Queen Elizabeth II had a stroke shortly before her death, according to a cousin of Prince Philip, in one of a number of competing theories about the decline of her health.
Lady Pamela Hicks was so close to Elizabeth that she was with her when her father died and she became queen in 1952. Her own father, Lord Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten, was a brother of Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg.
And her daughter, India Hicks, described in the biography Lady Pamela how she heard the queen experienced a stroke in the days before her death.
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It comes as former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson revealed in his own book Unleashed that Elizabeth had bone cancer in the year before she died.
“I was just about to board a plane when I heard the shattering news about the queen,” Hicks wrote. “I immediately called my mother to tell her that the queen had suffered a stroke and might not make it to the morning.
“I was concerned about my mother. ‘Would you like me to postpone my trip and be with you?’ I asked. ‘My darling,’ my mother told me, ‘it’s the poor queen who’s had the stroke, not me.'”
The queen’s official birth certificate listed the cause of death as natural causes. Hicks did not say who told her and it is possible the information she received was only partially true.
However, she does appear to have heard about the sudden decline in Elizabeth’s condition before it became public knowledge at around 12.30 p.m. on September 8, 2022.
It is also entirely possible that Johnson’s account of her having bone cancer is true—and he was certainly well placed to know as the serving prime minister up until a couple of days before her death.
However, the fact she may have been told she was dying of cancer does not necessarily mean that was what ultimately claimed her life.
In the book, Johnson described seeing her when he formally resigned days before her death: “I had known for a year or more that she had a form of bone cancer, and her doctors were worried that at any time she could enter a sharp decline.
“‘She’s gone down quite a bit over the summer,’ he said. And then the footman knocked and showed me into Her Majesty’s drawing room.”
“As [the queen’s most senior aide] Edward Young explained to me later,” Johnson wrote, “she had known all summer that she was going, but was determined to hang on and do her last duty: to oversee the peaceful and orderly transition from one government to the next—and, I expect, to add another departing PM to her record-breaking tally.”
Lady Pamela was quoted in Ingrid Seward’s book, Prince Philip Revealed, describing the moment Elizabeth became queen: “The shock of what had happened and the enormity of the consequences, briefly disconnected Philip who knew he was going to have to break the news to his wife.
“And then he pulled himself together and said he must go and find the Princess—she was having a rest in her bedroom—and they went for a walk in the garden and you could tell, walking up and down, up and down, that he was telling her. I think I gave her a hug and said how sorry I was. And then suddenly, I thought, my God, but she’s Queen.”
Jack Royston is chief royal correspondent for Newsweek, based in London. You can find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek‘s The Royals Facebook page.
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