The late Stuart and early Georgian periods produced secret “histories,” “memoirs,” and “anecdotes” that promise special insider information. Considerable historical evidence corroborates the frequency with which alternative versions compete for credibility both with what is manifest and acknowledged and with one another. Between 1650 and 1800, more than 500 editions were published with “secret history” (or “secret memoirs” or “anecdotes”) in their titles.7 This new category of historiography permits
special license: “memoirs” are partial and personal; the words “anecdote” and “secret” literally mean unpublished or unpublishable (Greek, anec-
dota: “things unpublished,” secret, private; or, “any item of gossip”; Latin, secernare, to separate, “kept from knowledge or observation”).8 Secret his-
tory often rewrites the past with hearsay, gossip, and slander; it becomes performative by relying heavily on sex acts and speech acts, seductions and promises.9 Authority figures like Charles II have much to hide: “’Twas his
Practice to be a Papist in his Closet, and a Protestant in his Chappel.”10 At
court the symbolic father of his people, he was under the covers the care- less procreator of bastards. Secret history’s popularity beginning in the late seventeenth century follows closely “the very time,” according to Michael McKeon and others, “when patriarchalist theory was receiving its fullest airing in England.”11 Along with other experimental genres, it participates
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Ferrand Spence both defends and apologizes for his translation of An- toine Varillas’s Les Anecdotes de Florence, ou L’Histoire secrete de la maison de
Medicis which contains “such matters as were neglected and flung aside by
the Historian” but which nevertheless “have been the Origine or occasion of the greatest Matters.”12 What others have cast aside as waste and chaff—un-
substantiated rumors, sordid love affairs, petty jealousies, private obsessions, bodily habits, and taboos—the secret historian gleans. Not only subject mat- ter but methodology are idiosyncratic: “I have here not followed any exact method of Chronology in this Treatise, not proposing so much to give an idea of facts as that of men.”13 In The Secret History of White-Hall (1697), the au-
thor promises “new Discoveries of State-Mysteries” while he anticipates and rejects “the Objection that I foresee would be made upon this subject, That all that could be writ has been written already, concerning the late Reigns, I should
dismiss it.” The text will “promiscuously . . . call to mind ” a “Private League,” a
“secret correspondence,” a “Wife’s petition [and suicide],” the prevention “of the
late queen’s being married,” “unseasonable boasting,” “censure,” and other tidbits
that “had, in all likelihood, been forever buried in the profoundest Oblivion . . . [in]
Dark and almost inscrutable Recesses.”14
Multiple versions of crucial events jockey for attention. Events ap- peared in various newspapers. They were entered in parliamentary proceed- ings and court records by tireless reporters like Narcissus Luttrell.15 The same
events were represented in pamphlets and broadsides. They were narrated in books like The Late History of Europe (1698) and A Compleat History of Eu-
rope (1698), re-narrated in The Memoirs of Europe (1710), and narrated yet
again in The Secret History of Europe (1711). The Secret History of the White
Staff (1714) (on government ministers Robert Harley, Francis Atterbury, and
Simon Harcourt) was followed by second and third parts (1715), as well as by John Oldmixon’s A Detection of the Sophistry and the Falsities of the Pamphlet,
entitl’d, The Secret History of the White Staff (1714), William Atterbury’s The History of the Mitre and the Purse in which the first and second parts of the Secret History of the White Staff are fully consider’d (1714), William Pittis’s A Dialogue between the Mitre and the Purse (1715), and Daniel Defoe’s The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff (1715). Swift casts an ironic but knowing
eye upon such competing truths: the narrator of A Tale of a Tub has “a Quill worn to the Pith in the service of the State, in the Pro’s and Con’s upon Pop- ish Plots, and Meal-Tubs, and Exclusion Bills” (P, 1:42).16
Secret history offered “those sorts of Relations, which they fancy con- taining something more Secret and Particular, than is to be found in the Publick Newspapers.”17 Claude Vanel’s The Royal Mistresses of France, or
the Secret History of the Amours of All the French Kings (1695) defends and
defines the form in its address “[t]o the reader . . . who may think these Stories Fabulous”:
169 The Secret Memoirs
For certain it is, that in the Main, these short Stories agree exactly with what they call the Truth of History, and as for the Circumstances which are added, they may be justly thought rather to illustrate the Stories, and discover the Causes of those odd Events, which others only barely or obscurely relate. For example, ’tis assuredly true, that a Prince committed such and such miscarriages, that such and such Persons of no Worth or Merit were advanced to high preferments, and that others greatly deserving of their Prince and Country, fell into Disgrace, while the True Historian (as they call them) is at a loss for the Reason of these Whimseys of Fortune. But here the Riddle is unfolded.18
Truth “in the Main” allows wide latitude for “Circumstances which are added.” Defoe’s The Secret History of the White Staff quotes one of Harley’s speeches to the Queen, but prefaces it with the disclaimer, “I have heard [it] was in Terms something like what follows.”19 “Something like,” “such and such,”
“What they call the Truth of History,” what “others . . . relate,” what “they call them”—these phrases acknowledge the practice of replacing one story with an- other. The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff, in keeping with its meta-critical title, comments on the seduction of readers by party-writers who easily shift “the Truth of what is here asserted . . . causing the deceiv’d people to dance in the Circle of their drawing.”20 Another author, John Phillips, justi-
fies himself: “Tho’ we ought not rashly to rake into the Ashes of Princes, and expose either their Personal Miscarriages, or their Failures, in the Management of Government; yet, no doubt, but the making of them Publick, may sometimes contribute, not a little, to the General Good.”21
Swift’s A Tale of a Tub narrates the course of European monarchy: the “Great Prince [Henry IV of France who] . . . raised a mighty Army, filled his Coffers with infinite Treasure, [and] provided an invincible Fleet” is
not motivated by any of the usual public mystifications for the exercise
of power: “Some believed he had laid a Scheme for Universal Monarchy: Others . . . determined the Matter to be a Project for pulling down the Pope. . . . Some . . . sent him into Asia to subdue the Turk, and recover Pal- estine” (P, 1:103). But the “secret Wheel” and “hidden Spring” of his reign is his unsatisfied “Protuberancy” raised by “an absent Female” (P, 1:103). This analysis of politics-as-sex is precisely the kind of insider-truth offered by scores of secret histories. The Secret History of the Reigns of K. Charles II
and K. James II, for example, observes that “the King [Charles II] . . . pre-
ferred the caresses of the expanded nakedness of a French Harlot before the preservation of three nations.”22 Swift’s version of Henry IV of France’s
penile motivation for war also is asserted by Vanel’s Secret History of the
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[W]hat is attributed to Policy, has no other Foundation than an erroneous Indulgence of Princes to their Mistresses, or their Favourites . . . at the same Time that they were believ’d to have in their Thoughts nothing more than the Welfare of their Dominions,’twas only a burning Desire to revenge the Quarrels wherein the Amours had engag’d ’em.23
A king becomes “so enthralled . . . for . . . ladies, that he neglects the Gov- ernment of his Dominions and altogether slights [his queen].” His queen “was so far from being troubl’d at the infidelity of her inconstant Spouse, that she paid him in his own Coin.”24
Narratives about sexual transgressions—incest, rape, polygamy, promis- cuity—describe violations of power within the government. The incestuous abduction of Henrietta Berkeley by Forde, Lord Grey of Werke, for exam- ple, becomes the vehicle for the story of the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion against James II in Behn’s Love Letters Between a Noble-man and His Sister (1688). Characters simultaneously plot for sex and power. The “secret origins” of the “foul and ignominious” Meal-Tub Conspiracy are traced to Charles II’s “counterplotting with his Popish Concubine and her close-stool Wench.”25
The Secret History of Zarah and the Zarazians (1705) offers a lurid version of
Sarah Churchill’s sex-life in order to attack the Whigs.
Other texts are less explicit although they still “abound with Cabals, In- trigues, &c” when describing politics, war, faction, and foreign relations.26 The
Secret History of the White Staff is not literally about clandestine sex, although
its metaphors and rhetoric imply it. Impassioned politicians burn with “se- cret Fire”: “This secret Fire they neglected at first, and impolitickly suffer’d too long to encrease, til it broke out into a Flame, which they could never quench.” They are “like hangers-on of the camp.”27 Powerful women (“That
Female Buz which had . . . too much influence in Public Management”; “Men, and the Influence of their Female Agents”; “the Artifices of some Females”) inspire double-entendre: “Men of State thought fit to plough with the Heifers of the Court.”28 The Secret History of White-Hall draws attention to its col-
lapsed metaphors: “[I]n King Charles II’s reign . . . the Ministers everywhere were in Love with French politicks, whether like other unlawful Amours it was Venal and Mercenary, I leave others to judge.”29
An ancient precedent was provided by Procopius’s Anecdota (c. 550), which was discovered and translated in the seventeenth century, first into French (1669) and then into English, as The Secret History of the Court of the
Emperor Justinian (1674).30 Procopius was secretary to the general Belisarius
during the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian (527–565).31 Procopius
wrote an official History of the Wars, comprised of seven volumes lauding Ro- man victories against the Persians, Vandals, and Goths. Apparently, however,
171 The Secret Memoirs
he felt compelled to compose an unofficial manuscript in order “to tell the whole unvarnished truth,” which was comprised of “mischievous and hateful and sordid gossip” and was motivated by “a deliberate attempt to discredit.”32
The hidden manuscript, which was not discovered for eleven centuries, strikes its modern editors as puzzlingly contradictory and irreverent. Procopius, def- erential in public, seems secretly determined “to impugn the motives of Jus- tinian and of the able Belisarius, and to cover with the vilest slander the Empress Theodora and Antonina, wife of Belisarius” (W, 6:viii–ix). The nar- rative is bluntly about sex and power. Antonina, descended from a prostitute, raised by “cheap sorcerers” (W, 6:9) and mother of many illegitimate children, is “insatiate in her passion” (W, 6:11) for another man with whom she reck- lessly and ruthlessly couples. After reading Procopius’s account of Belisarius’s stupid victimization by “a sort of flaming hot love” (W, 6:33), Edward Gibbon remarked that “the hero deserved an appellation which may not drop from the pen of the decent historian.”33 Justinian is “insincere, crafty, hypocritical,
. . . a fickle friend, a truceless enemy, an ardent devotee of assassination and of robbery, . . . keen to conceive and execute base designs, . . . he . . . became the creator of poverty for all” (W, 6:99, 101, 103). Theodora is even more de- praved. Her youth is spent in brothels in “unnatural traffic of the body,” and her maturity in acts of lust and cruelty further exacerbated by abuse of impe- rial authority (W, 6:125). The editor of the Loeb edition calls the whole work “sadly miscoloured” (W, 6:x).
To seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century readers, however, the manuscript effectively struck a nerve. Here was a story with elements conve- niently (if not exactly) parallel to current events: a victorious monarch (Charles II, William III, or in later years even Anne), a powerful royal mistress (such as Barbara Villiers or Louise de Kerouille), a brilliant but possibly merce- nary military leader (such as John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough) with a beautiful, high-profile, ambitious wife (such as Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough), a privileged ruling class associated with sexual misconduct, and a setting rife with political faction and economic/imperial expansion. Procopius set down two competing accounts of the same famous events and people. Yet the author’s allegiance to his hidden disparagement, however fan- tastic or grotesque or exaggerated, takes a certain precedence once it comes to light, even if it takes 1100 years to do so. Procopius’s reductive energy can pithily condense seven volumes into one.34 Here was a paradigm of heroic
action transformed into a mock-heroic world of fools and knaves. Here also was a narrator whose doubleness as both a respectable public agent and as an irreverent clandestine saboteur served as a paradigm for ironic narration.
Other classical precedents include Suetonius (c.69–c.140), secretary to the Emperor Hadrian. Lives of the Twelve Caesars (c.110; an English transla- tion by Robert L’Estrange first appeared in 1688) follows a pattern of “public”
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biography followed by an account of secret life. The life of Caligula is typical in its opening restraint. But by chapter 22, Suetonius writes, “Thus far we have made recital of his Actions that lookt somewhat Princelike; what fol- lows is the story of a monster.”35 Swift owned a copy of Suetonius.
Secret history has attracted scholars for seemingly contradictory rea- sons. In an investigation of the origins of early modern liberalism, secret his- tory gives voice to Whig polemics during the Restoration in the work of male writers like Sir William Temple, Andrew Marvell, and Gilbert Bur- net (Patterson, Mayer). In feminist investigations of the eighteenth-century novel, amatory secret history by Tory women writers like Behn, Manley, and Haywood is the naughty ancestor to respectable fiction.36 In the first case,
secret history seems progressive, encouraging middle-class moral outrage at failures in the lives of rulers and asserting ideals such as free speech and the citizen’s right to know. In the second case, it seems conservative, encourag- ing aristocratic pleasure in voyeurism and libertinism and tempting readers with forbidden sexual indulgence. But neither of these assessments focuses on the ability of the revelations of these narratives to undermine the stabil- ity of authority, to establish instead a world of open secrets in which every- one knows that pronounced “facts” cover unspoken and possibly unspeakable “other facts.” These secrets might wait undiscovered for over a millennium, like Procopius’s account of Justinian’s court—or like the account of ancient courts and rulers revealed to Gulliver in Glubdubdrib.