At first, it is difficult to imagine that The Spectator, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's most successful and influential periodical, has anything to do with secret history. In Spectator 10 (12 March 1711), Mr Spectator – the ostensible author of The Spectator papers – explicitly contrasts his polite periodical with the kind of intelligence-based, factional and partisan discourse epitomized by secret history. He cites Francis Bacon's observation that ‘a well-written Book compared with its Rivals and Antagonists, is like Moses’ s Serpent, that immediately swallow' up and devoured those of the Aegyptians’, and concedes:

As a printed text circulating on the literary marketplace, The Spectator superficially resembles contemporary partisan, news- or intelligence-based publications. Just as Moses's serpent swallowed those of the Egyptians in the book of Exodus, so Mr Spectator hopes that his publication will eclipse these impolite or even dangerous genres of print. The Spectator repeatedly satirizes intelligence-based literary culture. It describes, for instance, ‘a News-Letter of Whispers’ which appeal to readers ‘first, as they are private History, and in the next place, as they always have in them a Dash of Scandal’ and gives an account of ‘Modern News-mongers and Coffee-house Politicians’ who ‘oblige the Public with their Reflections and Observations upon every Piece of Intelligence that is sent us from abroad’. Mr Spectator renounces partisan intelligence of all sorts when he asserts that his periodical ‘has not in it a single Word of News, a Reflection in Politicks, nor a Stroke of Party’.