The first thing you notice at Sandringham, says BBC Sport’s Frank Keogh, is a “life-size sculpture” of the Queen’s racehorse Estimate, which won the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot in 2013. It’s a mark of the monarch’s “enduring love of horse racing”. Her equine charges – whose names included “Duty Bound”, “Constitution” and “Discretion” – won more than 1,800 races, including four of the five British Classics. The first newspaper the Queen read each morning was the Racing Post. The only person guaranteed to be put straight through to her by telephone was Lord “Porchey” Carnarvon, her longtime racing manager.

In our “democratic and egalitarian age”, says Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg, it is a miracle that monarchy has endured. Everything it stands for – “inheritance rather than merit” – is the antithesis of our proclaimed values. Yet our royal family has not only survived, it has thrived. For this, we must thank “the Queen’s genius”. She proved adaptable, and willing to endorse changes that were “profoundly alien to her class”. From abolishing the hereditary principle in the House of Lords to transforming the Empire into a Commonwealth of self-governing nations, the Queen understood and accepted our changing world.

The first plans for what would happen when the Queen died “date back to the 1960s”, says Sam Knight in The Guardian. Ever since, the various parties involved – “around a dozen government departments, the police, army, broadcasters and the Royal Parks” – have been meeting two or three times a year to refine the protocols, codenamed “London Bridge”. They involve “arcane and highly specific knowledge”. A slow march from the doors of St James’s to the entrance of Westminster Hall takes 28 minutes. The coffin “must have a false lid, to hold the crown jewels, with a rim at least three inches high”. Succession is, and has always been, “part of the job”. Queen Victoria had decided on the contents of her coffin 26 years before her death. “The Queen mother’s funeral was rehearsed for 22 years.”