To say that the British royal family is practiced at public display is an understatement. Pictured above, the June 16 Royal Ascot opening-day procession, traditionally carried out in the open-Landau spring-and-summer carriages, each classically powered by a team of four horses under the command of two postillions, the first one of which in this image above carries King Charles III and Queen Camilla and their opening-day guests, the 9th Duke of Wellington and the Duchess of Wellington.
At precisely 2 p.m. each day this week the royal procession will strike out on its same route with a rotating cast of characters, titled and not, wending its way around the course’s oval to the Royal Box’s entrance. This year, Royal Ascot’s finale takes place on Saturday, June 20.
But Charles’ opening-day Royal Ascot guests, the Wellingtons, bear considerably more historical tradition than any guests, titled or not, in the landaus or in the royal box later in the week.
Here’s the background: King George IV instituted the first Royal Ascot arrival procession, designed for him by Sir William Wellesley-Pole, in 1825, a short decade after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. In terms of public relations, no moss gathered on George IV. Extravagant and chronically in debt – at one point to the tune of (in today’s money) 65 million sterling – George IV was nevertheless mindful of public approval.
Wishing to cement that approval by adding another dollop of genuinely heroic grandeur, the king invited the very first Duke of Wellington, the enormously popular field marshal and the prime military architect of Napoleon’s lasting disempowerment at Waterloo, to ride with him in that very first Royal Ascot Landau to open the royal meeting. The kingdom, its press and thus the world could see the war hero and his monarch inextricably bound by allegiance to Britain.
Eight Dukes of Wellington and two very full centuries on from that 1825 procession, on this June 16, the 9th Duke rode, as each of his forbears did and as the future heirs to the ducal title will do, in the lead carriage with the king to open Royal Ascot. The two-century-old standing invitation to the Wellingtons is but a small cog in the British monarchy’s engine, but it’s emblematic of that engine at work. If by this late date anyone would need a Baedeker on how the British monarchy has survived for a thousand years, it’s a fair detail to consider.
Pictured above, the Royal Box, with Camilla and Charles, center, facing the race course, and the Duchess of Wellington in conversation with her back to the course, far right.
“Horsier” than Royal Ascot is difficult to get. Out riding from Windsor one early-18th-century day, Queen Anne, Charles II’s niece and then the reigning monarch, spied a piece of her own heath that she thought would serve well as a race course. Having a course designed, she opened Royal Ascot in 1711, with a few races. Royal Ascot week as we know it was established as a four-day meeting in 1768, which, exactly two centuries after the course’s founding, King George V expanded to as a week-long meeting in 1911. Over the three centuries since the course’s founding, the course and its signature royal week have become the highlight of the British racing and social calendar.
Above, a closer view of Charles, Camilla and the Wellingtons in the lead Landau on opening day. The footmen are each positioned to spring to his side of the carriage to assist their respective passengers in disembarking, thus halving the queueing. The king and queen always face the direction of travel and will exit first; their guests face the footmen and will exit after the monarchs.
Mission Central, with Ryan Moore in the irons, ran a fine race to win the eponymous King Charles III Stakes on June 16, pictured above moving well ahead of Rayevka at the line. All races at Ascot are on the track’s elegant and precisely-kept turf.
The lissome Harriet Sperling has just married Princess Anne’s son (with Captain Mark Phillips) Peter Phillips, pictured above in the Royal Box, and the verdict – from the febrile running dogs of the press on the royals beat – is uncharacteristically unanimous that Sperling is fitting well into the Royal Family. For her Ascot debut she chose to go with an ice blue ensemble, offset with some nice drop earrings. Nothing looks cooler and more unruffled than that.
And it’s a good thing too that Ms Sperling-Phillips chose the exact same tint of ice blue that the Queen, pictured above in the Royal Box with her son, Tom Parker-Bowles, chose for opening day.
Laura Lopes is the daughter of the Queen and sister to Tom Parker-Bowles, pictured above with her brother in the Royal Box. Lopes went with a simple navy flat-brim, seemingly in a summery, but sober, straw weave. What takes the topper up and out into six-shootin’ New Mexico ranch country 7000 miles to the west of Ascot is, of course, the unmissably theatrical band. Is that rattlesnake skin, or fabric made to look like it? Did Lopes bag a good rattler on the roadside with a handy Colt and have it tanned? Probably not, but we can certainly hope so. Either way, this is a wildly radical hat masquerading as something quite conservative. A Lopes headgear master-stroke, which, given Ascot’s staggering array of hats, is saying something.
For instance, this masterful cascade of a hat on this handsome race-goer. Such an effusive headpiece wouldn’t be allowed in the Royal Enclosure, but the lovely thing about this one is its mystery. First, what do we imagine that this thing cost. By that we don’t mean what it actually cost – we mean the unreasonable four- or five-figure number that we would reasonably like it to have cost. How about £4000? Sounds about right. Try as we might, it’s hard to picture this lid anywhere down in the three-figure range, what with the precise and yet very sturdy anchoring of all the stemwork into the relatively small plinth of the hat itself.
Second, and this is a highly complex issue with this hat: Refreshment. Put another way, how to get a solid Pimm’s Cup or even a skinny Champagne flute reasonably through the curtain of flowers at the front without starting a whole tsunami of clacking and clicking that dethrones the hat itself? To say nothing of her tipping her head back for a gentle ladylike sip? Getting a drink into her seems like the kind of project that might take a couple of extra people, who, though not in this photograph, we very much hope are close by for the lady in question. Here’s an idea! How about a really, really long (biodegradable) paper straw?
Because: Ascot is nothing if not about the social whirl, and what with all the Ps and Qs one is confronted with at Royal Ascot, that is mighty thirsty work.
