Three months after the Suckered! Trilogy in September 2015 came the Suckered! Plus Quadrilogy. I would say this was both a masterful forensic response to Wolf Vanderlinden's claim that the Trilogy lacked historical context and a serious contribution to a study of British political history of the 1880s.
And there's four parts to it!
Part 1 of the Quadrilogy deals largely with the widely misunderstood role of Robert Anderson in relation to the Times newspaper's fight with Charles Parnell. I don't think anyone had ever collated all the evidence and analysed it properly before.
For Part 2, which deals with the role played by the British Government in the Parnell Commission inquiry, I actually went to the lengths of instructing a researcher based in Ireland to obtain for me a copy of a memorandum written by a person who we would today call a 'whistleblower', William Henry Joyce. Very few people have ever seen this memorandum, held in an archive in Dublin, yet it is crucial to read it to consider whether Joyce's allegations are credible. I am quite sure that Wolf Vanderlinden, who cited Joyce, had never seen it. It's also perfectly obvious that Vanderlinden had misunderstood the role of Henri Le Caron and his relationship with Anderson. My forensic analysis of the role of William Hoare, the British Consul in New York is also, it has to be said, pretty impressive.
In part 3, I resolve a number of longstanding misunderstandings about the role of Chief Inspector Littlechild in respect of the Parnell inquiry and, I think, prove that Scotland Yard had no role in the flight of Richard Pigott in February 1889. I also provide what can only be regarded as the definitive chronology of events in respect of Pigott's suicide, which had never been done before.
Part 4 deals with the resignations of James Monro and Charles Warren from their respective positions at Scotland Yard and firmly knocks on the head the idea that any of those resignations can be regarded as suspicious or connected in any with any conspiracy theories.
It was a bit of a shame when they were first published that some members of the Casebook Forum decided to discuss whether the correct word for a series of four articles was 'quadrilogy' or 'tetralogy' but that's the Casebook Forum for you.
I think they are all worth a read. They are all now available on this site under the 'Historic Articles' tab.
LORD ORSAM 3 September 2023
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