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Queen Elizabeth, Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, has died aged 96, Buckingham Palace said late Thursday.
Her eldest son Charles, 73, automatically becomes king of the United Kingdom and the head of state of 14 other realms including Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
The royal family had rushed to Scotland’s Balmoral on Thursday after doctors said the monarch was not feeling well and should stay “under medical supervision”.
In spite of Buckingham Palace’s prior statement, announcing that “the Queen remains comfortable and at Balmoral,” she passed away.
According to the Buckingham Palace, Queen Elizabeth II was suffering from “episodic mobility problems” since the end of last year.
The development came after the queen appointed Liz Truss as the new British prime minister on the previous day.
Elizabeth was the queen of Britain and more than a dozen other countries, who saw 15 British prime ministers in her record-breaking reign and earlier this year marked her 70th year on the throne.
At her death, she was head of state of: Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, The Bahamas, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and the UK.
At the peak, she was queen of 18 countries at the same time, between 1983 and 1987. Since then, Fiji (1987), Mauritius (1992) and Barbados (2021) have become republics.
Her last years as the monarch were marked by a slew of scandals dogging the royal family.
The Sunday Times recently reported that Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, accepted a £1 million ($1.19 million, 1.21 million euro) donation from the family of the deceased Saudi terrorist, Osama bin Laden.
Neither Charles nor other members of the British royal family who had ties with Nazis or were entangled in numerous sexual affairs have been strangers to controversy and scandals.
From the 1970s to 90s, Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles were in a publicly-acknowledged illicit affair, which eventually resulted in Queen Elizabeth forcing the Prince and Princess Diana to get divorced in 1995.
Another one of the many scandals was when the Queen’s second son, the Duke of York, was embroiled in a sex-slave relationship with an underage girl.
Buckingham Palace initially tried to defend the “honor” of Prince Andrew and quash the spreading news.
When the facts came out eventually, Andrew was stripped of all his titles by the queen.
The succession has rekindled the long-running debate about colonialism and how the British monarchy spawned systems of oppression and slavery worldwide.
At its height about a century ago, Britain was the largest colonial power with its monarchy holding sway over 412 million people, or nearly one-fourth of the world population, in different corners of the globe from South Asia to Africa.
Uju Anya, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, in a tweet on Thursday afternoon denounced the British colonial legacy.
“If anyone expects me to express anything but disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep wishing upon a star,” she wrote.
In an interview later on Thursday, Anya said she was “a child of colonization” as her mother was born in Trinidad and her father in Nigeria, who met in England in the 1950s as colonial subjects, married there and then moved to Nigeria together.
“In addition to the colonization on the side of Nigeria, there’s also the human enslavement in the Caribbean,” she said. “So there’s a direct lineage that I have to not just people who were colonized, but also people who were enslaved by the British.”
Zoé Samudzi, a Zimbabwean writer and an assistant professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, also took to Twitter to slam the British royal family.
“As the first generation of my family not born in a British colony, I would dance on the graves of every member of the royal family if given the opportunity, especially hers,” she wrote.
The succession of Charles has prompted strong reactions from politicians and activists in former British colonies in the Caribbean, who have called for the abolition of the British monarchy.
“As the role of the monarchy changes, we expect this can be an opportunity to advance discussions of reparations for our region,” Niambi Hall-Campbell, an academic who chairs the Bahamas National Reparations Committee, was quoted as saying by Reuters on Thursday.
“Whoever will take over the position should be asked to allow the royal family to pay African people reparations,” David Denny, general secretary of the Caribbean Movement for Peace and Integration, was quoted as saying.
“We should all work towards removing the royal family as head of state of our nations,” he added.
Last year, Barbados, one of a dozen Caribbean nations which are Commonwealth members, ditched the British monarch as the head of state.
Many former British colonies, most recently Barbados, have snapped their ties with the British crown over the years.
In March this year, a group of 100 Jamaican political activists published an open letter to Prince William, the incoming monarch’s eldest son, demanding reparations.
“We see no reason to celebrate 70 years of the ascension of your grandmot her to the British throne because her leadership, and that of her predecessors, have perpetuated the greatest human rights tragedy in the history of humankind,” they wrote.
“During her 70 years on the throne, your grandmother has done nothing to redress and atone for the suffering of our ancestors that took place during her reign and/or during the entire period of British trafficking of Africans, enslavement, indentureship, and colonialization.”
