As it claims to peer into the bedchambers and cabinets of princes and ministers, to expose secrets of state, and to revise pre-existing narratives of the recent political past, secret history generates a number of critical assumptions. We might reasonably suppose that secret historians really do – or at least try to – disclose secrets; that these secrets provide an alternative version of history which supplements and undermines previous accounts of the past; that secret historians claim historical authority both for themselves and their narratives; and that the iconoclastic historical method and political rhetoric of secret history creates strong connections between this polemical form of historiography and the Whig opposition to arbitrary government. Such ideas are propounded in the prefaces to several secret histories as well as commentaries on this form that were published during the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth. Secret history appears to be a distinctively English form of historiography. Its proponents claim it as the genre of history best able to represent – that is, both depict and epitomize – the political liberties achieved by the Revolution settlement. Whether the threat to liberty is located in the French Court, the would-be absolute Stuart kings, or – in the early eighteenth century – the backstairs intrigues of Robert Harley's administration, the formal characteristics of secret history appear ideally suited to its professed political aims. There seems to be a straightforward relationship between secret history's claim to reveal secret intelligence, its distinctive formal characteristics, and its partisan purpose.

But it turns out that, of all of the critical assumptions that secret history's characteristic rhetoric of disclosure generates, only the political association between this form and the opposition to arbitrary government is consistently borne out in practice by the self-styled secret histories published over a fifty-year period. In the place of the secrets of state that they promise, many secret histories give their readers a self-conscious analysis of the political and formal repercussions of their claim to get open the closet door of those in power.