Queen Mother dies at 101

The Queen Mother Elizabeth, who won the country's loyalty and admiration during World War II at the side of King George VI, died Saturday, Buckingham Palace said. She was 101 years old.

She died "peacefully in her sleep" this afternoon at Royal Lodge, Windsor, the Palace said.

Her death follows 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," said a Palace spokesman.

"Her condition deteriorated this morning and her doctors were called. Queen Elizabeth died peacefully in her sleep at 3.15 this afternoon at Royal Lodge," said the spokesman.

"The Queen was at her mother's bedside," said the spokesman.

The Queen Mother's coffin is expected to be moved to the Royal Chapel of All Saints in Windsor Great Park Sunday morning.

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.

But those who were young when German bombs rained down on London and the country awaited Hitler's invasion remembered her as the queen who stayed when she could have fled to Canada, who endured the blitz with them and visited their shattered homes and bomb shelters.

As queen 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 full load of royal duties, which she carried into her 90s.

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 royal family breakups of the 1990s, the Queen Mother emerged as a symbol of the monarchy at its best.

On her 80th birthday, she even won praise from William Hamilton, a lawmaker who vehemently opposed the monarchy.

"If there had ever been a revolution in Britain in the last 80 years, she surely would have been spared," Hamilton said. "Unlike some of her brood, she never seems to put a foot wrong."

The former Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, daughter of a Scottish earl, was married in 1923 to Prince Albert, Duke of York, second son of King George V.

They had two daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, and lived quietly until 1936. The duke's elder brother succeeded to the throne that January as King Edward VIII, and by mid-December had abdicated to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

The Duke of York took the throne as King George VI, a reluctant monarch whom many believed unsuited to the job.

But the steadfastness and sympathy of the new king and his wife through the deprivation and danger of World War II cemented a bond with the nation that held the Queen Mother firmly in British affections for the next half-century.

The Queen Mother made fewer appearances in her mid-90s when she suffered from arthritis. She overcame much of the problem when, at age 95, she underwent a hip replacement in November 1995. She walked out of the hospital 18 days later, waving aside offers of assistance.

She broke the other hip while out viewing horses on a bitter January day in 1997, and had an emergency replacement.