The coded letters of Mary Queen of Scots

Last February I wrote about the decoding of a series of original letters from Mary Queen of Scots that have survived in the French National Archives. The discovery was featured quite extensively and I link to some of the articles in my post Decoding Mary Queen of Scots

A friend has now shared with me a longer article from the recent Financial Times Magazine about the process of cracking the code which Queen Mary used. It also gives some interesting and insightful historical interpretation of the situation in which the exiled Queen found herself, and the wider political pressures that circled around her and her cousin Queen Elizabeth I. Queen Mary appears to have been in her lifetime something of an enigma to her contemporaries and to have been the object of both passionate devotion and passionate loathing. Almost four and a half centuries later there is no great consensus as to how to understand her - which may tell us more about those who study her than about the Scottish Queen herself. That is perhaps something she shared with not a few of her Stewart ancestors and her Stuart descendants.

The illustrated article can be read at How three amateurs cracked a 445-year-old code to reveal Mary Queen of Scots’ secrets