Since childhood, Mary Stuart had enjoyed writing in cipher. Later in life, as Queen of Scots and a prisoner in England for nearly 19 years, the skill became essential to her survival.
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TRANSCRIPT
From an early age, Mary must learn how Europe's powerful dynasties communicate in secret.
-Mary is being taught how do you send secret messages.
We see in her letters to her mother, her getting quite excited about this new skill.
-"I would have written to you in cipher, but my secretary told me that there was no need and that he would write to you in cipher himself."
-Your entry-level code would just be giving alternative symbols for people's names.
Then there are more complicated codes where each letter of the alphabet has a substitute symbol, and more complicated still are ones where you would have false signals put in there as well.
-It makes it much harder for anyone to read it should it fall into, you know, unwanted hands.
-It's really essential to doing any kind of sensitive politics in this period.
-The coding systems that Mary used in her letters changed constantly, evolving in complexity, making them almost impossible to decipher... ♪