An international team of codebreakers said Wednesday they have found and deciphered the long lost secret letters of 16th-century monarch Mary, Queen of Scots, one of the most argued-over figures in British history.
The long-rumored missing letters, which were found mislabeled in the digital archive of a French library, were hailed by excited historians as the most significant discovery about the Scottish queen in a century.
Mary Stuart, a Catholic, wrote the coded letters from 1578 to 1584 while she was imprisoned in England due to the perceived threat she posed to her Protestant cousin Queen Elizabeth I.
Mary was beheaded in 1587 after being found guilty of plotting to assassinate Elizabeth I, marking the end of a dramatic life since portrayed in numerous movies and books.
But Mary was far from the minds of the three codebreakers who discovered more than 50 of her letters containing around 50,000 never-before-seen words.
They are members of the DECRYPT project, an international, cross-disciplinary team scouring the world’s archives to find coded historical documents to decipher.
Interview with George Lasry. Credit: Taylor & Francis
The trio were trawling through the digitized archive of France’s national library, known as the BnF, when they stumbled onto enciphered documents labeled as being from Italy in the first half of the 16th century.
“If someone wanted to look for Mary Stuart material in the BnF, that’s the last place they would go,” said French computer scientist and cryptographer George Lasry, the lead author of a new study in the journal Cryptologia.
Lasry told AFP that deciphering the code “was like peeling an onion,” for the trio, which also includes German music professor Norbert Biermann and Japanese physicist Satoshi Tomokiyo.
The telltale…
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For centuries, the controversy surrounding the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots, has been a subject of fascination for many historians across the globe. Now, a new development has emerged from the archives of 16th century Scotland.
An international team of codebreakers has recently uncovered and decoded long lost letters of the historical monarch.
The letters, written in a secret cipher, were discovered buried in a bundle of documents at the National Library of Scotland. The letters, which span from 1566 to 1586, had been cryptographically encoded by Mary’s secretary to protect the Queen’s written correspondences from any potential espionage.
After much analysis, the codebreaking team was able to decipher the letters’ hidden messages. The first letter, sent to Mary’s brother, the Earl of Murray, reveals the Queen’s concerns over the deteriorating political situation in Scotland. In another letter, her son James VI requests his mother’s assistance in dealing with a family dispute.
The letters shed an insightful light on Mary’s relationships with her family and also on key political figures of the era. They reveal that Mary was not only an accomplished politician and a leader, but also deeply connected to her family.
The discovery of the letters is an enormous advancement for historians seeking to further understand the life of this iconic figure. After years of research and effort, the codebreakers have finally broken through the centuries-long cipher and given the world a piece of the past that had been hidden for so long.