The difficulty of determining the age of the princess is partly due to the fact that when Mary was growing up and developing rapidly into a young woman, Charles of Castile, nearly five years younger, remained a child in appearance. The Flemish Council said she was too old for him, and sought to break off the match, and in 1514, to answer the gibe that Charles wanted a wife and not a mother, her age seems to have been officially announced as sixteen, while as a matter of fact she was nineteen. No wonder in these days of early marriages (her sister Margaret was packed off to Scotland when she was just over fifteen, and her father had been born before her grandmother's fourteenth birthday) she felt as though she had _coiffé Ste Catherine_, and the fiction of her age grew easily. The childhood of Mary passed in obscurity; new frocks, a few doctor's bills, a papal pardon, are the few indications of her existence. Once only do we see her, as a child of four, in the winter of 1499, playing in the great hall at Eltham,[4] when Lord Mountjoy brought Erasmus to see Prince Henry there. When she emerges into clearer light, she shows herself to be of little mental originality but of strong passions, and it will be interesting to describe, so far as is possible, the qualities she may have inherited from her father and her mother. Henry VIII., Queen Margaret of Scotland, Queen Mary of France, all had these violent qualities which are miscalled Tudor, for they really belong to the house of York. [4] Knight's "Life of Erasmus," p. 69. [Illustration: ELIZABETH OF YORK FROM THE PAINTING IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY (FLEMISH SCHOOL)]