In his extensive study of early modern secret history, Michael McKeon argues that the first years of the reign of George I are a ‘watershed’ in the history of this form, as well as in English public affairs. He remarks that events such as the end of the War of Spanish Succession, the death of Queen Anne, and the accession of George I ‘would seem to have made mandatory the disclosures of secret history’. But he also observes, albeit ‘with some uncertainty’, that, at this time, revelatory, satirical forms of polemic such as secret history and poems on affairs of state suddenly lost popularity. McKeon suggests that, while poems on affairs of state completely disappeared after the Hanoverian accession, secret history did survive this watershed, albeit in a much modified form. The decades after 1714, McKeon argues, witness the ‘ongoing “privatization” of the secret history, that is, the gradual shift of normative weight from the public referent to private reference – more precisely, the gradual absorption of the public realm's traditional priority and privilege by the realm of private experience’. In McKeon's analysis, this shift is registered by the incorporation of the conventions of secret history, hitherto a public, polemical form, into the private, domestic form of the novel.

That the Hanoverian accession creates a historical watershed is not, of course, an observation unique to studies of secret history. If the popularity of poems on affairs of state and polemical secret history does indeed wane after this date, then it may seem to bear out J. H. Plumb's argument that the ‘growth of political stability’ took place quite suddenly after 1715. The idea that secret history is no longer relevant or useful under an oligarchic, one-party regime and that, deprived of a political outlet for secret history, writers recycle its conventions in a non-polemical, novelistic context is an attractively neat narrative.