The first printed, English text to call itself a secret history is a slim octavo volume entitled The Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justinian (1674) – an anonymous translation of the Anekdota (or ‘unpublished things’) by the sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea. Procopius's shocking descriptions of the political tyranny and sexual debauchery of the Empire's leading figures – Justinian, his Empress Theodora, and General Belisarius – ensured that the Anekdota had achieved a significant degree of notoriety by the time it appeared in English. It was already known to European intellectual circles as a result of several earlier published editions. The first of these was a Greek text with parallel Latin translation which appeared in 1623 under the title Arcana Historia. It was followed in 1669 by the first vernacular translation: a French edition with the title Ανεκδοτα ou Histoire secrète de Justinien. The first English translation, published five years later, was based on both the Latin and French translations which preceded it.

The Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justinian seems at first glance to be an opposition polemic. Published in the wake of the Third Dutch War and in the midst of increasing fears that Charles II was becoming little more than a puppet of France, the English version of the Anekdota apparently challenges the absolutist ambitions of the Stuarts. In the opening pages of his narrative, Procopius declares that ‘nothing excited me so strongly to this work, as that such persons who are desirous to govern in an Arbitrary way, might discover, by the misfortune of those whom I mention, the destiny that attends them, and the just recompence they are to expect of their crimes’. His ambition held great appeal for opponents of the Court during the mid 1670s. The fact that The Secret History of the Emperor Justinian is the first English text to describe itself as a secret history, coupled with this overtly oppositional manifesto, means that it is often cited as the foundation of the close relationship between secret history and the Whig political cause during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.