It has discovered how Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth I kept their correspondence secret. Understanding the mechanisms employed for confidentiality in some circumstances, such as the last letter sent by Mary before her execution, might help us had better evaluate the contents contained within.
In other circumstances, it may enable us to decipher material that has been concealed for decades without causing damage to the original document. Keeping one’s words hidden could be a matter of life and death in Tudor England, as Mary Stuart, Queen Elizabeth’s niece, discovered when one of her letters was intercepted, leading to her trial and execution.
To avoid such misfortunes, letter writers of the day employed sophisticated folding techniques known as letter locking, which prevented missives from reading without the end receiver knowing they had opened in route. Such methods stretch back to at least the 1390s, but they achieved their apex during the Tudor period.
A study published in the Electronic British Library Journal reintroduces the world to the spiral lock, a very sophisticated and beautiful type of letter locking. Mary, Queen of Scots, and Queen Elizabeth I was among those who used it.
Some letters have passed down to us unopened through the ages, due to archivists’ aversion to damaging them. Scientists from Queen Mary University of London’s Unlocking History Research Group (named after a different Mary) disclosed an X-ray scanning technology that can read the ink within these manuscripts while they still folded earlier this year.
The letters that were discovered at the time offered insight into the activities of the middle class in the seventeenth century. After opening, some letters survived, and now valuable museum specimens. Members of the same team are now attempting to reverse-engineer them, utilizing fold line traces to recreate the form in which they received.
These techniques were used to preserved letters from both Elizabeth and Mary as part of the British Library’s exhibition Elizabeth and Mary: Royal Cousins, Rival Queens. “A number of the European kings who employed [the spiral lock] were linked to and corresponded with one another,” the research says, “raising the possibility that usage of this letter locking technology was transmitted throughout European courts through royal communication.” It was not a simple procedure, but Elizabeth and Mary “appear to have had outstanding talents in utilizing it.”
Mary, Queen of Scots may have been undone by a letter that came into the hands of her adversaries, but it didn’t stop her from employing the spiral lock to write further letters in the future. She addressed a letter to King Henry III of France the night before her death, including her final will and an attempt to prove her position as a martyr for her Catholic religion.
The letter is currently held at the National Library of Scotland as a treasure. It features a never-before-seen form of the locking method, presumably invented by Mary herself. The authors point out that the letter is intricate folding, which takes at least 30 exact moves, casts doubt on historians who have described it as “dashed off in a blur of crying.”
The Unlocking History team rebuilt the procedures employed and the variations with common approaches using a mix of comparison with similar instances and markings on the page exposed with contemporary illumination. Queen Elizabeth’s letter to Henry III in 1573 denying marriage to his brother, and one written in 1570 by Catherine de’ Medici, mother of Henry and two other French monarchs, are two more examples detailed in the article. For individuals who want to resurrect forgotten arts or have secrets they do not trust to digital encryption, the article includes thorough instructions on how to create a spiral lock as well as links to video demonstrations.
