Lost Secret Letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, Found and Decoded

PARIS, FRANCE—The AFP reports that encoded letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots, between 1578 and 1584 while she was imprisoned in England by Queen Elizabeth I have been deciphered and identified by computer scientist and cryptographer George Lasry, and his colleagues, Norbert Biermann and Satoshi Tomokiyo. The researchers, who are members of the DECRYPT project, found the 57 letters written in cipher in the digital archive of France’s National Library, where they had been mislabeled. Once they cracked the code, including more than 50,000 never-before-seen words, they noticed that the letters had been written using feminine forms and referred to “my son,” Scotland, and captivity, and the name of Elizabeth I’s principal secretary and spymaster, Francis Walsingham. Walsingham is thought to have entrapped Mary Stuart into supporting a foiled assassination plot against Elizabeth I. Lasry said that most of the secret letters were addressed to Michel de Castelnau Mauvissiere, France’s ambassador to England. The identification of the letters was confirmed with plaintext copies of seven of the letters held in the British Archives. Those letters are thought to have been leaked to Walsingham by a mole in Castelnau’s embassy. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Cryptologia. To read about the discovery of a page from a prayer book owned by a Catholic English family whose station was elevated during Mary's brief reign, go to "Artifact."