The tragic death of Mary Queen of Scots has remained a shadowy mystery for centuries. Coded letters she wrote while under house arrest were used by Queen Elizabeth I as incriminating evidence to accuse her cousin of ‘treason’ – and thus she was behead in 1587, aged 44.
However, up until now, many letters Mary had written were lost. Historians were left to wonder at the deposed Scottish queen’s true motivation: was she really involved in a plot to overthrow her cousin, or not?
Now, however, our quest to understand the motivation of the Scottish heroine is almost over, as one of the most groundbreaking discoveries of this century concerning her life has been made. Mary’s secret letters have been found in the online archives of the National Library of France – where they had been mistakenly labelled. Newly decoded, the results have been published in the online journal, Cryptologia.
The Tudor artefact, inscribed with Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon’s initials, was uncovered in Warwickshire
Born in 1542 at Linlithgow Palace, West Lothian, Mary became Queen of Scots when she was six days old following the death of her father, James V of Scotland. She was sent to France in 1548 to marry the French Dauphin, who died two years later, and thus she returned to Scotland in 1561.
When her husband, the Earl of Bothwell, left her in 1568, she fled to England where her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, was on the throne. In England, Mary became a political pawn and was imprisoned in various castles for 19 years. At the end of this time, a letter which she had written in code was found: she was declared ‘guilty’ of plotting to overthrow Elizabeth and sentenced to death. She was executed at Fotheringhay Castle in 1587, aged 44.
55 of the letters found in the French library were sent by Mary from her house arrest at the Earl of Shrewsbury’s home between 1578 and 1584. They were found written in ‘cipher’ – a graphic symbol intended to evade Elizabeth I’s spies, whilst some letters were also written in Italian, according to Cryptologia.
These letters ‘fill in huge amounts of missing information about Mary’s actions and political intentions in six of the most important years of her 19-year captivity in England,’ historian John Guy at the University of Cambridge explained.
According to Cryptologia, the letters are addressed mostly to Michel de Castelnau Mauvissière, the French ambassador to England. In her letters, Mary addresses all kinds of topics: from the proposed marriage of Queen Elizabeth I to the Duke of Anjou (in which she claims the English are not sincere), to her frantic response at the news of her son James’s abduction (he was abducted by a Scottish faction). Mary also writes about negotiating her release from captivity, and her plan to regain the Scottish throne in association with her son, in return for relinquishing all claims of succession to the English throne.
The letters were written to her friends, Susie and Tarek Kassem
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As such, the political side of her life has been revealed. Explaining the significance of this, historian John Guy said that these letters ‘prove that Mary was an astute politician and sound judge of men (and women), who grasped the machinations of international politics and was prepared to fight for what she believed in. She was not just a femme fatale or passive victim who spent her time in captivity complaining about her arthritis, plotting, and doing embroidery as the legends say. She had astonishingly varied (and largely accurate) sources of intelligence about current events in England, Scotland and France.’
Cracking the code was a team of three: French computer scientist George Lasry, German musical coach Norbett Biermann and patent expert Satoshi Tomokiyo from Japan. A common way of cracking code is to use a technique known as a ‘brute force search’, in which all possible solutions of the code are tested.
However, in this instance, ‘the number of possible solutions (or possible keys) is simply too large to check,’ the team wrote in the Cryptologia journal. Instead, a complicated method known as ‘hillclimbing’ was used, which involves using various permutations of the complex code to uncover the writing.
