Of course, from many points of view, by far the most important group of Royal children is that composed of the two little sons and of the baby daughter of the heir-presumptive. Owing to the sad death of the Duke of Clarence there are only three lives between little Prince Edward of York and the throne, and far more care has been bestowed upon his education and general upbringing than is generally the case even with Royal children of so tender an age, for our King to be will not be five years old until the 23rd of next June.
[Illustration: THE BATTENBERGS. PRINCESS VICTORIA. PRINCE ALEXANDER. PRINCE LEOPOLD. PRINCE MAURICE.]
As his names, Edward, Andrew, Patrick, and David, indicate, his grandparents and parents were anxious that the Prince should, from his birth, belong rather to the nation than to his family. It was seriously proposed that he should share the Queen's carriage on Diamond Jubilee Day, but the idea was given up when it was realised that the long slow drive through the streets of London would be a terrible ordeal for a three-year-old baby; thus, although little Prince Edward's Jubilee clothes were actually prepared, he only wore them at home, to the disappointment of his young mother, who would have liked her son to have gone down in history as having taken part in so great and noteworthy a pageant.
The Duke of York's second son, Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George, was born on the anniversary of the deaths of the Prince Consort and of Princess Alice, and so was three years old on the 14th of last December. Two years younger is Princess Victoria Alexandra Alice Mary, the youngest but not the least of Her Majesty's British great-grandchildren.
The child of Prince Adolphus of Teck--whose wife, it will be remembered, was Lady Margaret Grosvenor, a daughter of the Duke of Westminster--is Royal in the same sense as are the Ladies Alexandra and Maud Duff, and it is rather interesting to note that the three children all stand in the same intimate relationship to the future King of England, though even Prince Edward of York was not legally entitled to the name of "Royal Highness" until a special decree was passed in favour of all the children of the Duke of York.