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With the death of Elizabeth II, the United Kingdom and the international community witness the disappearance of a figure who has gone through the great stages of the second half of the 20th century and almost the first quarter of this century from a privileged position.
Her very long reign (about 71 years) has been the longest in British history, and has ranged from the global reordering of the world after World War II to the collapse of some of its main actors such as the Soviet Union.
From the loss of the British Empire to the role that the monarchy should play in this new reality.
Crowned in February 1952 at the age of 25, Elizabeth II had to preside over the definitive disappearance of the British Empire, which had already lost its most precious territory, India, in 1945 under the reign of George VI.
The United Kingdom went from a world superpower to a major power in a few decades, a change accepted pragmatically by the deceased sovereign for whom the most important thing was always, above all else, and including her own family, the continuity of the Crown .
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Last minute in the United Kingdom after the death of Elizabeth II
The changes within his country were also substantial.
Over the course of seven decades he met 15 prime ministers who found a queen who kept her institutional distance.
The abundant anecdote about her private opinions is part of the more or less fictionalized recreation but remained beyond the reach of public opinion, with the exception, perhaps, of an at least tense relationship with Margaret Thatcher.
He suffered IRA terrorism in his own family with the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in 1979, but he respected the Good Friday Agreements of 1998 and in 2012 he shook hands and spoke with the former commander of that organization, Martin McGuinness, in his capacity as deputy prime Minister for Northern Ireland.
Perhaps the biggest headaches have come from the familiar vicissitudes and labyrinthine interiors of Windsor.
Shortly before she was crowned, her sister announced that she was marrying someone who was not of royal blood.
Some of her children followed the same path to the anachronistic scandal of a family with rigid traditions.
But without a doubt the person who could most clearly destabilize Elizabeth II was the complex and painful relationship of the royal family with Diana of Wales.
The cold reaction of the queen to the death 25 years ago of Lady Di showed an unprecedented distance between much of the country and her queen.
With a high cost of image and a long time later, Isabel II managed to suture that wound by returning to her undaunted institutionality, despite her love affairs,
financial and criminal charges that have affected their children and grandchildren in recent years.
The improbable age at which his son Carlos (73 years old) and his wife and queen consort, Camilla of Cornwall, reach the transmission of the Crown makes the form of continuity that an institution that lives, precisely, from its self-sufficient capacity to guarantee it.