It’s hard not to imagine the scenes that might have enchanted us this weekend, and especially next Tuesday – the processions, the beacons, the marching bands.

A service at St Paul’s, much daffy but endearing London silliness, and that unmistakeable little hat-and-gloves figure on the Palace balcony, as Elizabeth II celebrated her hundredth birthday.

A vision in neon green. Providence, of course, decreed otherwise: our longest-reigning monarch was gathered unto her fathers on September 8, 2022.

Serenely, at her beloved Scottish retreat – loath, it seemed, long to outlive her husband of 73 years and the steadfast, incorrigible love of her life.

And she had never had it easy. We too readily forget that Elizabeth was not born to be Queen. The cooing interest of April 1926 was much tempered by general expectation that, even if her older uncle never married and had issue, her parents would in short order produce a son, leapfrogging their infant daughter in the line of succession.

Though bright, dutiful and inquiring, she was denied a proper education. On account of Hitler’s war, she spent the vital character-forming years of her teens practically under Windsor house arrest and, when she elected to marry – but 21 and very much in love – her parents were not best pleased.

Her mother had harboured hopes of a lucrative match to William Hartington, heir to the Duke of Devonshire, and from Churchill down and for years to come many Establishment figures eyed Philip, Duke of Edinburgh as a sort of wolf.

These years as a young and largely carefree bride and young mother proved sadly scant. The Queen was not 26 when catapulted unexpectedly onto the Throne.

But a woman – in an era, remember, where one (even gainfully employed) needed the signature of a husband or father to gain credit, and surrounded by a bunch of moustaches each privately convinced he would do a far better job of reigning than this young filly.

The Queen had in addition for many years to humour her ultraconservative mother, from her 60s to contend with the follies of her children and in an era where deference, and reverence for national institutions, was by 1970 falling fast away.

Biographers even describe her first 12 years or so as the ‘unfinished reign’, self-consciously standing in for her late father, loath to change anything much, scant of confidence and excruciatingly aware of her thin, shrill girlish voice.

But Philip, her strength and stay always behind the scenes, coaxed her through sustained vocal exercises and changes indeed there were – such as, for instance, an end in July 1958, and for ever, to the presentation of debutantes at court.

Just as well, Princess Margaret harrumphed – ‘every tart in London was getting in’.

The Queen had her own understated strengths. For one, a Stakhanovite work ethic. Every day of her reign, save at Christmas and Easter, she worked morning and evening through the latest remorseless ‘red box’ of State papers. So conscientiously she was often better informed than her Prime Ministers.

For another, till almost the end she was blessed with robust good health. Strong as an ox, one Private Secretary purred, and ‘trained for eight hours’ – able to perform that long without refreshment or a comfort break.

Sustained, too, by a deep and meaningful Christian faith – more and more confidently expressed in her Christmas broadcasts, especially after the passing of her mother in 2002 – and that remarkable vow, in South Africa, when she marked her 21st birthday.

‘I declare before you all,’ she declaimed, ‘that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial family to which we all belong…’

And she meant it. No one who knew anything of her character, even at seriously low moments in the 1990s, ever believed she would contemplate abdication.

The Queen had one safety valve: her beloved animals. The corgis cared not a whit who she was. She bred racehorses – with an extraordinarily informed knowledge of bloodlines and form – and, for that matter, reared gundogs, Ayrshire cows and even racing pigeons. All funded exclusively from her private resources: absorbing interests that lifted her mind away, for relaxed hours, from daunting responsibilities

Frugal, unassuming, defined by hard work, service and duty and with a lifelong loathing of affectation – her live television address, on the fraught eve of Diana’s funeral, cut through as it did because Her Majesty did not pretend for a moment she had liked her – Elizabeth really was viscerally, naturally Scottish.

Most of her closest personal friends were Scots. Her lifelong and in some regards terrifying retainer Margaret ‘Bobo’ MacDonald, part of Elizabeth’s life from June 1926 till her death in September 1993, was the daughter of a Highland railway man. Palace insiders darkly dubbed her the ‘QE3’. And the Queen for decades lived for two things – her restorative annual cruise from the Clyde through the Western Isles; capped by delicious holiday at Balmoral.

The only point of the year, as she shared in 1991, when she could sleep for six weeks straight in the same bed. And the demise of that Royal Yacht was as cruel a thing as any government could have done to so tireless and faithful a monarch.

Though – by the generosity of her children and the charter of the pocket-liner Hebridean Princess – the Queen was twice delighted, in 2006 and again in 2010, to reprise that Hebridean voyage.

She was filled with secrets. And took them with her. All her Prime Ministers, in time, shared their impressions of her. Her opinions as to them she kept to herself.

But she was particularly fond of Harold Wilson – her first Premier not to patronise her; who even and sincerely sought her advice – and the legend she was on particularly sticky terms with Margaret Thatcher is baseless.

In fact, Elizabeth was quietly furious at the disgraceful and dubious manner in which her longest-serving Prime Minister was forced from office.

Conspicuously, she conferred honours that were in her own personal gift – the Order of Merit, the Garter, and a baronetcy for Denis – and, in April 2013, even attended Thatcher’s funeral.

Only Churchill’s obsequies had likewise been honoured by Her Majesty’s presence.

And then, very quietly, not a decade later, one autumn Royal Deeside afternoon and ere a leaf had fallen, she was gone.