"Wherefore are you, good men of letters, so little susceptible of shame, as always to be fostering and inflaming the feelings of jealousy and hatred in the hearts of Princes? Wait at least till we are dead, and then write whatever you please; for avarice, party feeling, and other passions will no longer draw a veil over your eyes; and it is only when purified of these, that history will be real history, and fit to live for posterity."
Emperor Charles V
to Christian Nasseus of Cambray,
who in a 1540 historical account represented
King Francis I in the harshest of colors
[Quoted in Correspondence of the Emperor Charles V,
ed. Wm. Bradford (1850)]
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