After 70 years on the throne, is this the Queen's worst yet?
On 24 November 1992, Queen Elizabeth II, marking four decades on the throne, took the unusual step of admitting publicly that she had not had a very good year.
Speaking at the Guildhall in London, the Queen said that 1992 was “not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure.”
“In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents,” she said, “it has turned out to be an 'annus horribilis'.”
Four days earlier, Windsor Castle -- home to England’s monarchs for over 1,000 years -- had almost burned to the ground after a faulty electric light set fire to a curtain.
Miraculously, nobody was killed in the blaze, which destroyed 115 rooms and inflicted £62 million worth of damage on the castle first built by William the Conqueror.
The fire came at the tail end of a difficult year for Queen Elizabeth II. Her son and daughter, Prince Andrew and Princess Anne had both seen their marriages breakdown during 1992 and her eldest son and heir, Charles, would separate from his wife, Diana, in December.
Diana’s book, Diana: Her True Story, detailing her marital problems with Prince Charles had revealed his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles.
The family drama came alongside rising anger in Britain about the cost of the monarchy, with the Queen agreeing to take on her family expenses -- which had previously been funded by the UK taxpayer -- and paying income tax, the first monarch to do since the 1930s.
Exactly three decades later Queen Elizabeth II is marking another milestone: 70 years since her father, King George VI, died and she became queen on 6 February 1952.
She is also having another difficult year.
“I think that this has been worse than the annus horribilis of 1992,” said author and historian Andrew Lownie, who recently
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