A SHORT Queen's Speech, a police escort and sheer determination ensured that the Queen arrived at Ascot in good time for the first race yesterday.
Having discharged her constitutional duties, she swapped the Imperial State Crown for a peppermint green Ascot hat and arrived at the Royal Enclosure at 2.15pm, slightly more than two hours after leaving the Palace of Westminster.
It was no mean feat, involving a quick trot up Whitehall to Buckingham Palace in the Irish State Coach after the State Opening of Parliament, to divest herself of her ceremonial robes and change into more suitable travelling attire.
For the first time anyone can remember, the Sovereign's Escort of Household Cavalry and King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery dispensed with the Rank Past, the traditional parade in the Palace quadrangle at the end of the State Opening. That saved a good few minutes.
There were sighs of mock horror when the Prime Minister first announced that the ceremony would clash with Royal Ascot. The Queen rarely misses this highlight of the racing calendar.
The Queen began her day early, travelling from Windsor Castle to Buckingham Palace to change into a long white gown, white gloves, necklace, earrings, bracelet and diamond diadem.
Accompanied by a Household Cavalry escort, she arrived at the Palace of Westminster at 11.15. She went straight to the Robing Room where she exchanged the diadem for the Imperial State Crown, and put on the Garter collar and parliamentary robe.
By 11.35am she was on the throne and ready to deliver the speech she had first seen the previous night. Mercifully it was relatively short. It took just 10 minutes to deliver.
On the dot of midday she was out of the door and back into the carriage for the 20-minute procession back to Buckingham Palace. With no Rank Past it took her just 10 minutes to change, then she was driven down to Windsor Castle.
The police escort ensured she arrived at 1pm, just in time for a light lunch and to gather her guests for Ascot. After changing, again, into a peppermint green wool coat over matching silk dress, and donning her straw hat, the Queen, Prince Philip and other members of the party left Windsor at 2pm.
Fifteen minutes later, and ensconced in the Royal Box, Her Majesty got down to the more relaxing business of perusing the racing card.
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Royals culled their cousins wisely (The Guardian)
James Meek, science correspondent
They were royal killers, but they kept a sense of proportion. The Queen's ancestors, researchers have found, unwittingly obeyed the rules of evolution when bumping off their closest relatives.
US evolutionary biologists have studied the brutal politics of a string of English monarchs spanning three centuries, from Edward III to Elizabeth I. They found that the monarchs never killed so many rivals in their families that they compromised the genetic legacy of their kin.
Henry IV and Henry VIII each executed five of their cousins. Elizabeth I killed three. The worst monarchic killer was Edward IV, who had his own brother, George, the duke of Clarence, and five cousins, among them Henry VI and Edward, prince of Wales, disposed of.
Researchers suspected that lust for the throne might have led kings and queens to violate an evolutionary law known as Hamilton's rule, which states that within a family group the survival of individuals is less important than the survival of close relatives sharing genes. In other words, a king who executed two brothers would, in effect, cancel out his own genetic legacy.
But analysis of kinship ties among the victims, reported in the latest edition of New Scientist, suggests this never happened. Henry VIII's victims were the equivalent of a third of his genes; Elizabeth's, about an eighth. Even Edward IV slaughtered the equivalent of only two-thirds of his genes.
"I was astounded," said Dr McCullough. "We thought that at least two or three would violate [Hamilton's rule] because some very close relatives were killed."
Hamilton's rule, named after the late evolutionary biologist William Hamilton, was devised as an explanation for altruistic behaviour among animals. But it also explains how genetic traits can be passed on from generation to generation even amid mutual aggression and rivalry.
Since the royal family is not a species, however, their restraint in killing each other has not necessarily had anything to do with their success compared with other human beings. Britain's royal family has almost become extinct on several occasions since the reign of Elizabeth I, and has been restocked with imports.