In the wake of Queen Elizabeth II’s passing at 96, rumors and speculation are filling in the blank spot that reads “cause of death.” Nature abhors vacuums, so it will be up to King Charles III to squelch burgeoning conspiracy theories if his mother is to rest in peace.

For Britons short of their mid-70s, the Queen was the only monarch they ever knew. It’s natural that many expected her to go on ticking forever like Big Ben, renamed Elizabeth Tower to mark her 2012 Diamond Jubilee after 60 years on the throne.

But she had been ailing for some time and, since 2021, had canceled a trip to Northern Ireland, meetings, commemorations and other public appearances. She even skipped the Royal Ascot, a horse racing event she had attended every year since her 1953 coronation.

Fueling the inquiries is the tradition of Buckingham Palace holding health matters secret. During Elizabeth’s final year, they stated only that she had “episodic mobility problems,” the regal equivalent of a cricket team saying that a player has “an undisclosed injury.”

The head of the royal medical household, physician Sir Huw Thomas, executed the same game plan last year. When the Queen’s husband — Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh — died at 99, his death certificate wasn’t released for a month.

And when the Telegraph obtained the document, it showed that Sir Huw had recorded only that the Queen’s consort died from “old age.” That was self-evident, and unsatisfying to those possessing a ghoulish obsession with royals and conspiratorial minds.

Non-answers only invite more questions, and in the Queen’s case, add that she was photographed just two days before her death with the U.K.’s  new prime minister, Elizabeth Truss, the 15th Elizabeth invited to form a government during her 70-year reign.

In photographs of that meeting, royal watchers noticed bruises on the back of the sovereign’s hand. The Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes had already listed the various ailments that sources had claimed afflicted the Queen, ranging from bone cancer to a bad hip to heart problems.

After examining the pictures, the Daily Mail quoted Dr. Deb Cohen-Jones, who speculated from Perth, Australia, that the discoloration could be “possibly a sign of declining health” and “possibly evidence of peripheral vascular disease” affecting the brain.

On Twitter, people ginned up comparisons to the 1936 death of Elizabeth II’s grandfather, George V, hidden from view until 1986. A royal physician injected that sovereign with an overdose, so headlines reading “The King is Dead” would appear “’in the morning papers rather than the less appropriate evening journals.”

The world of 2022 in which Charles inherits the crown contains many more disreputable sources, and a global conglomeration of social media that amplifies whispers and half-baked pontifications.

What will the new ruler do? If he bucks tradition and releases a cause of death, it won’t quell all the tittering. But not releasing it will only call the list of things that could “possibly” have taken his mother’s life to linger long after she’s buried.

This was the case with Queen Elizabeth I who died in 1603. Because she never married, historians, crackpots and novelists have claimed that “the Virgin Queen” was a man, a theory popularized by “Dracula” author Bram Stoker, who believed that the princess had been replaced by a boy after dying in childhood.

According to the Tudor Society, “There was no way for any of Elizabeth’s physicians to give a direct cause of death ultimately, because they didn’t know and she didn’t allow anyone to examine her, nor did she have a post-mortem,” which sound similar to how this Elizabeth’s death is being handled.

So far, all the palace has said is only that the Queen “died peacefully,” the same language used to describe her husband’s final hours. It’s standard practice for the royals. But it will be incumbent on the new king to navigate a modern world that demands more details.

Only then can his mother truly requiescat in pace.