Princess Elizabeth of England representing the King at Trooping the Colour (the annual celebration of the British Sovereign’s official birth date) in 1951. She would be crowned Queen a year later.

An eight-year-old Princess Elizabeth strokes one of the prize-winning horses during a visit to the Richmond Horse Show in 1934.

Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Windsor Horse Show in 1968.

Princess Elizabeth rides in Windsor Great Park on her 10th birthday, 1936.

Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Windsor Horse Show in 1979.

Queen Elizabeth II canters up to the start of a five-furlong outing at Royal Ascot, 1961.

Queen Elizabeth II in the stands at New Plymouth Raceway, in New Zealand, *top,* and during a visit to the Longchamp Racecourse, in Paris, *above.*

Queen Elizabeth II arrives for the first day of the Royal Windsor Horse Show in 1952, her first year as monarch.

Queen Elizabeth II reviews the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery during their 70th-anniversary parade in Hyde Park, 2017.

Queen Elizabeth II watches her colt High Veldt leave his box in the paddock for the parade ring at Kempton Park, during the second day of the Ascot races in 1956.

The portrait of Queen Elizabeth II released by the Royal Windsor Horse Show to mark the occasion of her 96th birthday, this past spring.

Elizabeth II and Her Horses

Remembering Britain’s longest-reigning monarch in her most beloved pastime

Her favorite horse was called Burmese. She was a regal black mare, given to Queen Elizabeth II by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Queen rode her for 18 consecutive years, from 1969 to 1986, including during Ronald Reagan’s 1982 visit to Windsor Castle. (The president was lent Centennial, a black gelding, for the occasion.)

The Queen’s love of horses started early. Born in 1926, she had her first riding lesson at the age of three, and received her first pony, a Shetland mare, the following year—a fourth-birthday present from her grandfather King George V. At 11, when a reporter asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, the future Queen answered (“without a moment’s hesitation,” according to Life magazine), “I should like to be a horse.”