In the long and painful imprisonment of the queen Mary of Scotland, also known as Mary Queen of Scots., having been deceived into the hands of her cousin Elizabeth I, who promised her protection, on May 19, 1568 and was never released again until the death sentence was passed on February 8, 1587, she was never given the opportunity to see her son again. Giacomo, whom he left in diapers at the age of only 10 months, nor his faithful supporters. However, during his 19 years in prison, he always tried to contact them through a dense network of correspondence. Of these letterswhich were largely thought to be lost, valuable evidence has been found in recent find in the National Library of France in Pariswhere a team of cryptographers is working on deciphering the messages.
Mis-catalogued documents in the library are inadvertently thrown into the spotlight by a sensational discovery of a code hiding their most prized secrets. It’s about 57 letters written by a Scottish sovereign between 1578 and 1584, three years before her beheading.. Despite the strict surveillance to which she was subjected, the empress was able to get in touch with her loyal supporters thanks to the complicity of some courtiers who agreed to deliver to her precious scrolls handwritten in a coded language.
“We were expecting Italian because it was in the catalog, but then we saw some French words…”but freedom (my freedom) – and rumors that no one would write if they were free,” explained Dr. George Lasry, who led the study for Good Morning Scotland. BBC. “So we knew it was someone in captivity, and part of the tongue was in female form, so it was a woman. He also wrote.”my sons” – my son – so she was a prisoner with her son. We thought, “That’s too crazy,” it can’t be Mary Steward. But then we saw the word Walsingham and learned that Francis Walsingham was Queen Elizabeth I’s top spy, so we concluded they were Mary’s spies. At first it was very hard to believe, it was a very emotional moment.”
It took two months to solve the riddle, a “rather complicated” process, but only at the beginning, since 50,000 words need to be coded in order to know the exact meaning of the letters.. The recipient of these revelations was mainly Michel de Castelnau de Movisiere, the French ambassador to England, an ardent supporter of Maria La Cattolica. The existence of a confidential channel of communication between Mary and Castelnau was well known to historians and even to the English government of the time. The documents ended up in a Parisian library because their addressee was the French ambassador in London. The existence of the letters was suspected, but they were thought to be lost. An international group of codebreakers, consisting of Dr. Lasry, a computer scientist and cryptographer, working alongside Norbert Biermann, a pianist and professor of music, and Satoshi Tomokie, a physicist and patent examiner specializing in encrypted historical documents, came across these letters and the search continued.
“There are many details about intrigues, politics, his attempts to bribe officials and complaints about his health and condition in captivity,” explains Dr. Lasri. “We’re just starting to scratch the surface of the content.” “This is the most important new discovery about Mary, Queen of Scots in 100 years,” said Dr John Guy, a history researcher at the University of Cambridge who wrote a 2004 biography of Mary, Queen of Scots. and historical discovery.
“These new documents, some 50,000 words long, show that Maria was an astute and observant analyst in the field of international affairs.. They will occupy historians of Britain and Europe, as well as students of French and early modern cipher techniques.” These letters, revealing Mary’s hostility to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, but also maternal concern for the fate of her son James VI, kidnapped in 1582, could only be the beginning of a much more extensive and valuable documentary treasure, useful for the reconstruction of the myth of Mary Stuard, a Christian martyr, sacrificed on the altar, the cause of the state.
Source: Elle