How the third child finds it so unlucky…

RARELY is it the case of third time lucky for royal children.

Princess Margaret was the third child of James I, but died in 1600 when she was just one, while Anne Sophia, the third child of Queen Anne, died at nine months in 1687.

Jacobite pretender to the throne James Stuart was the third child of James II, the last Catholic king of Britain. He claimed the crown after his father was deposed in 1688 but his 1715 uprising failed and he was exiled in Rome.

George II’s third child, Amelia, was intended to marry Frederick the Great of Prussia, but was snubbed. She never recovered and when she died, a spinster, they discovered a miniature of Frederick on her body. Meanwhile Queen Victoria’s third, Alice, died in poverty from diphtheria at the age of 35 after nursing her sick children.

Victoria’s granddaughter Louise, the third child of Edward VII, was shipwrecked off Morocco. Though the family were eventually rescued, her husband, the Duke of Fife, developed a deadly case of pleurisy.

Recently, Prince Andrew is the third child of our Queen. He divorced Sarah Ferguson and has been mired in scandals, including friendships with US paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and Azerbaijan’s billionaire dictator Ilham Aliyev.

The latter row led to Andrew losing his job as trade envoy.