Although secret history first appeared in England in the 1670s, it was during the 1690s that the form really began to flourish. After the Revolution of 1688–9, Whig polemicists could publish the sexual and political secrets of the Stuart kings with impunity, and large numbers of them seized the opportunity to do so. Between 1688 and the beginning of the eighteenth century, at least twenty-five texts were published bearing the title ‘secret history’. Some, such as The Secret History of the Reigns of K. Charles II and K. James II (1690), its ‘prequel’, The Secret History of the Reigns of King James I and King Charles I (1690), and The Secret History of the Four Last Monarchs of Great Britain (1691) – a compilation of these two texts – are homegrown English secret histories; others, such as The Cabinet Open'd or, the Secret History of the Amours of Madam de Maintenon with the French King (1690), The Royal Mistresses of France, or, The Secret History of the Amours of all the French Kings (1695) and The Court of St. Germains; or, The Secret History of James II (1695) are translations from French originals. Where The Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justinian had attacked Charles II indirectly, through the figure of the Emperor Justinian, the new wave of secret histories launch an explicit, all-out assault on the sexual and political corruption of the Stuart and Bourbon Courts. They argue that Charles II and James II were little more than puppets of France, manipulated at every turn by the mistresses and money provided for them by the enemy of liberty, Louis XIV.

Hostile contemporary commentators often present the new secret histories of the 1690s as evidence of Whig corruption. In Ductor Historicus (1698), Thomas Hearne asserts that, if Procopius was indeed the author of both the respectable History of the Wars and the seditious Anekdota (which Hearne doubts), then he ‘deserves to be branded with the Character of a base contemptible Wretch, since he could blow Hot and Cold, as we say, in the same Breath’.