Secret letters written by Mary Queen of Scots while she was imprisoned in England by her cousin Queen Elizabeth I have been decoded. Experts said the codebreakers' work is the most significant discovery about Mary for 100 years.
For centuries, the contents of the letters were believed to be lost. That was until George Lasry, a computer scientist and cryptographer, Norbert Biermann, a pianist and music professor, and Satoshi Tomokiyo, who is a physicist and patents expert, stumbled upon them in the national library of France - Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF).
The trio discovered that Mary had penned the letters after solving her cipher system. Their work on 57 letters revealed 50 new scripts that historians were not aware of.
