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Britain's Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, died peacefully in her sleep on Saturday afternoon, Buckingham Palace announced. She was 101.
"The Queen was at her mother's bedside," a palace spokesman said.
"Her condition deteriorated this morning and her doctors were called. Queen Elizabeth died peacefully in her sleep this afternoon at the Royal Lodge," he said.
The Queen Mother's coffin would be moved to the Royal Chapel of All Saints in Windsor Great Park on Sunday morning, he added.
Her death came less than two months after the death of her younger daughter, Princess Margaret, at age 71.
"Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, had become increasingly frail in recent weeks following her bad cough and chest infection over Christmas," the spokesman said.
She was as popular at the end of her life as she had been a half-century before.
She was best known to younger generations as the mother of Queen Elizabeth II and grandmother of Prince Charles.
As the consort to the monarch, George VI, she might have been expected to retire from public life at his death in 1952. But after their daughter's succession to the throne, she took a new title, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, and a load of royal duties.
Over two generations of dramatic social change and upheaval, through the abdication crisis that put her reluctant husband on the throne in 1936, the devastation of World War II and the scandals plaguing the royal family in 1990s, the Queen Mother emerged as a symbol of the monarchy at its best.
PTI
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