Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

How might cryptic messages written from within a political prison bring us closer to understanding a captive queen. Well, historian

Jade Scott has studied the letters that Mary Queen of Scots wrote in captivity and describes

them as, quote, her weapons, her armour, her battle strategy. Speaking to Lauren Good, Jade reveals what we can learn from these

coded missives, from the huge varieties of cipher that they contained, to how the Queen of

Scots smuggled them past her captors. Jade, thanks so much for joining me today to talk about

your new book, Captive Queen, the Decrypted History

of Mary Queen of Scots. Before we delve into these letters, could you please explore the context

she was actually writing them in? Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Lauren. I always

have quite a lot to say about the letter, so I'm really excited to get the chance

to talk about them. But absolutely, we have to set the scene, as it were, for how Mary was

composing her letters, why she was writing so many letters. And the book focuses particularly

on her English years of captivity. so from 1568 until her execution in

1887. And there are thousands of letters that Mary sends out and that she received herself.

And the reason for this is that she is, of course, physically distanced from

other avenues and tools of power. She's removed from her supporters in Scotland. She has

limited access to supporters beyond Scotland and England, you know, in the continent and beyond.

She has limited access to those, of course, because she's not able to receive formal ambassadors.

She does have access to some diplomatic support.

She is allowed to communicate with the ambassadors of France and, to a much more limited extent, the ambassador of Spain, but that communication is only able to happen

because she's writing letters to them.

She's very often not able to receive people in person

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