The shock claim was made on online message board Reddit - with the original message and the user’s personal account now mysteriously deleted. The Queen was seen attending church in Sandringham today, dismissing any speculations of her death. The original post was first uploaded by a Reddit user called Beefy_Cabbage on 27 December - gaining over 50,000 ‘upvotes’, indicating approval, and 7,000 comments. The rumour has since spread like wildfire, with Buckingham Palace responding by refusing to comment on the shock claims. Other Reddit users said the post was either a "creepy prediction" for the Queen's death - or a mistake which has sparked a M15 response.

One user said: "This is one of those posts that's going to be a part of a YouTube video called "creepy unexplainable reddit posts." Another wrote: "Imagine if The Queen gets on reddit and sees this". A third said said: "Plot twist, this is the queen's alt account and she's orchestrating all of this to fake her death and pass on the throne." One user even broke down the mathematical likelihood of the Queen dying yesterday, as predicted in the original post.

They said: "Elizabeth II is currently 92 years old. Via this website , the odds for a 92-year-old woman to die within the next year of her life is 16.06% (which will be rounded up to 16.1% for simplification). Dividing this probability evenly among all 365 days of the year (which is not how it works, but it's all that we have to go off of), each day of her 92nd year, the Queen has about a 0.04411% chance of dying on any given day.

"Now, in order to fulfill beefy_cabbage 's legendary prediction, the Queen would need to NOT die before January 5th, and then die on that day. There are 9 days before the 5th (27th-4th), so the probability ends up being:

"(100%-0.04411%) * 0.04411% (the first term representing the nine days she would survive and the second term representing the day she would die).

"By this expression, the Queen has a 0.04393% chance of dying on January 5th, 2019. This is about a 1 in 2276 chance. So it's pretty unlikely (but definitely still within the realm of possibility!) that she'll die then. God Save the Queen."