This is a work of nonfiction. Nothing has been made up or ‘novelised’. Everything is attributable to an identified source.
Reading this book, you will notice that sometimes I use standard ‘curly’ quotation marks and sometimes Continental-style quotation dashes. This is a deliberate technique. Words in quotation marks are a direct quote, faithfully reproduced but sometimes edited back. Quotation dashes signify an indirect quote: that is, an honest and accurate reflection of what was said, but not using the actual words. In fact, sometimes I will use modern phrases to convey the same meaning. I find this helps to lighten the leaden plod of indirect testimony in official accounts, which were never intended for easy reading and rapidly become wearisome. However, both types of quotes are fully sourced and attributed. No dialogue has been invented.
I have modernised spellings for easier accessibility. Dates are kept in the Old Style (OS) Julian Calendar used by the English at the time.
For simplicity, I generally refer to the participants by their second names rather than their titles. For instance, in repeated references, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, is ‘Blount’ rather than ‘Mountjoy’, and so on. No disrespect is intended. Similarly, Juan del Águila is simply ‘Águila’. I am aware that this isn’t actually his surname (any more than ‘da Vinci’ is Leonardo’s) but if Dan Brown can get away with it, so can I.
Des Ekin
