Here is what the distinguished historian, Geoffrey Elton, an expert on Tudor England, had to say about this:

“If knowledge of the past is to entitle the historian to speak to his own day, it must not be so organized as to satisfy that day’s whim; if it is to teach usefully about mankind and the human condition, it must be understood for itself and in all its variety, undetermined by the predilections of the present and unruled by it at a time when the present did not yet exist”

(1991)