Section 2 explores a series of eighteenth-century texts that fall outside the core tradition of anti-absolutist, Whig secret history but which engage closely with its rhetorical conventions. Spy narrators, sexual and political scandal, and a self-conscious approach towards the discourse of revelation – among other characteristics – act as points of connection between these texts and secret history. All of the texts under consideration in this section adapt the conventions of secret history in ways that are politically inflected, but the parties and causes that they support are often very different from the Whig origins of secret history. As its conventions are appropriated by writers of different partisan persuasions, secret history becomes a battleground in the party conflicts of early eighteenth-century Britain.

Chapters 4 and 5 address two very different sorts of text written during Queen Anne's reign: respectively, Delarivier Manley's scandalous romans à clef, The New Atalantis (1709) and Memoirs of Europe (1710), and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's polite periodical, The Spectator (1711–14). Chapter 4 demonstrates the ways in which Manley reworks the conventions of Whig secret history to create a distinctively Tory version of this form. More particularly, it shows that Manley uses secret history to encourage a sense of party identity and cohesion among the disparate, factional Tories in the run up to the critical electoral year of 1710. Chapter 5 reveals that The Spectator appropriates and parodies many of the characteristic rhetorical devices of secret history as part of its attempt to reform the reading public according to a model of polite sociability. This chapter argues that, in spite of The Spectator's persistent protestations of political neutrality, its engagement with secret history nonetheless carries partisan overtones: Addison and Steele use a backdrop of secret history to contrast the polite virtues of friendship and discretion, associated by them with the Junto Whigs, with the culture of secrecy and intelligence embodied by their political opponent, the Tory Lord Treasurer, Robert Harley.