Coders uncover secrets of lost letters written by Mary Queen of Scots from prison | Science & Tech News

Secret letters written by Mary Queen of Scots while imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth I have been cracked by a hacking team.

For centuries, the contents of the coded correspondence dating from 1578 to 1584 were thought to have been lost.

Mary, who was beheaded on this day 436 years ago, used a complex encryption system to hide her messages, which the perpetrators found included reflections on her time in prison, ill health and attempts to negotiate her release.

Why was he imprisoned?

Mary had already been held captive in Scotland by the time she was held in England – her imprisonment spread across castles from Carlisle to Fotheringhay for 19 years.

The recently deciphered letters were written while under the tutelage of the Earl of Shrewsbury.

She was imprisoned by Elizabeth, her cousin, because she was seen as a threat to her authority.

Catholics regarded Mary as the rightful sovereign and was first in the line of succession.

She was eventually executed in 1587, aged 44, for her involvement in an alleged plot to assassinate Elizabeth.

What were the letters about?

Most of Mary’s letters were intended for the French ambassador to England, Michel de Castelnau de Mauvissiere, who supported her claim to the throne.

They included complaints about her ill health and the conditions of her captivity, as well as her distrust and contempt for Elizabeth’s chief secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

She also expresses distress over the kidnapping of her son James, the future King, in August 1582.

Mary was known to communicate with allies from prison – but the range of these letters, from 1578 to 1584, suggested they were sent earlier and later than previously thought.

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How were they decoded?

The team was computer scientist and cryptographer George Lasry, music professor Norbert Biermann and physicist Satoshi Tomokiyo, who came across 57 letters in France’s national library of online archives.

The library had listed them as being from the first half of the 16th century and relating to Italian matters – but the authors soon realized they were written in French.

The cipher is homophonic with a nomenclature – this means that each letter of the alphabet can be encoded using several cipher symbols, ensuring that no symbol appears too often.

There are also special symbols for certain words, names and places.

“The code is quite elaborate and it took us a while to crack it,” said Mr Lasry, from the University of Kassel.

“But after a while, we started to see some plausible pieces of text in French. From those pieces, it emerged that the author was a captive, had a son, and was a woman, which could match Mary Stuart.”

Their work revealed verbs and adverbs often in the feminine form, references to captivity and references to Walsingham – described as the “definitive clue”.

It was confirmed by comparing them to the plain text of the letters in the Walsingham Papers at the British Library – and successfully revealed dozens of scenarios previously unknown to historians.

Their findings have been published in the scientific journal Cryptologia.

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“A historical sensation”

The discovery was hailed by leading expert John Guy, whose 2004 biography of Mary led to a 2018 film starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie.

“This discovery is a literary and historical sensation,” he said.

“This is Mary Queen of Scots’ most important new find in 100 years. I have always wondered if de Castelnau’s originals might turn up one day – buried in the National Library of France or perhaps somewhere else – unidentified due to encryption.

“And now they have.”