Tacitus had the greatest influence.  ’There is no learning so proper for the direction of the life of man as Historie; there is no historie so well worth the reading as Tacitus.  Hee hath written the most matter with best conceit in fewest words of any Historiographer ancient or moderne.’[4] This had been said at the beginning of the first English translation of Tacitus, and it was the view generally held when he came to be better known.  He appealed to Englishmen of the seventeenth century like no other historian.  They felt the human interest of a narrative based on what the writer had experienced for himself; and they found that its political wisdom could be applied, or even applied itself spontaneously, to their own circumstances.  They were widely read in the classics.  They knew how Plutarch depicted character in his Lives, and Cicero in his Speeches.  They knew all the Latin historians.  But when they wrote their own characters their chief master was Tacitus.

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Continental historians provided the incentive of rivalry.  They too were the pupils of the Ancients, and taught nothing that might not be learned equally well or better from their masters, but they invited the question why England should be behind Italy, France, or the Low Countries in worthy records of its achievements.  In their own century, Thuanus, Davila, Bentivoglio, Strada, and Grotius set the standard for modern historical composition.  Jacques Auguste de Thou, or Thuanus, wrote in Latin a history of his own time in 138 books.  He intended to complete it in 143 books with the assassination of Henri IV in 1610, but his labours were interrupted by his death in 1617.  The collected edition of his monumental work was issued in 1620 under the title Iacobi Augusti Thuani Historiarum sui temporis ab anno 1543 usque ad annum 1607 Libri CXXXVIII.  Enrico Caterino Davila dealt with the affairs of France from Francis II to Henri IV in his Historia delle guerre civili di Francia, published in 1630.  Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio described the troubles in the Low Countries in his Della Guerra di Fiandra, published from 1632 to 1639.  Famianus Strada wrote on the same subject in Latin; the first part of his De Bella Belgico, which was meant to cover the period from 1555 to 1590 but was not completed, appeared in 1632, and the second in 1647.  Hugo Grotius, the great Dutch scholar, had long been engaged on his Annales et Historiae de Rebus Belgicis when he died in 1640; it was brought out by his sons in 1657, and contained five books of Annals from 1566 to 1588, and eighteen books of Histories to 1609.  These five historians were well known in England, and were studied for their method as well as their matter.  Burnet took Thuanus as his model.  ’I have made him ’, he says, ’my pattern in writing.’[5] The others are discussed by Clarendon in a long passage of his essay ’On an Active and on a Contemplative Life’.[6] He there develops the view, not without reference to his own history, that ’there was never yet a good History written but by men conversant in business, and of the best and most liberal education’; and he illustrates it by comparing the histories of his four contemporaries: