A moving and insightful treasure trove of her ‘lost letters’ has been discovered online, writes Gertrude Clark.
The “most important new find on Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots” as the historian John Guy described it, was revealed last month: the discovery of her so-called Lost Letters written in captivity in England to the French ambassador. The extra-ordinary thing is, the discovery wasn’t made by historians, but by code-breaking internet sleuths. You didn’t know that there are obsessives who trawl historical archives to find cipher-codes in old documents? Meet George Lasry, Norbert Biermann and Satoshi Tomokiyo. They discovered in the French Bibliotheque National online archive a trove of 57 letters written by Mary to Michel de Castelnau in code during 1578-84. For much of that time, the letters were safe; it was when Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, recruited an agent in the French embassy in 1583 that the correspondence was passed on to the authorit-ies. Fifty of the 57 letters are new to historians.
As George Lasry writes, he and his colleagues “weren’t even looking for ciphers from Mary Queen of Scots. We were just looking for ciphers in archives across Europe. By chance, we stumbled upon those in the online collections of the French National Library. The documents are fully in cipher, including the date, the signature, so there was no way anyone could know they are from Mary.” It didn’t help that the catalogue wrongly identified the letters as Italian texts from the first half of the 16th century – a lesson to historians, if ever there were one, that the attributions in historic catalogue entries can’t be taken for granted.
The letters could really only have come to light in our time. In the first place, it is only relatively recently that historic manuscript collections are now available online, which makes the task of scholars far easier; instead of having to go to libraries, excellent reproductions are available to anyone. For academic sleuths such as Lasry, this makes his task inf-initely easier. The other factor is that the code was cracked using sophisticated computer algorithms – though it must be said that Walsingham’s own code-breaker was brilliant for his time. As Lasry says: “It took crazy folks like us, passionate about cracking any cipher they may find, to make this discovery”.
The hard work wasn’t all done by computer. “First we needed to transcribe the graphical symbols into a computer-readable format, a daunting task, given that there were 150,000 symbols to transcribe in total”. They then tried an initial random computer algorithm, retained it if it deciphered some of the text, then changed it gradually by making small amend-ments to improve the decryption: a process called “hill climbing”. But human intelligence is needed to interpret the findings – to establish, for instance, the language of the text. Once they had decoded 30 per cent of the text, they discovered French words, feminine forms and then the words “my son” and finally the word “Walsingham” – “the Eureka moment”.
What do the letters tell us? According to John Guy, author of Queen of Scots and My Heart is My Own – both brilliant accounts – they “show definitively that Mary, during the years of her captivity in England in the Earl of Shrewsbury’s custody, closely observed and actively involved herself in political affairs in Scotland, England and France, and was in regular contact, either directly, or indirectly through de Castelnau, with many of the leading political figures at Elizabeth I’s court …[and] show Mary to have been a shrewd and attentive analyst of international affairs”.
Among the most moving are the letters writ-ten when Mary learned of the abduction of her son James by a Scottish faction (the Ruthven Raid) in which she desperately asks for help from France – she had once, after all, been its Queen. And the most insightful? Her warnings to de Castelnau that some of the couriers and agents he recruited might be Walsingham’s ag-ents. She was in no doubt about Walsingham, describing him as a cunning person, falsely offering his friendship while concealing his true intentions. Poor Mary. How right she was.
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