Mary, Queen of Scots Wrote Secret Letters in Captivity. A Trio of Codebreakers Deciphered Them.

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Letters sent by Mary, Queen of Scots in the 16th century while she was held in English captivity were recently unearthed at the National Library of France.

Mary wrote the 57 letters between 1578 and 1584 to Michel de Castelnau Mauvissière, the French ambassador to Queen Elizabeth I's court; the correspondence was long thought to be lost to history."It’s a stunning piece of research, and these discoveries will be a literary and historical sensation," Dr. John Guy, author of Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart, said. "They mark the most important new find on Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, for 100 years."

A cryptography team composed of French computer scientist George Lasry, German pianist and music professor Norbert Biermann, and Japanese astrophysicist Satoshi Tomokiyo decoded the letters; the published their findings in a paper in Cryptologia, "Deciphering Mary Stuart’s lost letters from 1578-1584." According to CNN, "The multidisciplinary team has worked together for 10 years to find and understand historical ciphers. Lasry is also a member of the DECRYPT Project, which digitizes, transcribes and identifies the meaning of historical ciphers."

"Mary, Queen of Scots, has left an extensive corpus of letters held in various archives," Lasry said in a statement. "There was prior evidence, however, that other letters from Mary Stuart were missing from those collections, such as those referenced in other sources but not found elsewhere. The letters we have deciphered are most likely part of this lost secret correspondence."

He added, "Upon deciphering the letters, I was very, very puzzled and it kind of felt surreal. We have broken secret codes from kings and queens previously and they’re very interesting but with Mary, Queen of Scots it was remarkable as we had so many unpublished letters deciphered and because she is so famous."

The subject matter of the 57 letters varied, including the proposed marriage of Queen Elizabeth to the Duke of Anjou, her return to the Scottish throne, her health, and her thoughts on current politics. Mary used what is called a homophonic cipher, where each letter is replaced with a certain symbol. And not only did she replace letters, but she also used symbols in place of some high-frequency words.

"She’s negotiating with the Spanish, with the French—evident in these letters—with Scotland and with Elizabeth. And it really does deepen our sense of her as a political animal, not just as a captive queen," Susan Doran, a historian at the University of Oxford says. "There’s much more to Mary than the plotting."

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