In 2015, a chance encounter led me to purchase a fascinatingly old book. Published in 1657, it could have been about gardening for all I cared–it was hundreds of years older than anything I had ever touched. But, as I began delving into my new purchase, bits of a dramatic, even heroic story began to emerge.

What I’d bought wasn’t just any book—it was a book about which other books have been written. “Lane’s Reports” was the first published records of law cases heard in the English Exchequer Court. These “reports” were taken from the notebooks of a young law student from the Middle Temple Inn of Law who would one day rise to be one of the most pre-eminent voices of law in his time. But the arc of his life was about to take a dramatic turn.

Initially appointed into royal service as the Attourney General of the 4-year-old Prince of Wales (Charles II), Richard Lane was soon drawn into the burgeoning maelstrom of the English Civil War. In the service of King Charles I, he would be knighted and eventually elevated to the highest position a non-royal can hold: Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England and head of the king’s Privy Council. However, after the surrender of the king’s wartime capital of Oxford, he faced retribution from Parliament for his loyalty to King Charles I. With his home and property confiscated, Sir Richard Lane was banished into exile, never to see his home or family again.

In exile, Lane continued his royal service as Lord Keeper in the impoverished exile council of the young King Charles II. He ultimately died serving the young, penniless king. In a shakily written deathbed letter (which I have held), Sir Richard Lane asked the young king to make his son (also Richard Lane) one of his personal grooms. The king honored this request. Ten years later, with the Commonwealth government failing, Charles II accepted limitations on his power and was restored to the throne of England. With the Restoration, the family home of Sir Richard Lane was restored to his widow, Margaret.

All of this was known. But amid these facts sat a number of glaring unknowns, both about the intriguing book, but also about its enigmatic author. How did the book of a prominent royalist come to be published seven years after his death–and especially during the height of the anti-monarchy commonwealth? How did he die? Where was he buried? Even what he looked like was a mystery, since the Mytens-painted 1645 portrait of him as wartime Lord Keeper disappeared following a national exhibition in 1866. What about a historical book that claimed the royal groom to Charles II was a different Richard Lane?

And so, apparently disinclined to self-promotion, and having died many years apart from places where reliable records were kept (and in the middle of cataclysmic times), historians have been left to piece together his fate largely from bits and scraps. So, I have come to refer to him as the “Lost Lord Keeper” as I continue my work to solve the ever-growing list of mysteries surrounding the life of this heroic son of England.