Carter Roy

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Allegedly, the 1586 Babington letter is the most important letter Mary, Queen of Scots, ever mailed.

And she sent a lot of mail.

By the time she sent the Babington letter, Mary had been held captive as a political prisoner for almost 20 years, ever since Scottish lords had staged a coup against her.

She narrowly escaped with her life.

only to discover that her supposed allies in England would rather keep her locked in a castle on house arrest.

Mary longed to regain her freedom and her throne.

She was the archetypal princess trapped in a tower, and her letters were the key to her rescue.

While Mary knew her captors read her official mail, and so did international spies, she had enemies across Europe, people who didn't want her restored to her birthright as queen.

So Mary had to be sneaky, hence writing in code.

on the video, you'll see a key for one of her ciphers.

The symbols stand for individual letters, combinations of letters, places, people, and even phrases like, I pray you and my good brother.

basically the 1500s versions of LOL and OMG.

The code also has symbols to denote that a letter should be doubled or deleted.

And if that wasn't complicated enough, Mary had at least 60 different ciphers.

So even if you had the key to decrypt one letter, you couldn't decrypt them all.

Some ciphers were so strong, code breakers in the 2020s needed a computer program to help crack them.

And that was almost 500 years later.

These are solid codes.