Mary writes: ‘Watch out for Walsingham because he is a clever man and a master deceiver’

Mary, Queen of Scots– ill, paranoid and desperate in her years of captivity under Elizabeth I – passed many of the long and dreary hours of her incarceration writing letters, many in code. Now, over four centuries after her execution in 1587, in an alchemical encounter between modern technology and sixteenth-century secretive brilliance, a stash of encrypted papers hidden in an obscure corner of the French archives has been painstakingly decrypted and found to be by Mary herself. A BBC documentary, The Secret Letters of Mary, Queen of Scots (BBC Two and iPlayer), tells the story of the discovery and decryption of the letters

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