wherein also why may it not be said, that in speaking of the past, I point at the present, and taxe the vices of those that are yet lyving, in their persons that are long since dead; and have it laid to my charge?  But this I cannot helpe, though innocent.

He wrote of remote ages, and contributed nothing to historical knowledge.  But he enriched English literature with a ‘just history’, as distinct from annals and chronicles.[5] ’I am not altogether ignorant’, he said, ‘in the Lawes of Historie, and of the Kindes.’  When we read his lives and commendations of the great men of antiquity as he pictured them, we cannot but regret that the same talents, the same overmastering interest in the eternal human problems, had not been employed in depicting men whom he had actually known.  The other Elizabethan work that ranks with Raleigh’s in its conception of the historian’s office and in its literary excellence, deals with another country.  It is the History of the Turks by Richard Knolles.

The character was definitely introduced into English literature when the historians took as their subjects contemporary or recent events at home, and, abandoning the methods of the chronicle, fashioned their work on classical models.  Its introduction had been further prepared to some extent by the growing interest in lives, which, unlike chronicles that recorded events, recognized the part played by men in the control of events.  In his Advancement of Learning Bacon regretted that Englishmen gave so little thought to describing the deeds and characters of their great countrymen.  ‘I do find strange’, he said, ’that these times have so little esteemed the virtues of the times, as that the writing of lives should be no more frequent.’  He and Hayward both wrote lives with the consciousness that their methods were new in English, though largely borrowed from the classics.[6] Hayward tried to produce a picture of the period he dealt with, and his means for procuring harmoniousness of design was to centre attention on the person of the sovereign.  It is a conception of history not as a register of facts but as a representation of the national drama.  His Henry IV gives the impression, especially by its speeches, that he looked upon history as resolving itself ultimately into a study of men; and it thus explains how he wished to be free to describe the times wherein he lived.  He is on the whole earlier than Bacon, who wrote his Historie of the Reigne of King Henry the Seventh late in life, during the leisure that was forced on him by his removal from all public offices.  Written to display the controlling policy in days that were ’rough, and full of mutations, and rare accidents’, it is a study of the statecraft and character of a king who had few personal gifts and small capacity for a brilliant part, yet won by his ready wisdom the best of all praises that ’what he minded he compassed’.  How he compassed it, is what interested Bacon.  ‘I have not flattered him,’ he says, ’but took him to the life as well as I could, sitting so far off, and having no better light.’  Would that Bacon had felt at liberty to choose those who sat near at hand.  Who better than the writer of the Essays could have painted a series of miniatures of the courts of Elizabeth and James?