attended by Sandringham House staff; "every single person on the estate went and stood around the gates and his grave was absolutely covered in flowers." Queen Alexandra wrote to Queen Mary that "now [their] two darling Johnnies lie side by side". Legacy Prince Edward, who was eleven years older than his brother and had hardly known Prince John, saw his death as "little more than a regrettable nuisance." He wrote to his mistress of the time that "the poor boy had become more of an animal than anything else." Edward also wrote an insensitive letter to Queen Mary, which has since been lost. She did not reply, but he felt compelled to write her an apology, in which he stated:"I feel such a cold hearted and unsympathetic swine for writing all that I did ... No one can realize more than you how little poor Johnnie meant to me who hardly knew him ... I feel so much for you, darling Mama, who was his mother."In her final mention of Prince John in her diary, Queen Mary wrote simply "miss the dear child very much indeed." She gave Winifred Thomas a number of John's books, which she had inscribed, "In memory of our dear little Prince." "Lala" Bill always kept a portrait of Prince John above her mantelpiece, together with a letter from him that read "nanny, I love you." In recent years, Prince John's seclusion has been brought forward as claimed evidence of the "heartlessness" of the Windsor family. According to a 2008 Channel 4 documentary, much of the existing information about Prince John is "based on hearsay and rumour, precisely because so few details of his life and his problems have ever been disclosed," and the British Epileptic Association has stated,"There was nothing unusual in what [the King and Queen] did. At that time, people with epilepsy were put apart from the rest of the community. They were often put in epilepsy colonies or mental institutions. It was thought to be a form of mental illness" …adding that it was another twenty years before the idea that epileptics should not be locked away began to take hold. One author has claimed that the royal family believed that these afflictions might flow through their blood, which was then still believed to be purer than the blood of a commoner, and, as such, wished to hide as much as possible