Lost letters give a fascinating insight to life of Mary Queen of Scots

It is a reasonable question, given the celebrity status she continues to hold, despite all attempts to dismiss her as an airhead. The only answer I can offer is that her allure persists because she remains an enigma. A tantalisingly unknowable figure, she was charismatic and wise on some occasions, hot-headed, wilful and misguided on others.

Attempting to fathom what sort of person she was, and why she made the catastrophic mistakes that led her to the scaffold, has been a lifetime’s work for some historians. Last week, however, their job got a little easier, and more interesting.

The announcement of the discovery and deciphering of more than 50 coded letters Mary wrote during her captivity in England was, for those interested in Stuart history, akin to finding the Holy Grail. The unearthing of this treasure trove, misfiled for decades in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, was truly a “Eureka!” moment.

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Written between 1578-1584, mostly while Mary was in the custody of the Earl of Shrewsbury in locations such as Tutbury Castle, Sheffield Castle and Chatsworth House, they reveal an astonishing amount of information about what preoccupied the Queen during her incarceration. Clearly she was doing a great deal more than needlework and eating lavish dinners.

These long-lost letters have been deciphered by computer scientist and expert code-breaker George Lasry, musician Professor Norbert Biermann and patent specialist Satoshi Tomokiyo. Sharing a passion for cryptology, this international team’s work has been hailed as the most important new discovery in Marian studies in a century. Their findings are published in the online journal Cryptiana.

The messages take the form of closely written hieroglyphics or runes. Although the cipher looks impenetrable, it was a language in which Mary was fluent. As was the fiendishly complicated way of cutting and folding such missives, called letterlocking, which meant recipients would immediately know if they had been tampered with before reaching them.

Mary used the highly sophisticated spiral locking technique for the last letter she ever wrote, to her brother-in-law Henri III of France, in the early hours of the morning she was executed. The fact that the paper on which that message was written was blotched – it is held in the National Library of Scotland – has led some to suggest she wept as she wrote.

Mary used the sophisticated spiral locking technique called letterlocking so the recipient knows if the letter has been tampered with (Image: Newsquest)

Using a network of underground couriers, and worried always about Elizabeth I’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham’s agents intercepting them, many of Mary’s secret letters were to the French ambassador in London.

Another correspondent was the Archbishop of Glasgow, James Beaton, who was her ambassador in Paris. Among much else she discusses attempts to negotiate her release and regain her throne, her declining health, the woeful conditions of her imprisonment, Elizabeth’s possible marriage to the Duke of Anjou, European and domestic politics, anxiety over the kidnapping of her son James, and her sense of abandonment by France.

At one point she mentions that Elizabeth’s favourite, the Earl of Leicester, claimed she owed her life to him, since the English queen had once wanted her dead.

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For those of us mesmerised by Mary’s story, these letters are like the raising of the Mary Rose: a capsule of history which, now in the light of day, reopens the past as if it were yesterday. You can almost hear her autocratic voice, as she talks about her “ordinary” letters, sent openly from her various prisons. These she would not mind her worst enemies reading (and they did). Only in messages conveyed by what she referred to as “the secret channel” did she commit her true feelings and fears. But as everybody knows, it was a letter like these which, when it fell into Walsingham’s hands, eventually led to her execution.

History, as this ground-breaking discovery shows, is not set in stone. It is neither dull nor dead. Who knows what next might be found bricked up in a wall, under the floorboards, in a secret drawer, behind a canvas or beneath the croquet lawn?

The excavation of part of a massive Roman cavalry fort at Trimontium near Melrose, a little over a century ago, rewrote Roman history in the British Isles; the discovery of the Sutton Hoo burial site in Suffolk in 1939 or the Galloway Hoard in 2014 brought the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings into our back yard.

Meanwhile, archaeologists are still reeling from the sight of Richard III’s skeleton, buried beneath a Leicester car park. And on it goes, as it will forever. History lies all around us: as alive and ever-changing as we are, and likely to survive a great deal longer.

It is possible, of course, to be a little too eager to lay hands on something new and revelatory. When the Sunday Times published extracts from what it claimed were Hitler’s diaries – authenticated by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper – much egg was left on the newspaper’s chin when they were proved to be a hoax.

If it seems too good to be true, goes the dictum of fraud investigators, then it probably is. In the case of the Hitler Diaries, it was all too easy to hoodwink experts since they desperately wanted to be associated with the most explosive find of a generation. Of the 20th century’s biggest names, nobody’s inner thoughts were of more interest than the psychopathic despot’s.

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While my hopes are fading of one day learning that Mary’s diary, written in her last years, has been found beneath the ruins of Fotheringhay Castle, these coded letters are the next best thing. Indeed, say the cryptographers, since there are glaring gaps, more could yet emerge.

Such a breath-taking find is a reminder that the story of people and nations is constantly being updated. There is nothing static about the past and our relationship to it, nor is history ever complete or wholly known.

In our own times, as we awaken to the extent of spies and agents working to undermine the West, the connection between Mary’s covert activities, and the authorities determined to outwit her, feels uncomfortably but seductively modern.