Extremely rare photos of Queen Elizabeth pregnant are going viral
Queen Elizabeth lived one of the most well-documented lives in history, but there almost no photographs of the monarch pregnant.
The late Queen, who died in September at the age of 96, had four children, but Royal protocol dictated that she kept largely out of the public eye when expecting.
As a result, there are hardly any pictures of her pregnant.
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However, as she was one of the most famous women in history, there were some exceptions, and they have recently gone viral on TikTok.
Posted to the social media platform by the Royal fan account @spencer.royal, while some of the pictures can't be dated accurately, others can.
These dates prove that the Queen was expecting when they were taken and give a rare glimpse into the more human side of an otherwise private person.
In the picture below, the Queen is around eight months pregnant with Prince Andrew as she walks through London's Liverpool Street Station.
The image was taken back in January 1960 as she returned from spending Christmas at Sandringham.
As you can imagine, viewers of the images had a lot to say about them.
One wrote: "It's mad I actually have never seen her pregnant all this time."
A second observed: "The fact that she's always pregnant during autumn to winter."
"Baby bump was illegal," joked a third while a fourth added: "She was magnificent."
"Never seen her pregnant but she was gorgeous and still is no matter where she is," remarked a fifth.
"That just looks like me after eating from a buffet restaurant," wrote a sixth.
Another one of the verifiable images from the TikTok shows the Queen pregnant with her second son, Prince Edward, who was born in March 1964.
The image shows her arriving at the at Covent Garden Opera, where she saw the ballet in November 1963.
As reported by Indy100, pictures of the Queen pregnant were considered to be taboo, and unlike future members of her family, including Princess Diana, there are no pictures of the Queen shortly after giving birth.
A statement from Buckingham Palace in 1948, when she was expecting the now-King Charles, read: "Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth will undertake no public engagements after the end of June."
As is suggested in this statement, the Queen's pregnancies were surrounded in so much secrecy that the palace did not even announce that she was expecting, simply that she was stepping back from her duties.
Emma Guinness