Anthony Munday is perhaps best known today as a dramatist and poet, being one of a group of contemporary writers thought to have collaborated with Shakespeare on the composition of plays such as Sir Thomas More. But aside from his literary career, Munday also appears to led a more colourful life as an informant and spy for the religious authorities under Elizabeth I and her successor, James VI & I. As a young man, Munday left his apprenticeship to the printer John Allde and travelled to France and Italy. While there, he spent several months in the English College in Rome, the home from the 1570s onwards of Catholic clergy exiled from England. Returning to London in July 1579, Munday launched into publishing a series of virulently anti-Catholic pamphlets, including a number aimed at the by then notorious figure of Edmund Campion, the English Jesuit priest and Catholic convert who was executed for treason in December 1581. Munday testified against Campion at his trial and against a number of other English priests whom Munday had met during his time in Rome. He later went on to work as an agent for the Bishop of London in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, tracking down recusant Catholics and bringing them into the hands of the authorities.

This work, published in the early 1580s at a time of mounting fears about the presence traitors at home and the threat of Spanish invasion, takes the form of a chronicle of treasons, seditious plots, rebellions, and other attempts at the lives of English monarchs from the reign of Richard I (1157-99) to the present day.