their private estates.  Another is, for that men might safely write of others in maner of a tale, but in maner of a History, safely they could not:  because, albeit they should write of men long since dead, and whose posteritie is cleane worne out; yet some aliue, finding themselues foule in those vices, which they see obserued, reproued, condemned in others; their guiltinesse maketh them apt to conceiue, that whatsoeuer the words are, the finger pointeth onely at them.  The last is, for that the Argument of our English historie hath been so foiled heretofore by some unworthie writers, that men of qualitie may esteeme themselues discredited by dealing in it....

Then he questioned, whether I had wrote any part of our English Historie, other then that which had been published; which at that time he had in his hands.  I answered, that I had wrote of certaine of our English Kings, by way of a briefe description of their liues:  but for historie, I did principally bend, and binde my selfe to the times wherein I should liue; in which my owne obseruations might somewhat direct me:  but as well in the one as in the other I had at that time perfected nothing.

The result of the interview was that Hayward proceeded to ’perfect somewhat of both sorts’.  The brief description of the lives of the three Norman kings was in due course ordered to be published, and would have been dedicated to its real patron but for his untimely death; in dedicating it instead to Prince Charles, Hayward fortunately took the opportunity to relate his conversation with Prince Henry.  How far he carried the other work is not certain; it survives in the fragment called The Beginning of the Raigne of Queene Elizabeth,[4] published after his death with The Life and Raigne of King Edward the Sixt.  He might have brought it down to the reign of James.  Had he been at liberty to follow his own wishes, he would have been the first Englishman to write a ‘History of his own time’.  But when an author incurred imprisonment for writing about the deposition of a sovereign, and when modern applications were read into accounts of what had happened long ago, the complexity of his own time was a dangerous if not a forbidden subject.

There is a passage to the same effect in the preface to The Historie of the World by Sir Walter Raleigh, who, unlike Hayward, willingly chose to be silent on what he knew best: 

I know that it will bee said by many, That I might have beene more pleasing to the Reader, if I had written the Story of mine owne times; having been permitted to draw water as neare the Well-head as another.  To this I answer, that who-so-ever in writing a moderne Historie, shall follow truth too neare the heeles, it may happily strike out his teeth.  There is no Mistresse or Guide, that hath led her followers and servants into greater miseries....  It is enough for me (being in that state I am) to write of the eldest times: