third monarch to reach their eighties - both King George III and Queen Victoria lived to be 81 - and to now be fifteen years older than them is noteworthy to say the least. That longevity has stood her, the Monsrchy and her realms well.
It is often said that when the then Princess Elizabeth of York was born in 1926 that no-one expected her to succeed to the throne. Even the Buckingham Palace website says that in effect today. That is not really true - in 1926 she was third in line after her uncle the Prince of Wales and her father thr Duke of York. Had she had a younger brother she would have moved down the list, but that was not to be. Even at the time of her birth there may well have been doubts as to whether the Prince of Wales would marry, and King George V, increasingly despondent about his eldest son, expressed the strong hope that nothing would come between his second son and his beloved granddaughter. In that he was prophetic. In 1936 Princess Elizabeth rose to second and then first in line to the throne. Her accession was certainly possible, if not indeed likely, from her birth onwards.
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