Secret letters written in code by Mary, Queen of Scots during her imprisonment in England have been uncovered and decoded by a team of cryptographers. The documents, which were believed to have been lost, were found in the National Library of France in Paris.
Written to her supporters while she was imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century, the 57 letters date from 1578 to 1584, a few years before Mary's beheading on 8 February 1587. Experts said the codebreakers' work was the most significant discovery about Mary for 100 years.
The letters had been wrongly catalogued in the library, and only when the code was broken was it possible to identify Mary as the author. Working through a complex pattern of symbols, they revealed Mary's complaints about her detention, her feelings of abandonment by France, and attempts to broker her release.
Dr George Lasry, who led the study, told the BBC it was a 'fairly complex' process that took about two months. 'We were expecting Italian because that is what the catalogue said, but then we started to see some French words - "ma liberté" (my freedom) - and sentences no-one would write if they were free,' he explained. 'So we knew it was someone in captivity, and some of the language was in feminine form, so it was a woman. She also wrote "mon fils" - my son - so it was a woman in captivity with a son.'
The letters also reveal Mary's animosity towards Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and her distress when her son James was abducted in August 1582. Dr John Guy, a history fellow at the University of Cambridge, described the discovery as 'a literary and historical sensation'.
