The Politics of Disclosure, 1674-1725

Secret History Narratives

Rebecca Bullard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317314134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This is a study of the 'secret history', a polemical form of historiography which flourished in England during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Section 1
Whig Secret History: The Core Tradition

Section 1 is divided into three chapters that chart Whig secret history over the course of half a century. Each of the chapters addresses a different stage in this genre’s development.

Chapter 1 focuses on Procopius’s Anekdota. It describes the kind of model that Procopius’s text provides for later writers in this tradition through an analysis of the internal, rhetorical features of the Anekdota and of the reception of this text in early modern Europe. This chapter reveals that early modern secret historians inherit from Procopius a complex literary and historiographical paradigm. Instead of simply revealing the secrets of those in power, the Anekdota also encourages its readers to reflect on and theorize the ethical and epistemic as well as the political consequences of its revelatory rhetoric.

Chapter 2 explores the boom in Whig secret history that happened during the 1690s. It demonstrates that, during this period, secret history developed into a peculiarly English form of historiography. It also analyses this form’s engagement with what is now known as ‘whig’ historiography. This chapter shows that some secret historians, including John Somers and the anonymous author of the highly popular Secret History of the Reigns of K. Charles II and K. James II, present secret history as a token of newfound political liberties – a sign of the historical watershed that was created by the Revolution of 1688–9. Other secret historians, however, approach their chosen form in a less positive fashion. Instead of affirming the security of the Revolution settlement, writers like David Jones manipulate the conventions of secret history to suggest that the forces of arbitrary government pose an ongoing threat to English liberty and that the general populace remains powerless to act against such forces. Although several contemporary commentators accuse such secret historians of sedition, Chapter 2 argues that this highly sceptical form of historiography is designed to challenge not the government of William III, but rather the kind of political complacency that posed an indirect threat to English political liberty during the 1690s.

The third and final chapter in this section turns to consider the response of secret historians to the Hanoverian accession in 1714. It focuses on the work of the bookseller and Whig polemicist, John Dunton. Like many of his contemporaries, Dunton uses secret history to draw parallels between the two Protestant ‘revolutions’, in which the advent of a virtuous, Protestant (albeit foreign) monarch brought to an end a four-year, internal threat of popery and arbitrary government: the reign of James II in the 1680s, and the Tory ministry of the Lord Treasurer, Robert Harley, during the last four years of the reign of Queen Anne. By 1718, however, it was clear that Dunton’s secret histories would bring him neither the political nor the commercial success that he had anticipated. In streightened circumstances, Dunton begins to suggest that his failure is itself an index of contemporary political corruption. By reasserting the connection between secret history and Revolution principles, Dunton not only attacks the current Whig ministry but also reveals secret history’s capacity to function polemically even when it appears to be a form in decline.

The three chapters of section 1 reveal that, over the course of the period under consideration, 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 a common tradition. But this section also demonstrates that the potential effects of these devices upon their readers vary considerably according to historical circumstances. In order to understand the significance of secret history’s key rhetorical conventions, therefore, we need to attempt to reconstruct the possible range of meanings that they possessed within their original political context, and to assess the ways in which their redeployment over the course of time reflects both change and continuity within the secret history tradition.

1 Procopius of Caesarea and the Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justinian (1674)

The first printed, English text to call itself a secret history is a slim octavo volume entitled The Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justinian (1674) – an anonymous translation of the Anekdota (or ‘unpublished things’) by the sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea.¹ Procopius’s shocking descriptions of the political tyranny and sexual debauchery of the Empire’s leading figures – Justinian, his Empress Theodora, and General Belisarius – ensured that the Anekdota had achieved a significant degree of notoriety by the time it appeared in English. It was already known to European intellectual circles as a result of several earlier published editions. The first of these was a Greek text with parallel Latin translation which appeared in 1623 under the title Arcana Historia. It was followed in 1669 by the first vernacular translation: a French edition with the title Ανεκδοτα; ou Histoire secrète de Justinien. The first English translation, published five years later, was based on both the Latin and French translations which preceded it.²

The Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justinian seems at first glance to be an opposition polemic. Published in the wake of the Third Dutch War and in the midst of increasing fears that Charles II was becoming little more than a puppet of France, the English version of the Anekdota apparently challenges the absolutist ambitions of the Stuarts. In the opening pages of his narrative, Procopius declares that ‘nothing excited me so strongly to this work, as that such persons who are desirous to govern in an Arbitrary way, might discover, by the misfortune of those whom I mention, the destiny that attends them, and the just recompence they are to expect of their crimes’.³ His ambition held great appeal for opponents of the Court during the mid 1670s. The fact that The Secret History of the Emperor Justinian is the first English text to describe itself as a secret history, coupled with this overtly oppositional manifesto, means that it is often cited as the foundation of the close relationship between secret history and the Whig political cause during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.⁴

In this chapter, however, I want to complicate the received analysis of the politics of The Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justininian. Although secret history does undoubtedly become associated with the Whig cause – and particularly with Whiggism’s more radical elements – over the course of the later seventeenth century, the idea that The Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justinian is a Whig polemic is not incontrovertible. As we will see, the first translations of the Anekdota into Latin and French originate not in radical, anti-establishment political circles, but rather among a highly respectable educational elite. The notion that Procopius provides a literary model for anti-absolutist polemicists in Restoration England is further challenged by the internal, rhetorical characteristics of the Anekdota. Towards the beginning of his narrative, Procopius claims that he will reveal secrets relating to the reign of the tyrannical Emperor Justinian. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the information contained in his text is often common gossip or open secrets rather than ‘genuine’ arcana imperii. Moreover, the fact that the text of the Anekdota remained unpublished not only during Procopius’s lifetime, but for almost a thousand years afterwards, qualifies the idea that this is a bold, revelatory text designed to challenge absolute rule.

Both in its internal, rhetorical strategies and its publication history, then, the Anekdota provides an ambivalent model to seventeenth-century secret historians in England. Instead of simply assuming that The Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justinian was the founding text of the Whig secret history tradition, it is crucial that we analyse in detail the complex model that the Anekdota presents to seventeenth-century English polemicists.

The Reception of the Anekdota in Early Modern Europe

Procopius clearly regarded the Anekdota as a dangerous and seditious work. He informs his readers that, although he was determined to commit to writing the atrocities carried out by Justinian and Theodora during their reigns, publication of this information was impossible, since ‘I could not long have concealed, or secured my self against some exemplary punishment if my Book should have been published: and I judged it very dangerous to commit such a secret to any Friend whatsoever’.⁵ In fact, Procopius suppressed the Anekdota so effectively that it remained unpublished for over a millennium. In 1623, the manuscript was discovered in the Vatican Library by a German scholar, Nicolaus Alemannus, who published a Latin translation alongside the original Greek text under the title Arcana Historia (Lyon, 1623). Some contemporaries clearly believed that Alemannus’s translation was as unpalatable and potentially seditious as Procopius’s original. Three years after the appearance of the Arcana Historia, the first published response to this text complained that Alemannus’s translation ‘did not seem to pertain to the infamy of this emperor [ Justinian] more than to the injury of all kings and leaders’.⁶ Such an accusation suggests that, even in translation and a thousand years after it was first published, Procopius’s Anekdota remained a politically dangerous text.

Not all early modern commentators agreed that translations of Procopius’s Anekdota were necessarily seditious. Nearly fifty years after the publication of Alemannus’ Arcana Historia, Leonor de Mauger produced the first vernacular translation of the Anekdota – a French text bearing the title Ανεκδοτα; ou Histoire secrète de Justinien (Paris, 1669). For the most part, the Latin and French translations of the Anekdota follow Procopius’s original faithfully but they differ from the original text in two significant and interrelated respects. First, the Latin translation of the Anekdota is heavily censored.⁷ It cuts from its opening pages a description of the debauched life led by Antonina, wife of General Belisarius, prior to her marriage and, more significantly, a lengthy passage which depicts, in graphic detail, the bizarre sexual acts committed by Theodora in the public theatre before her marriage to Justinian. The French translation of 1669, which is probably based on Alemannus’s earlier Latin translation, retains these excisions. The second difference between Procopius’s Anekdota and its seventeenth-century translations is the legal status of these texts. As we have seen, Procopius considered his attack on Justinian far too dangerous to publish immediately after it was written, and it remained an illegitimate and, ultimately, forgotten manuscript. In sharp contrast, both the Latin and French translations are beautifully produced folios which advertise on their title pages the fact that they are printed with royal permission. Indeed, the French translation is the final volume of a handsome set of the complete works of Procopius. Its publication in this format suggests that the Anekdota was regarded as equal in status to Procopius’s other works: his prestigious History of the Wars and his architectural history, On Buildings. By 1685, as we have seen, the neoclassical critic Antoine Varillas felt it appropriate to write a treatise on ‘the Art of writing secret History’ as the preface to his own secret history, Anekdota Heterouiaka.⁸ It seems that by the late seventeenth-century – on the European continent, at least – Procopius’s Anekdota had been transformed from a seditious, unpublished manuscript into a published text that could either be regarded as a harmless antiquarian curiosity or even as a prestigious form of neoclassical history worthy of high-quality reproduction and imitation.

Even those commentators who responded enthusiastically to the new availability of Procopius’s narrative in Latin and French translations, however, express some embarrassment at the contents of this work. Varillas emphasizes his adherence to his ancient exemplar, declaring that his historiographical method is derived neither ‘from my Reason nor Caprice, but only from the Examples of Procopius, whom I will ever have in ken, seeing I cannot find any other Guide’.⁹ There is, however, a note of reluctance in Varillas’s self defence: any other guide, he seems to imply, might have been preferable to the prurient Procopius. Indeed, he goes on to suggest that the modern translations of Procopius have significant advantages over the ancient original. He commends the ‘Modesty’ of Nicolaus Alemannus, ‘who, causing his Ανεκδοτα to be Printed, has retrench’d such Passages, wherein the Infamies of the Empress Theodora … were too lively represented’.¹⁰ Varillas asserts, decisively: ‘I wish this Vacuum may never be fill’d, and that those who are able to do it, may have neither the Will nor the Leisure’.¹¹ In spite of his overtly neoclassical method, Varillas expresses relief that Alemannus, a modern intermediary, has tempered the worst excesses of his ancient original.

In his Jugement sur les Anciens et Principaux Historiens Grecs & Latins (1646), François de la Mothe le Vayer registers some of the same anxieties as Varillas. He suggests that modesty caused Alemannus to cut the most sexually explicit passages from his translation of Procopius.¹² Indeed, la Mothe le Vayer claims that Procopius – who was celebrated for his History of the Wars and On Buildings before the publication of the Anekdota – may not have written the seditious and satirical Anekdota at all.¹³ He goes on to assert, however, that if Procopius really was the author of the Anekdota, then he was clearly embarras...