During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Britain experienced an extraordinary and unprecedented vogue for texts calling themselves ‘secret histories’. Secret history undermines received or official accounts of the recent political past by exposing the seamy side of public life. As an early commentator on the form puts it, the orthodox historian ‘considers almost ever Men in Publick’, whereas the secret historian ‘only examines ’em in private’:

Inside the closets and cabinets of those in power, secret historians discover sexual intrigue and political chicanery. They reveal that monarchs and ministers routinely attempt to dupe their people in an effort to extend their own power. Secret history presents itself as a defender of British political liberties at the vanguard of the battle against French-style absolute rule. But secret history is also self-conscious about its status as a literary form. A revisionist mode of historiography, it re-plots received accounts of recent political history along partisan lines. It encourages its readers to consider the relationship between historical narratives and political power and the function of secrecy and revelation in each.

The discoveries that secret historians make in the cabinets and closets of the powerful vary according to period. The first English text to bear the title ‘secret history’ is The Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justininian (1674), an anonymous translation of the Anekdota or ‘unpublished things’ by the sixth-century Byzantine historian, Procopius of Caesarea.