Once on the course, they trot briskly for the ten-minute drive along the swathe of green turf, taking a slightly different track each day to avoid churning up the racetrack. The Queen is in the first carriage accompanied by Peter Phillips and his wife. As they pass the grandstands, a tremendous cheer goes up for the Queen and top hats are raised. Already some lucky punters are collecting from the bookmakers, having had a successful wager on the colour of the Queen’s hat. After dismounting from the carriages in the parade ring, the royal party spends most of the afternoon in the royal box.

It was Queen Anne in 1711 who first saw the potential for a racecourse at Ascot. While out riding near Windsor Castle, she came upon an area of open heath that looked, in her words, ‘ideal for horses to gallop at full stretch’. Queen Anne’s gift to racing, founding the royal racecourse, is marked by the tradition of opening Royal Ascot with the Queen Anne Stakes. The Ascot summer race meeting officially became a royal week in 1911. Ever since then, the royal meeting has been patronised by the reigning monarch. For the Queen, Royal Ascot is the highlight of the racing year, and she has never missed the meeting since her accession in 1952.

The Gold Cup, a Group 1 race and Britain’s top event for long-distance thoroughbreds, is run over two miles four furlongs and is open to four-year-olds and older. It is always held on the Thursday – Ladies’ Day – of Royal Ascot. The trophy is one of three cups at Royal Ascot traditionally presented by the Queen. It is the fourth race of the day and the Queen comes down to the paddock in time to look at the runners and meet her Barbadian-born Newmarket trainer Sir Michael Stoute and her jockey Ryan Moore.

The Queen has an expert eye and knows the breeding of every runner in the race. She does not refer to the horses by their names on the race card but by their bloodlines, so a horse may be ‘the Galileo colt’ or ‘the Storm Cat filly’. Her horse Estimate is the only filly in the race and her trainer is not confident, although the capacity crowd has backed her down to be favourite. Sir Michael commented: ‘I really felt it was a tough task, I wasn’t confident at all with her taking on the boys.’ The Queen’s racing manager John Warren was also cautious, saying: ‘It’s a bit like asking whether Martina Navratilova could beat Bjorn Borg.’ Adding to the pressure was the fact that no reigning monarch had ever won the Gold Cup.