The known facts about Junius, the pseudonymous eighteenth-century polemicist, are faithfully represented in this novel. All quotations from his letters are accurate and the production of a specially printed vellum-bound edition of them for Junius's personal use is well documented. The historical consensus is that the letters were the work of War Office clerk Philip Francis, but certainty on the issue is impossible. The question of how Francis was able to deploy a handwriting style for Junius in such elegant contrast to his own, entangled as it is with speculation about whether he employed an amanuensis, and, if so, who that amanuensis might have been, has never been satisfactorily resolved.
So it is with the controversy over whether George III, while still Prince of Wales, secretly married Hannah Lightfoot and fathered by her a son, George Rex. A certificate of their marriage at St Anne's Church, Kew, on 17 April 1759, bearing the apparently authentic signatures of George, Hannah, Dr James Wilmot and, as one of the witnesses, William Pitt, at that time Secretary of State for the Southern Department, can be inspected at the Public Record Office, located, ironically, in Kew.
The certificate was denounced as a 'gross and rank' forgery by the Probate & Divorce Court in 1866 when considering a petition by Dr Wilmot's great-granddaughter, Lavinia Ryves, for recognition of her related claim to be the legitimate granddaughter of George Ill's younger brother Henry, Duke of Cumberland. But the verdict, which flew in the face of the testimony of the leading handwriting expert of the day, can hardly be considered conclusive, given what the consequences would have been of pronouncing the certificate genuine. In strict legal logic, Victoria would have been required to vacate the throne. Some things are not meant to be. And some things are not allowed to be.
One of many strange events bearing on the mystery is the theft of the parish records from St Anne's Church, Kew, during the night of 22/23 February 1845. The motive for the theft remains, as was presumably the intention of those who commissioned it, unknown.
As for the bizarre similarity between the topographies of Avebury and the Cydonia complex on Mars, all are free to make of that what they will.