A tranche of greater than 55 encoded letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots has been uncovered — and decrypted — by a staff of cryptographic consultants.
Writing whereas being held for 19 years within the Tower of London for treason by her cousin Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart despatched a sequence of missives to the French Ambassador to the English court docket, Michel de Castelnau de Mauvissière. The concept was to evade the hawklike scrutiny of Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham.
The Sixteenth-century letters (written between 1578 and 1584) had been discovered within the on-line archives on the Nationwide Library of France by an interdisciplinary staff consisting of pc scientist George Lasry, pianist Norbert Biermann, and astrophysicist Satoshi Tomokiyo. In accordance with their ensuing paper, the cipher makes use of a typical substitute method by which symbols had been substituted for letters — however with greater than 150,000 symbols utilized in complete, the staff turned to computerized codebreaking to make them readable, mixed with old style sleuthing.
The trouble mixed “computerized cryptanalysis, guide codebreaking, and linguistic and contextual evaluation,” in accordance with the staff.
The letters’ topics included mulling marriage proposals for Elizabeth, the state of Mary’s help in Catholic France, and negotiations round her launch and the ascension of her son James VI (future James I of England) to the Scottish throne.
“The existence of a secret communication channel between Mary and Castelnau has been well-known to historians, and it was even identified to the English authorities on the time,” the researchers famous within the paper. “Though its existence was identified … the channel was so safe that its contents [were thought to] have been misplaced. … Our new decipherments present additional insights into how this channel was operated, and on the folks concerned.”
