The Queen’s final portrait released ahead of her funeral

The funeral is today.

The last ever portrait of the Queen was released last night by Buckingham Palace ahead of her funeral taking place today. The picture was taken in May head of the Platinum Jubilee and shows Elizabeth II smiling in her home at Windsor Castle. The Queen can be seen wearing a blue dress and her favourite three-strand pearl necklace, pearl earrings and her aquamarine and diamond clip brooches, which were an 18th birthday present from her dad George VI in 1944. Wearing the two brooches alongside each other, they were made by Boucheron from baguette, oval and round diamonds and aquamarines. She wore these brooches during her address to the UK on the 75th anniversary of VE Day in 2020 and for her Diamond Jubilee televised speech in 2012. The photograph was taken by photographer Ranald Mackechnie who took the jubilee portrait of the Queen which was taken to mark her 70 year reign. In a televised tribute to her mother-in-law earlier this evening, the Queen Consort said that the Queen had "wonderful blue eyes" and she "will always remember her smile." Camilla also recounted how the Queen used her "good sense of humour" to calm her nerves on her wedding day.

Camilla said: "I remember coming from here, Clarence House, (to) go to Windsor the day I got married when I probably wasn’t firing on all cylinders, quite nervous and, for some unknown reason, I put on a pair of shoes and one had an inch heel and one had a two-inch heel.

"So, I mean talk about hop-a-long and there’s nothing I could do. I was halfway down in the car before I realised and you know, she – she could see and laughed about it and said, ‘look I’m terribly sorry’ and she did, you know, she had a good sense of humour."