Mary Queen of Scots’ Lost Letters Decoded

Not Just the Tudors

History Hit

History

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2023

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The most important discovery related to Mary Queen of Scots for 100 years was recently made - by a team of amateur cryptologists.

In this episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks with Dr. George Lasry - a computer scientist by day - about how he and his colleagues found by chance more than 50 letters in code in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, deciphered them, and proved that Mary wrote them during six of her 19 years of imprisonment. What insights do they give us into the personal and political thoughts of one of Europe’s most famous and tragic monarchs?

The full paper on the ciphered letters can be found in the journal Cryptologia, here.

The project was sponsored by DECRYPT Project - a European inter-university project to collect, transcribe, and decipher encoded documents found in archives, here.

This episode was edited by Stuart Beckwith and produced by Rob Weinberg.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:01.0	Famously, it was through her letters that Mary Queen of Scots was condemned for treason.
0:01.0	There was a mole leaking Mary's letters to Thomas Phillips, the acclaimed codebreaker
0:14.3	of Sir Francis Worsinger, who worked for Elizabeth I, who deciphered a letter that contained
0:19.9	evidence that made Mary appear guilty of treason.
0:25.4	Historians have long known in other words that Mary Queen of Scots wrote letters in
0:30.7	cipher, and they've also known, or at least speculated, that there were letters that she
0:34.8	wrote that had been lost.
0:40.1	But now, in what Dr. John Guy has described as a literary and historical sensation, the
0:43.8	most important new find on Mary Queen of Scots for 100 years, three passionate cryptographers
0:49.8	have found those letters and deciphered them.
0:55.9	Though I in total 57 letters, some 50,000 words that they have discovered in the French
0:59.6	archives, in the National Library of France, they've cracked the code, they've deciphered
1:04.8	them, they've transcribed them, and they've translated them.
1:10.1	And those three are Georges Lassry, Norbert Biermann, and Santoshi Tomokiel.
1:13.6	Between them, they have done something that no historian has managed to do.
1:20.7	You can read the details of their work in their article, which is open to all, in the
1:24.5	journal Cryptology.
1:29.7	But today, I'm going to speak to Georges Lassry about what they discovered, what it tells
1:31.4	us about Mary Queen of Scots, and how on earth they did it.
1:37.0	Welcome to Not Just the Tudors.
1:49.0	I am very, very excited to talk to you about this find, which has been described as the
	...

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