LONDON — Deep in the archives of
France’s national library, an assortment of coded letters listed as Italian
texts lay untouched for more than 400 years. But when three code breakers — a
German pianist, an Israeli computer scientist, and a Japanese physicist — stumbled
upon them, they discovered something remarkable.
اضافة اعلان
They were, they found, not Italian texts at
all.
Instead, they were part of the secret
prison correspondence of Mary, Queen of Scots, whose tragic life and tangled
role in the lethal dynastic and religious politics of 16th-century Europe have
long fascinated writers and historians. One leading biographer of Mary
described the discovery as the most significant in the study of her life for
more than a century.
“We found treasure lying in plain sight,”
said George Lasry, the computer scientist who led the yearlong project, which
was released to the public on Wednesday, the 436th anniversary of Mary’s death.
Letters of a captive queenMary became the queen of Scotland when she
was just six days old, in 1542, but was imprisoned and forced to give up her
throne in 1567. She escaped to England, only to be jailed again by her cousin
Queen Elizabeth I as a threat to her own rule. After 19 years as a prisoner,
she was eventually executed in 1587, at age 44, accused of involvement in a
Catholic plot to assassinate the Protestant Elizabeth.
The existence of a confidential line of communication between Mary and the ambassador was already well known to historians, but the code breakers’ findings indicated that it was in place much earlier than previously thought.
The 57 letters, written between 1578 and
1584 and previously believed lost, include her thoughts about her ailing
health, her conditions as a captive in a series of English castles, and her
failed attempts to secure her freedom.
She also expressed her deep anguish over
her separation from her son, James, made king of Scotland at age one by her
forced abdication, as well as her mistrust of Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir
Francis Walsingham.
The bulk of the coded letters were intended
for France’s ambassador to England, Michel de Castelnau, who supported Mary’s
claim to the throne. As a descendant of King Henry VII, she was regarded by
many of her fellow Catholics not only as a potential champion for their faith
but also as England’s legitimate queen: Elizabeth was the child of King Henry
VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, whose marriage the Catholic Church did not
recognize.
Instead, Elizabeth was eventually succeeded
by James, who was raised as a Protestant by Scottish nobles.
Deciphering 50,000 wordsThe existence of a confidential line of
communication between Mary and the ambassador was already well known to
historians, but the code breakers’ findings indicated that it was in place much
earlier than previously thought.
“I cannot thank you enough for the care,
vigilance and entirely good affection with which I see that you embrace
everything that concerns me and I beg you to continue to do so more strongly
than ever, especially for my said release,” Mary wrote to the ambassador in one
letter, dated to April 16, 1583.
“The cipher has 200 different symbols, which can all represent letters, numbers, and names… You have no idea of the date, the recipient or the sender. Nobody could have guessed what it was.”
As the code breakers — Lasry, Norbert
Biermann of Germany, and Satoshi Tomokiyo of Japan — were cast into the
international spotlight Wednesday, they reflected on the year of late nights
they had put into deciphering the some 50,000 words, initially without knowing
their famous author.
“It took a lot of time and effort,” Lasry
said. “We all have our day jobs. We just do this in our evenings and weekends.”
Discovering the authorAfter deciphering that the woman writing
the messages had a son, the team spotted several mentions of “ma liberté”, as
well as the name “Walsingham”. It was only then that they understood the
significance of the documents.
“When we finally realized what it was,”
Lasry said, “I remember thinking, ‘No way. It cannot be that we just stumbled
upon this by chance. It surely would have been discovered much, much earlier.’”
Mary’s encoding was complex, he added. “The
cipher has 200 different symbols, which can all represent letters, numbers and
names,” Lasry said. “You have no idea of the date, the recipient or the sender.
Nobody could have guessed what it was.
“It was kind of like an onion you have to
peel,” he said. “We had to work layer by layer.”
John Guy, a Cambridge University historian
whose 2004 biography of Mary was the basis of a 2018 film starring Saoirse
Ronan and Margot Robbie, said in a statement that the findings were a “literary
and historical sensation”.
“They will occupy historians of Britain and
Europe and students of the French language and early modern ciphering
techniques for many years to come,” he said.
For now, with a second phase of the project
already underway, there is no holiday on the horizon for the code breakers.
“We are not going to take a break,” Lasry
said. “We never stop. We always look for new ciphers.”
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