Codebreakers find, decipher lost letters of Mary, Queen of Scots

This undated handout image shows words in a message decoded using a cipher used by Mary, Queen of Scots, at an undisclosed location in France. An international team of codebreakers said February 8, 2023, that they have found and cracked the cipher of the long lost secret letters of 16th-century monarch Mary, Queen of Scots. — Photo by Handout/LASRY/BIERMANN/TOMOKIYO/ AF

PARIS: An international team of codebreakers said Wednesday they have found and deciphered the long lost secret letters of 16th-century monarch Mary, Queen of Scots, one of the most argued-over figures in British history.

The long-rumoured missing letters, which were found mislabelled in the digital archive of a French library, were hailed by excited historians as the most significant discovery about the Scottish queen in a century.