Leading historian Owen Dudley Edwards believes that a Cambridge don named Adcock may have been the author of the Roger Casement Black Diaries. Dr Dudley Edwards presented his view to an international symposium on the Irish patriot hosted by the Royal Irish Academy at the weekend.
The assertion came at the end of a virtuoso performance during a session chaired by the Chief Justice, Mr Justice Keane, in which the legal aspects surrounding the Irish patriot's trial for treason were examined.
Dr Dudley Edwards, reader in history at Edinburgh University, is regarded as an objective voice in the controversy over whether the passages relating to homosexual behaviour contained in the Black Diaries - for 1903, 1910 and 1911 - were written by Casement or were the work of a forger. Both sides of the debate were the subject of submissions by leading academics from Ireland, Britain, the US, Belgium and Germany throughout the two-day symposium.
Dr Dudley Edwards said Adcock could have been responsible, given the anxiety of the British government at the time to discredit Casement. Casement was internationally revered for his work in exposing atrocities in the Belgian Congo and the Amazon. Then there were his views on efforts to draw America into the war: "The people and parliament were told little; the press knew a little more which it used to bludgeon and blackmail rather than to inform. Soldiers were herded like brutes towards death and many of them did not know what awaited them."
In Casement's trial, several processes were at work. These included a British public relations attempt to pacify "bellicose press lords" and "suspicious Americans" and a Tory plot to recover power by the subversion of the Liberal government of the day.
There was also a German plot to blacken the British in world opinion by ensuring that Casement, the great humanitarian, would be hanged. The Germans realised it was necessary to win the propaganda effort and if the Irish were to be tempted into a futile rising and there was a show trial of Casement as a traitor, US opinion would be affected.
This was a view shared in part by Prof Reinhard Doerries from Nuremburg, who reviewed Casement's role in imperial Germany as an emissary of Clan na Gael in the US, before the 1916 Easter Rising.
Pivotal to Dr Dudley Edwards's theory were the machinations of two key officials, Sir Reginald "Blinker" Hall, chief of British naval intelligence, and Basil Thomson, secret service chief at Scotland Yard, in the plot to discredit Casement's reputation. Both men were associated with high-profile wartime forgery operations. Dr Dudley Edwards was not saying definitively that Casement was not the author of the diaries, "but as historians we must never neglect an alternative viewpoint until we can disprove it".
Mr Frank Callanan SC and Dr Conor Gearty, professor of human rights law at King's College, London, each took a distinctive look at the legal system and constraints surrounding the Casement trial and conviction.
Mr Callanan said conflicting legal and political tensions gave rise to a degree of "objective collusion" between prosecution and defence in relation to Casement's purpose in returning to Ireland from Germany in April 1916.
The chief prosecutor, F.E. Smith, offered the defence of the Black Diaries, with the suggestion that they might ground a plea of insanity. This cynical initiative served only to unnerve Casement's legal team, led by Serjeant Sullivan, who proved less than equal to the task.
Dr Gearty dealt with the defence of the realm legislation passed at the start of the first World War and the constraints on civil liberties within Britain at the time, particularly in relation to dissent inspired by resurgent Irish nationalism.
He identified the role of the judges in the Casement case and asserted that their primary role was the protection of the executive power of the dominant class, whatever the cost - the normal role of the legal systems.
Mr Justice Keane thanked Dr Gearty for his "interesting if rather idiosyncratic" contribution.