Mary Queen of Scots' scheming revealed in decoded letters

Times

25-06-2025

Mary Queen of Scots was a cunning politician who ran Machiavellian-like schemes from behind bars, historians have said, after newly decoded letters shone light on her plots.
The letters, written in a cipher made up of symbols rather than alphabetic characters, were hidden in the French national library, mistakenly labelled as Italian and with no link identified to Mary or Elizabethan England.
They were found and decoded by a team including George Lasry, an Israeli computer scientist, Satoshi Tomokiyo, a Japanese astrophysicist, and Norbert Biermann, a German music professor.
They routinely go through archives and decode ancient ciphers purely for fun.
The letters reveal the lengths Mary went to in order to secretly influence the Elizabethan court during her captivity, which ended with her execution in 1587.
Speaking at the Chalke history festival in Wiltshire, Alex Courtney, a historian and teacher, said the letters showed that Mary was more than just 'a villain or a victim' and that they could revolutionise our understanding of the jailed queen.
The team used a combination of computer algorithms, linguistic analysis and manual codebreaking techniques to unlock the secrets within the 57 letters.
They initially started looking for an 'Italian' solution to the code, which failed.
However, when they began looking into whether they might be in French, using a 'hill-climbing' technique of gradually-improving ciphers, they were able to fully decode them in 2023.
Since then, they have all been translated into English and examined by Courtney and Estelle Paranque, a fellow historian, and are due to be published in a book in 2027.
One clue as to who the author was came from the repeated use of the phrases 'my son' and 'my freedom', leading them to conclude that they were written by an imprisoned mother.
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The final puzzle piece came from some of the names, including references to Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I's spymaster.
'Walsingham was the smoking gun,' Lasry said. 'We were quite astonished that we were the ones lucky enough to find those letters … We have cracked hundreds of historical ciphers, many of them very interesting. But none of them were like this. What made this so special was we had 50 letters, all unknown to historians and considered lost.'
In the letters, which are mostly written to Michel de Castelnau, a French soldier who was ambassador to the court of Queen Elizabeth I, Mary sets out various political ploys, even trying to manipulate the notoriously wily Walsingham.
She instructs Castelnau to reveal certain pieces of information about her, giving him directions on how much he can and cannot say, sometimes dictating word for word.
Courtney and Paranque joined the project after Lasry and his colleagues called for historians to help. After they were inundated with applications, Lasry set them a challenge, handing Paranque one letter to translate from medieval French into English.
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Paranque said the letters had wholly changed her opinion of Mary. 'Honestly, if you read the letters that are not ciphered, I thought she was a moron,' she said. 'But our ciphers — if you really try to put yourself back in 1581, as if you don't know who is going to win … I was reading them and thinking, she's going to win. They're that clever.'
At one point Mary refers to her son, the future King James I of England, as 'my poor infant'.
Courtney, a historian of the period, said: 'She's very good at turning on the waterworks when, rhetorically, it might be the best strategy.'
He added: 'She is a particularly adept player of the very weak hand that she has.'