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The Willoughby Papers
Each volume of The Willoughby Papers presents a complete historical mystery inspired by genuine events, forgotten documents and enduring historical puzzles. From the battlefields of the Wars of the Roses to the deception operations of the Second World War, every novel combines meticulous research with compelling fiction to uncover the stories that history almost forgot.
Whether you're discovering the series for the first time or continuing H. A. Willoughby's latest investigation, I hope these books encourage you to look at Britain's past with fresh eyes and perhaps to question what else might still be waiting to be discovered.
Books From the Archive
Wars of the Roses • 1485
Wars of the Roses • 1485
Wars of the Roses • 1485
The Moldwarp’s Secret
The Willoughby Papers - Archive No. I
In the spring of 1958, antiquarian H. A. Willoughby is first drawn into a quiet investigation on the grounds of Caldworth Priory in the English Midlands. Beneath an unremarkable field known locally as the Knight’s Field lies a burial long attributed to a Yorkist soldier slain during the Wars of the Roses.
But when excavation reveals a knight buried with a Lancastrian badge upon his breast, the accepted history of the grave begins to unravel.
Archival research soon leads Willoughby to forgotten manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, documents connected to the Battle of Towton and to a knight named Sir Alard de Brackenbury, whose identity appears to have been deliberately concealed. As the evidence accumulates, Willoughby discovers that the burial was not merely mis recorded but intentionally suppressed.
The trail leads into the turbulent years of Henry VIII and to the hand of Thomas Cromwell himself. For hidden within the papers is a secret with dangerous implications: a Lancastrian lineage whose existence could once have cast doubt upon the Tudor claim to the English throne.
Blending historical mystery, antiquarian investigation, and the enduring shadows of England’s most violent civil war, The Moldwarp’s Secret reveals how the past is not only remembered but sometimes carefully erased.
Jacobite Rising • 1746
Wars of the Roses • 1485
Wars of the Roses • 1485
The White Cockade
The Willoughby Papers - Archive No. II
History remembers Culloden as a battle. But what if it was something else?
When H. A. Willoughby is invited to examine a collection of estate papers in the Scottish Highlands, he expects little more than a routine antiquarian inquiry. Among the documents is a ledger insert concerning a long-dead Jacobite officer, Captain Ewan MacRae, a man remembered locally as a martyr of the Rising of 1745.
Yet the papers suggest a different story.
Fragments of correspondence, inconsistencies in the record, and a single surviving relic begin to point toward an unsettling possibility: that MacRae may not have died in the manner history has chosen to remember and that, on the eve of Culloden, he may have attempted something far more dangerous than battle.
As Willoughby follows the trail through archive and memory, he is drawn into a question that extends beyond one man’s fate.
Was MacRae a traitor, or was he trying to prevent the destruction that followed?
And if the truth was known, why was it allowed to disappear?
Set against the bleak landscape of the Highlands and the enduring legacy of the Jacobite Rising, The White Cockade is a historical mystery of memory, loyalty, and the quiet reshaping of the past.
Roman Rebellion • AD. 60
The Barrow at Ashdown Ridge
A Willoughby Papers Mystery - Archive No III
When an ancient barrow on Ashdown Ridge is excavated, archaeologists expect little more than the remains of a Bronze Age burial. Instead, they uncover fragments of a Roman tablet bearing a troubling inscription, a message buried for nearly two thousand years.
The tablet appears to have been written by a Roman officer during the catastrophic revolt of Boudicca in AD 60. In it he accuses his own commander of something extraordinary: that the destruction of London and St Albans may not have been an unavoidable disaster, but a sacrifice knowingly permitted in order to crush the rebellion and secure imperial glory.
The discovery reaches the desk of antiquarian editor H. A. Willoughby, who soon finds that the papers connected to the find have mysteriously disappeared during the war.
When the missing documents unexpectedly resurface in a Georgian townhouse in Bath, Willoughby begins an investigation that leads from Roman Britain to wartime England and to a question buried almost as deeply as the tablet itself.
What if the official history of Rome’s darkest hour in Britain is not the whole truth?
World War II • 1944
The Fortitude File
A Willoughby Papers Mystery - Archive No IV
1944. Amiens. A prison shattered. A secret buried.
In the closing years of the Second World War, a daring RAF raid tears open the walls of Amiens prison, freeing members of the French Resistance and leaving behind questions that were never meant to be asked.
More than twenty years later, antiquarian Henry Arthur Willoughby, working among the quiet files of working among the files of the Public Record Office in London, uncovers a thin folder marked Fortitude – Supplementary. Its contents are fragmentary, its significance unclear, yet something within it refuses to be set aside.
Drawn first to Amiens, and then deeper into the hidden machinery of wartime intelligence, Willoughby begins to trace a pattern of repeated transmissions, of a network operating under increasing danger, and of a deception so vital that it had to be sustained at all costs.
As the evidence aligns with the vast Allied operation known as Operation Fortitude, a more troubling possibility emerges: that the success of D-Day may have depended not only on what was known, but on what was allowed to continue.
Measured, evocative, and steeped in the quiet ambiguities of history, The Fortitude File is a story of intelligence and memory, of duty and consequence and of the hidden cost behind one of the greatest victories of the modern age.
