Coded letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, are deciphered, revealing her private thoughts

Over 50 encrypted letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots, have been deciphered, revealing the ill-fated monarch’s meditations on a wide variety of subjects.

A team of international code-breakers discovered the trove of 400-year-old handwritten messages in the national library of France, according to a study published on Feb. 8 in the journal Cryptologia.

The newly decoded letters were written during the queen’s years of captivity and are likely part of a “secret correspondence considered to have been lost,” researchers wrote.

Who was Mary, Queen of Scots?

Mary Stuart was crowned queen of Scotland just six days after her birth in 1542 following the unexpected death of her father, James V, according to researchers. While others governed in her stead, she was shipped off to France as a child and married a French prince, who later became king, while she was a teenager.

After the premature death of her husband in 1560, Mary returned to Scotland. Following two other marriages and the birth of her son, James VI, a group of Scottish nobles who suspected foul play in the death of her second husband had Mary imprisoned in a castle on an island.

While she was held captive, she was made to abdicate the Scottish throne, and her infant son was crowned king. A year later, Mary absconded to England and sought the protection of her cousin Queen Elizabeth I, researchers wrote.

But, Queen Elizabeth, a protestant, viewed Mary, a Catholic, as a threat because many English Catholics considered Mary to be the rightful monarch, researchers wrote. So, instead of offering her sanctuary, Queen Elizabeth had her imprisoned.

Mary spent the next 19 years of her life confined in castles in the English countryside where she maintained a concealed correspondence with her allies. She was found guilty of scheming to kill Queen Elizabeth and was executed in 1587.

What did the decoded letters reveal?

The letters, which were long thought to be lost, contain roughly 50,000 words and fill in some of the gaps in knowledge regarding her years of imprisonment.

Most of them were written using a series of symbols that corresponded to letters, words or phrases.

“Using computerized codebreaking techniques, together with manual textual and contextual analysis, we were able to recover the cipher key and decipher all the letters,” researchers, who were funded by the DECRPYT Project, wrote.

Mary’s decoded letters, which were mostly addressed to the French ambassador to England, discuss a lot of subjects, from the conditions of her confinement to the politics of the day.

“Mary’s complaints about her conditions in captivity, and her requests to improve them are frequently mentioned in the letters,” researchers wrote.

Another recurring subject was her desire to maintain a secret channel of communication with the ambassador and her broader network of allies, researchers said.

Many of the letters expressed a keen interest in domestic and international affairs, and included information about supposed schemes to usurp the throne of England. Some of the letters bring up the idea of bribing her enemies to change their allegiances, and others convey Mary’s interest in hiring more spies.

Absent from the letters are the details of the several schemes to dethrone Queen Elizabeth and install Mary as monarch. These plots led to greater scrutiny of Mary and her eventual execution.

The letters prove that during her time in captivity, Mary “closely observed and actively involved herself in political affairs in Scotland, England and France, and was in regular contact, either directly, or indirectly through [the French ambassador], with many of the leading political figures at Elizabeth I’s court,” John Guy, a British historian, told NPR, adding that the letters will engage historians and those interested in coded language for years.

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