Queen Elizabeth stayed true to form in her final diary entry before her death, keeping things brief and unemotional. Just two days before her death at age 96 on Sept. 8, 2022, the queen sat down to record the day’s events at her beloved Balmoral estate. “Edward came to see me,” the simple journal entry reads, as reported by Robert Hardman in his new royal biography.
The queen was referring to Sir Edward Young, her private secretary who was helping her make arrangements for the swearing in of newly-elected U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss’s ministers. After years of public service, the Queen’s final public engagement was appointing Truss on Sept. 6.
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“It transpires that she was still writing it [the diary] at Balmoral two days before her death,” Hardman wrote in an excerpt published by The Telegraph. “Her last entry was as factual and practical as ever.”
Hardman wrote that the queen’s diary functioned more as a log of daily events rather than a place for introspection. “I have no time to record conversations, only events,” she once famously told society diarist Kenneth Rose.
Hardman’s book, Charles III: New King, New Court. The Inside Story, details how Queen Elizabeth fastidiously kept a diary throughout her 70-year reign. “It is unsurprising that the monarch was diligent in her documentation, even as illness made her increasingly frail,” British magazine Tatler reported.
King Charles also keeps a journal, but “he doesn’t write great narrative diaries like he used to,” a senior courtier told Hardman. Instead, the king “scribbles down his recollections and reflections” at the end of every day. Perhaps the crown is to blame for impersonal diary entries; Hardman writes that the king’s writing style is “not quite as self-analytical, humorous and readable as the journal he kept as a prince.”
