Rebecca Bullard begins her study of the secret histories written between the Exclusion crisis and the death of George I with three chapters that define the genre and trace its history, political uses, and rhetorical strategies. She summarizes what we can expect in secret histories: “Whig secret historians continue to deploy very similar rhetorical devices: all claim to reveal secret intelligence; all associate their claims with the opposition to arbitrary government; many use a set of common metaphors (for instance, secret springs) or even quote particular phrases found in earlier secret histories to assert their membership of [sic] a common tradition” (28).

As most other critics have begun to do, she begins the history of the form with Procopius of Caesara and his Anekdota. This countertext to Procopius’s History of the Warres of the Emperor Justinian purports to reveal “secrets” about the ruler of the Roman Empire and about the “springs” of his government. Procopius’s exposure of Justinian is interwoven with his narrative of Belisarius, one of the greatest generals to command the Roman armies, and of two women, Theodora, Justinian’s consort, and Antonina, Belisarius’s wife. Thus, the secret history is born in the highest levels of government and in the most dangerous and hypnotizing powers of sex.

In the two chapters on “the Core Traditions,” Bullard demonstrates stability and change with well-chosen moments and uses John Somers, John Oldmixon, David Jones, and a few others as representatives of the debates they entered. Rather unfortunately, she chooses John Dunton as exemplar in the chapter on 1714. He is useful in that he highlights how often the secret histories represent a rhetoric of nondisclosure. Dunton, however, was a brilliant political fighter at the turn of the century, not in 1714; in publications such as the Athenian Mercury, he conducted safe, telling forays in a variety of genres against an established government. By 1714, however, he was burned out, in bad health, and fighting against financial ruin. Using him leaves the impression that the secret history had burned out, too, and that Oldmixon deserved more creative analysis.

Procopius featured two men and two women, and Bullard concludes with fascinating chapters on two men, Mr. Spectator and Daniel Defoe, and two women, Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, who adapted aspects of secret histories and incorporated them into texts of various kinds. Bullard has chosen well, as the rhetoric of Manley and the Spectator could hardly be more different, and these four writers, perhaps especially Defoe and Haywood, illuminate each others’ strategies and complexities. The study of Manley is especially good as it demonstrates her intelligence and astute understanding of politics. For example, Bullard demonstrates how “Manley adapts Whig resistance theory to reflect upon constitutional anxieties” current in Anne’s reign (105). In these four chapters, Bullard brings to the fore the strong antiabsolutist theme in secret histories, and Manley is an effective starting point. Manley had, of course, unusual access to information, to sexual and political maneuvering and liaisons, as did Addison and Defoe. Because Bullard includes spy narratives with secret histories, the chapter on the Spectator adds an enjoyable variant. She needed, however, to remind the reader that the Tatler had to be discontinued for its political content and that Addison’s political career included being Undersecretary of State, going on an official trip (with a secret agenda) to Hanover with Lord Halifax, and even being Secretary to the Lord Regents, the men in charge of the change of regime in 1714. This chapter is the least original, as Kathryn King and Juliette Merritt have anticipated its central points. There is symmetry to the book in that Dunton and Haywood, who are featured in the last chapters of the book’s sections, had no special access and knowledge. This fact allows Bullard to illustrate her finding that a characteristic of many secret histories was that they had no new information, no secrets to communicate, and the rhetoric of nondisclosure was an art. Good books always show us how much more could be done, and another kind of symmetry would have been achieved had Bullard considered Haywood’s Fortunate Foundlings (1744), a novel at least as dependent on the secret history as Roxana. In fact, we need another chapter or even another book on the explosion of fictional secret histories published between 1725 and 1740. Among the intriguing titles are The Life, Amours, and Secret History of Francelia, Late D[uche]ss of P[ortsmout]h (1734) and Haywood’s The Fair Hebrew … Secret History of Two Jewish Ladies (1729).

A welcome trend in eighteenth-century studies is the identification of drastically revised, backward-looking forms that inflect texts we have perhaps too often found to remind us of our own time. Reading Bullard’s book with Alison Conway’s The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680–1750, which includes a chapter on Roxana and a chapter titled “The Secret History of Women’s Political Desire, 1690–1714,” elevates the legacy of secret histories as rhetorical weapons. A problem with Bullard’s book is her unwillingness to draw on theoretical tools. For example, she puts much more weight on readers than primary evidence of what they “saw” supports, but incorporating some of the theories of the “revolution” in the positioning of readers vis à vis the text might have made her assertion more persuasive. Elspeth Jajdelska’s Silent Reading and the Birth of Narrator and Roger Chartier’s Inscription and Erasure come immediately to mind. Worse, Bullard repeatedly misses the chance to explicate the misogynist core at the heart of most secret histories, a core that exposes this element in Defoe’s personality and that both Manley and Haywood recognize and incorporate creatively. Although much is made by Bullard and other critics of Theodora’s goose trick when she was a harlot, Theodora is most useful because she was allegedly sexually insatiable and demonstrably relentless as an influential joint ruler, both qualities exceptionally threatening to men. Sexual audacity and desire for power are inseparable in Theodora and Sarah Churchill—and consistently present in British secret histories. And, of course, Churchill was replaced in the queen’s favor by one of the most reviled women in eighteenth-century political history, Abigail Masham, who was once obscenely linked with the court women offering the ambitious a chance to “plough with the Heifers of the Court” (Defoe, Secret History of the White Staff, 42). Without this dimension, the genre’s ultimate goal of discrediting in every possible way the heritage of Procopius, is diminished.

Bullard effectively embeds the secret histories in the broader political anxieties and ambitions of groups of influential men, and her attention to rhetoric is unusual and a considerable strength. She takes words such as “springs” and demonstrates their usefulness with a variety of writers. English people were fascinated by mechanical inventions that used springs, but writers also used the word to describe the mysterious inner workings of the minds of human beings. Bullard mines “springs” well but does not quite grasp how modern and theoretical Defoe’s use of “intelligence” was. As Roy Godson notes, intelligence work in the United States and Great Britain is “primarily security services” (British and American Intelligence [New York, 1987], 6–7). Defoe, as well as the Spectator, was engaged with the “ethics of secresy,” but Defoe saw that counterinsurgency can forestall devastating riots and civil war, both then serious threats. Today national stability in every society will always be at least partly the responsibility of government intelligence services. In a wonderful section, Bullard turns to Amy in Roxana, Defoe’s text that has attracted the best criticism of all his many texts. Amy is a Defoe-style agent sent on “commissions to gather intelligence” (151), and yawning before us may be Defoe’s shattering reassessment of work in which he once passionately believed.