Left: Cipher of Mary Queen of Scots. Right: Great Paris Cipher
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There are no certainties in Ciphers
This is the story of an imprisoned ‘would be’ monarch and a beleaguered emperor who put too much trust in the art of cryptography[1]. Both were victims of a false sense of security. The whole point of cryptography is to prevent information from falling into enemy hands. But for the ‘would be’ monarch; Mary Queen of Scots and the beleaguered emperor; Napoleon Bonaparte, all it did was to buy them a little time, before their secrets were disclosed.
The days of finding ingenious places to hide a message - steganography – were being overtaken by the more sophisticated use of cryptography – hiding the meaning of a message using a process called encryption. In other words, the message hidden in the riding crop was being replaced with the scrambled code agreed beforehand between sender and receiver that could only be unscrambled using a key. If intercepted it was gibberish, and this is where codebreakers were increasingly needed, two of whom we will soon meet.
The Cipher of Mary Queen of Scots
Surely Mary Queen of Scots would have fared far better in life as plain old Mary Stewart, a commoner, rather than being lumbered with the impossible burden of Queen of the Scots. 1542 was the worst possible time for the birth of a Scottish royal, further compounded if you were a Catholic royal. This was the year that England’s Henry VIII defeated the Scottish army at the Battle of Solway Moss and looked like he was on the verge of overthrowing Mary’s father, King James V. The Scottish king took defeat badly and died just one week after Mary’s birth.
Being a fatherless baby queen in any sixteenth century European country was an unenviable position to be in. All eyes were on you for all the wrong reasons; your future happiness was certainly way down the list. You were just a pawn in a complicated royal game of chess completely at the mercy of your elders and guardians – those kings, queens, bishops and knights, caught in a permanent maelstrom of alliances, treaties, internecine intrigues, and outright war. The infant Mary looked like a good bet as a future wife for Henry VIII’s son, Edward, as a ploy to unite England and Scotland under one Tudor monarch. But the Scottish royal court rejected Henry’s offer, turning its gaze instead towards its natural Catholic ally, France; Mary’s own mother, Mary of Guise, was French after all. It was decided that Mary would marry Francis, the dauphin of France, hence cementing the relationship with a Catholic France in preference to a Protestant England. Henry VIII died in 1547 and during the short reign of his son, King Edward VI, the English again defeated Scotland at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh. Following this defeat it was deemed too dangerous to leave the child queen in Scotland, so in 1548 aged just six years, Mary was taken to France.
When both were aged just sixteen, the young dauphin, Francis, married Mary, and one year later they were crowned King and Queen of France. Tragically, just two years later, in 1560, Francis died of a long standing ear infection that spread to his brain. In 1561 the widowed teenaged queen returned to a Scotland that was becoming more and more Protestant. She was accommodating enough to this development though, and she had the support of the Protestant nobles. But she lost much of this support in 1565 when she married her cousin, Henry Stewart, Earl of Darnley, a thoroughly unlikable scoundrel who was not deemed to be an asset to Scotland. In 1567 he was murdered and historians cannot agree if it was Mary or her nobles who stage-managed the event. Her next marriage to James Hepburn, Fourth Earl of Bothwell was not a resounding success either, and by now, the Scottish Protestant nobles had become impatient with, as they saw it, an ineffectual Catholic queen. They sent Bothwell into exile – a lucky escape – and imprisoned Mary, forcing her to abdicate in favour of her fourteen-month-old son, James VI.
The following year Mary escaped, and with an army of six thousand supporters, tried to regain her crown. When her army was defeated she had two choices, cross enemy territory in an effort to flee to France, or flee to England and seek refuge from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. She rather naively chose the latter: a decision that left her imprisoned for the rest of her life. Elizabeth’s ‘official’ reason for incarcerating Mary was for the murder of her second husband, Darnley; the real reason was that Mary posed a threat to Elizabeth I who was acutely aware of a rump of English Catholics who regarded her as an imposter on the English throne. They did not recognise the marriage between her father, Henry VIII and her mother Anne Boleyn and consequently they regarded Elizabeth as an illegitimate pretender. These English Catholics preferred the pedigree of Mary, who was the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s older sister, and was as such – in the eyes of the Catholic English nobility – the rightful heir to the English throne.
In 1586, after eighteen years in prison, Mary received an unexpected batch of letters from her supporters in mainland Europe. They had been sending letters to the French Embassy in London for several years but, correctly reading the tense political situation, the Embassy never forwarded the messages to Mary knowing full well that they would be confiscated before she could see them. Enter stage right, Gilbert Gifford, newly returned after training as a Catholic priest in the English College in Rome. He arrived at the French Embassy saying that he could smuggle the letters to Mary in her current place of incarceration, Chartley Hall. Without getting into too much detail about his method, it involved an obliging local brewer and a beer barrel. In tandem with the beer barrel postal service, a group of Catholic nobles in London were plotting three incredibly courageous missions: Mary’s rescue, Elizabeth’s assassination, and a foreign supported invasion of and rebellion in England. You could say that the optimism of youth made them reckless. Their leader was twenty-four-year-old Anthony Babington, and the crazy scheme became known as the Babington Plot. But it would need the approval of Mary before they proceeded and in order to get this approval they needed to communicate with her. Again, Gifford obliged, arriving at Babington’s house with a letter from Mary saying that she had heard about him from her supporters in Paris and would like to converse further with him. Babington’s return letter to Mary described his plans in way too much detail; he did encrypt it though. The cipher consisted of 23 symbols that were to be substituted by the letters of the alphabet (excluding j, v and w), along with 35 symbols representing words or phrases. In addition, there were four nulls[2], and a symbol which signified that the next symbol represented a double letter.
Gifford, it turns out, was too good to be true; he was in fact, a double agent, working both for Mary Queen of Scots and Sir Francis Walsingham, Principal Secretary to Queen Elizabeth I. Walsingham was a formidable figure; if he was a school headmaster, you would dread being called to his office, correctly assuming the worst. He was very interested in the art of spying; indeed, you could say it was his evil pleasure. It was Walsingham who ordered Gifford to go to the French Embassy and offer himself as a courier. Henceforth, every message that travelled between Mary and her allies was first read by Walsingham who, coincidentally, was already familiar with the work of the Flemish cryptanalyst, Philip van Marnix. He was the clever chap who had successfully deciphered a letter from Philip of Spain to Don John of Austria in 1577 outlining plans to invade England. With the knowledge of this success, Walsingham employed his own cryptanalyst, Thomas Phelippes, who happened to be one of Europe’s leading practitioners in the field. In particular, he was a master of frequency analysis.
As Simon Singh[3] observes, “a weak encryption can be worse than no encryption at all.” And why is this? If you believe that no-one will ever succeed in deciphering your words, you will write more freely about your feelings and intentions – more freely perhaps than if you were writing normally. The cipher used by Babington and Mary only offered a false sense of security. Phelippes managed to break Babington’s cipher by establishing the frequency of each character, using the process of elimination, and employing some intelligent guesswork to fill in the gaps. Once he deciphered Babington’s damning message to Mary – the one that proposed the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I - he gave it to Walsingham. Mary’s reply to Babington was easily deciphered by Phelippes – the one suggesting that she be released just before or at the same time as the assassination, in case news of the deadly deed reached her jailors, who might then murder her. But Walsingham was not happy with just catching Mary and Babington; he wanted the entire gang, and here he drew on Phelippes’ unrivalled skill of forgery. He instructed Phelippes to forge a postscript to Mary’s return letter to Babington asking for the names of his co-conspirators. Now Walsingham had everything he wanted.
It would end horribly for Babington and his co-conspirators who endured the most ghastly of public executions. Mary Queen of Scots got off lightly with a simple beheading.
Great Paris Cipher
By the early nineteenth century codebreaking was a well-established weapon of warfare and espionage. Britain would use cryptography to its advantage during the Peninsular War of 1808-1814, which was played out in Spain and Portugal. Continuing on his quest to conquer all of Europe, Napoleon’s Grand Armée started to invade the Iberian Peninsula of Spain and Portugal in 1808. Madrid and Lisbon were occupied and Napoleon put his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. With the help of British forces under the command of the Duke of Wellington, Spain and Portugal waged guerilla warfare against Napoleon’s invading army.
Just like Sir Francis Walsingham employed the services of Phelippes during the threat to Queen Elizabeth I’s throne, Wellington employed the services of codebreaker, George Scovell during the Peninsular War. Scovell developed a system to intercept French messages to and from the battlefield, and cracked their codes[4]. In response, the French upped their game in 1811 and jumped from simple ciphers known as petits chiffres, based on a combination of 50 numbers to a more robust code based on a combination of 150 numbers[5]. This became known as the Army of Portugal Code and George Scovell cracked it within two days.
Now the French had to knuckle down again to come up with something stronger. At the end of 1811 new and supposedly un-crackable cipher tables were sent from Paris to all French military commanders[6]. This became known as the Great Paris Cipher, or, more exotically, Le Grande Chiffre de Paris. These tables were sent with guidelines to trick the enemy, such as adding meaningless figures to the end of letters, something loosely equivalent to Babington’s nulls. This was a more difficult nut for Scovell to crack. He spent a year meticulously studying all intercepted documents encoded with this new cipher. He gradually began to extract some meaningful material by using letters that contained un-coded words and phrases, so that he could intelligently guess the meaning of the coded sections, or, fill in the blanks with a degree of confidence. Remember that Phelippes managed to break Babington’s cipher also by employing some intelligent guesswork to fill in the gaps.
Scovell’s big catch was the letter sent from Joseph to Napoleon, which was intercepted in December 1812. By this stage, from examining almost a year’s worth of intercepted letters, he had cracked enough of the code to decipher most of Joseph’s letter outlining explicit details of French operations and plans. Scovell’s decoding of this letter allowed Wellington to prepare for the final battle for control in Spain – the Battle of Vittoria - on 21 June 1813. That night British troops seized Joseph Bonaparte’s coaches and amazingly found his copy of the Great Paris Cipher table; now there could be no more doubts; the code was well and truly cracked.
Phelippes would have been maddened by the Great Paris Cipher. His frequency analysis method would have been rendered useless because he would have immediately gone for the cipher text[7] symbol that appeared the most; in the case of both English and French this is the letter ‘e’. So, if the number 5 appeared most frequently in an encrypted letter, the codebreaker could fairly accurately assume that it corresponded to the letter e in plaintext[8]. The Great Paris Cipher though, used a method called homophonic substitution whereby a single letter would take on multiple numbers based on how frequently that letter appeared in the language[9]. To make it even more complicated, some numbers stood for nothing; they were simply included in the cipher text to make enemies even more confused. These nulls were specifically inserted at the ends of words to outwit a common decryption technique of studying similar endings to ascertain patterns. Babington also did this, but Phelippes twigged it pretty quickly.
The Great Paris Cipher must have got the thumbs up then, from Napoleon. The ensuing problem was not with the cipher; it was with the people in the French army who used it, or more accurately, only partly used it. Perhaps from laziness, or from overconfidence in the cipher, the French army decided it was sufficient to encrypt only part of a message, thinking that would be enough. But by leaving some words of their messages unencrypted, they gave Scovell a back door into their cipher, and that was all he needed; just enough unencrypted text to make an educated guess at the encrypted parts. The more ciphertext he gathered, the more clues Scovell accumulated, which meant that decrypting messages was getting easier and easier until finally the cipher was broken. Used in its entirety, The Great Paris Cipher, or, Le Grande Chiffre de Paris, was pretty much unbreakable; partially used, it was a gift to a brilliant cryptologist like Scovell. The Germans also exhibited a similar overconfidence in their Enigma cipher in World War II, and this also proved a gift to a team of brilliant cryptanalysts in Bletchley Park, the secret location for Britain's codebreakers during that war.
Conclusion
C is for cryptography, cipher and confidence. Lesson number one - no matter how confident you are in your cipher it is probably best practice to remain terse and understated in your communications on the off chance that it will be deciphered and your soul will be laid bare to your enemies. Mary Queen of Scots paid for this overconfidence with her royal head. Lesson number two - no matter how confident you are in the strength of your cipher it is probably best practice to fully use it. Napoleon’s Grand Armée paid for their laziness with defeat at the Battle of Vittoria.
Footnotes
[1] Derived from the Greek words kryptos, meaning hidden and graphein, meaning to write
1.1 Mary, Queen Of Scots. The Famous People website. 2016. Available at://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/mary-queen-of-scots-6414.php. Accessed Aug 31, 2016.
Read more at http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/mary-queen-of-scots-6414.php#vErGw0o4PlutRHQz.99
[2] A ruse with no meaning to put you off track
[3] Singh, S. The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-breaking. 2000. Fourth Estate Limited. London.
[4] Urban, M. The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes: The Story of George Scovell. 2001. Faber and Faber.
[5] ibid
[6] ibid
[7] Unintelligible text before it is de-coded
[8] What the message would look like in normal writing
[9] Urban, M. The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes: The Story of George Scovell
There are no certainties in Ciphers
This is the story of an imprisoned ‘would be’ monarch and a beleaguered emperor who put too much trust in the art of cryptography[1]. Both were victims of a false sense of security. The whole point of cryptography is to prevent information from falling into enemy hands. But for the ‘would be’ monarch; Mary Queen of Scots and the beleaguered emperor; Napoleon Bonaparte, all it did was to buy them a little time, before their secrets were disclosed.
The days of finding ingenious places to hide a message - steganography – were being overtaken by the more sophisticated use of cryptography – hiding the meaning of a message using a process called encryption. In other words, the message hidden in the riding crop was being replaced with the scrambled code agreed beforehand between sender and receiver that could only be unscrambled using a key. If intercepted it was gibberish, and this is where codebreakers were increasingly needed, two of whom we will soon meet.
The Cipher of Mary Queen of Scots
Surely Mary Queen of Scots would have fared far better in life as plain old Mary Stewart, a commoner, rather than being lumbered with the impossible burden of Queen of the Scots. 1542 was the worst possible time for the birth of a Scottish royal, further compounded if you were a Catholic royal. This was the year that England’s Henry VIII defeated the Scottish army at the Battle of Solway Moss and looked like he was on the verge of overthrowing Mary’s father, King James V. The Scottish king took defeat badly and died just one week after Mary’s birth.
Being a fatherless baby queen in any sixteenth century European country was an unenviable position to be in. All eyes were on you for all the wrong reasons; your future happiness was certainly way down the list. You were just a pawn in a complicated royal game of chess completely at the mercy of your elders and guardians – those kings, queens, bishops and knights, caught in a permanent maelstrom of alliances, treaties, internecine intrigues, and outright war. The infant Mary looked like a good bet as a future wife for Henry VIII’s son, Edward, as a ploy to unite England and Scotland under one Tudor monarch. But the Scottish royal court rejected Henry’s offer, turning its gaze instead towards its natural Catholic ally, France; Mary’s own mother, Mary of Guise, was French after all. It was decided that Mary would marry Francis, the dauphin of France, hence cementing the relationship with a Catholic France in preference to a Protestant England. Henry VIII died in 1547 and during the short reign of his son, King Edward VI, the English again defeated Scotland at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh. Following this defeat it was deemed too dangerous to leave the child queen in Scotland, so in 1548 aged just six years, Mary was taken to France.
When both were aged just sixteen, the young dauphin, Francis, married Mary, and one year later they were crowned King and Queen of France. Tragically, just two years later, in 1560, Francis died of a long standing ear infection that spread to his brain. In 1561 the widowed teenaged queen returned to a Scotland that was becoming more and more Protestant. She was accommodating enough to this development though, and she had the support of the Protestant nobles. But she lost much of this support in 1565 when she married her cousin, Henry Stewart, Earl of Darnley, a thoroughly unlikable scoundrel who was not deemed to be an asset to Scotland. In 1567 he was murdered and historians cannot agree if it was Mary or her nobles who stage-managed the event. Her next marriage to James Hepburn, Fourth Earl of Bothwell was not a resounding success either, and by now, the Scottish Protestant nobles had become impatient with, as they saw it, an ineffectual Catholic queen. They sent Bothwell into exile – a lucky escape – and imprisoned Mary, forcing her to abdicate in favour of her fourteen-month-old son, James VI.
The following year Mary escaped, and with an army of six thousand supporters, tried to regain her crown. When her army was defeated she had two choices, cross enemy territory in an effort to flee to France, or flee to England and seek refuge from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. She rather naively chose the latter: a decision that left her imprisoned for the rest of her life. Elizabeth’s ‘official’ reason for incarcerating Mary was for the murder of her second husband, Darnley; the real reason was that Mary posed a threat to Elizabeth I who was acutely aware of a rump of English Catholics who regarded her as an imposter on the English throne. They did not recognise the marriage between her father, Henry VIII and her mother Anne Boleyn and consequently they regarded Elizabeth as an illegitimate pretender. These English Catholics preferred the pedigree of Mary, who was the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s older sister, and was as such – in the eyes of the Catholic English nobility – the rightful heir to the English throne.
In 1586, after eighteen years in prison, Mary received an unexpected batch of letters from her supporters in mainland Europe. They had been sending letters to the French Embassy in London for several years but, correctly reading the tense political situation, the Embassy never forwarded the messages to Mary knowing full well that they would be confiscated before she could see them. Enter stage right, Gilbert Gifford, newly returned after training as a Catholic priest in the English College in Rome. He arrived at the French Embassy saying that he could smuggle the letters to Mary in her current place of incarceration, Chartley Hall. Without getting into too much detail about his method, it involved an obliging local brewer and a beer barrel. In tandem with the beer barrel postal service, a group of Catholic nobles in London were plotting three incredibly courageous missions: Mary’s rescue, Elizabeth’s assassination, and a foreign supported invasion of and rebellion in England. You could say that the optimism of youth made them reckless. Their leader was twenty-four-year-old Anthony Babington, and the crazy scheme became known as the Babington Plot. But it would need the approval of Mary before they proceeded and in order to get this approval they needed to communicate with her. Again, Gifford obliged, arriving at Babington’s house with a letter from Mary saying that she had heard about him from her supporters in Paris and would like to converse further with him. Babington’s return letter to Mary described his plans in way too much detail; he did encrypt it though. The cipher consisted of 23 symbols that were to be substituted by the letters of the alphabet (excluding j, v and w), along with 35 symbols representing words or phrases. In addition, there were four nulls[2], and a symbol which signified that the next symbol represented a double letter.
Gifford, it turns out, was too good to be true; he was in fact, a double agent, working both for Mary Queen of Scots and Sir Francis Walsingham, Principal Secretary to Queen Elizabeth I. Walsingham was a formidable figure; if he was a school headmaster, you would dread being called to his office, correctly assuming the worst. He was very interested in the art of spying; indeed, you could say it was his evil pleasure. It was Walsingham who ordered Gifford to go to the French Embassy and offer himself as a courier. Henceforth, every message that travelled between Mary and her allies was first read by Walsingham who, coincidentally, was already familiar with the work of the Flemish cryptanalyst, Philip van Marnix. He was the clever chap who had successfully deciphered a letter from Philip of Spain to Don John of Austria in 1577 outlining plans to invade England. With the knowledge of this success, Walsingham employed his own cryptanalyst, Thomas Phelippes, who happened to be one of Europe’s leading practitioners in the field. In particular, he was a master of frequency analysis.
As Simon Singh[3] observes, “a weak encryption can be worse than no encryption at all.” And why is this? If you believe that no-one will ever succeed in deciphering your words, you will write more freely about your feelings and intentions – more freely perhaps than if you were writing normally. The cipher used by Babington and Mary only offered a false sense of security. Phelippes managed to break Babington’s cipher by establishing the frequency of each character, using the process of elimination, and employing some intelligent guesswork to fill in the gaps. Once he deciphered Babington’s damning message to Mary – the one that proposed the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I - he gave it to Walsingham. Mary’s reply to Babington was easily deciphered by Phelippes – the one suggesting that she be released just before or at the same time as the assassination, in case news of the deadly deed reached her jailors, who might then murder her. But Walsingham was not happy with just catching Mary and Babington; he wanted the entire gang, and here he drew on Phelippes’ unrivalled skill of forgery. He instructed Phelippes to forge a postscript to Mary’s return letter to Babington asking for the names of his co-conspirators. Now Walsingham had everything he wanted.
It would end horribly for Babington and his co-conspirators who endured the most ghastly of public executions. Mary Queen of Scots got off lightly with a simple beheading.
Great Paris Cipher
By the early nineteenth century codebreaking was a well-established weapon of warfare and espionage. Britain would use cryptography to its advantage during the Peninsular War of 1808-1814, which was played out in Spain and Portugal. Continuing on his quest to conquer all of Europe, Napoleon’s Grand Armée started to invade the Iberian Peninsula of Spain and Portugal in 1808. Madrid and Lisbon were occupied and Napoleon put his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. With the help of British forces under the command of the Duke of Wellington, Spain and Portugal waged guerilla warfare against Napoleon’s invading army.
Just like Sir Francis Walsingham employed the services of Phelippes during the threat to Queen Elizabeth I’s throne, Wellington employed the services of codebreaker, George Scovell during the Peninsular War. Scovell developed a system to intercept French messages to and from the battlefield, and cracked their codes[4]. In response, the French upped their game in 1811 and jumped from simple ciphers known as petits chiffres, based on a combination of 50 numbers to a more robust code based on a combination of 150 numbers[5]. This became known as the Army of Portugal Code and George Scovell cracked it within two days.
Now the French had to knuckle down again to come up with something stronger. At the end of 1811 new and supposedly un-crackable cipher tables were sent from Paris to all French military commanders[6]. This became known as the Great Paris Cipher, or, more exotically, Le Grande Chiffre de Paris. These tables were sent with guidelines to trick the enemy, such as adding meaningless figures to the end of letters, something loosely equivalent to Babington’s nulls. This was a more difficult nut for Scovell to crack. He spent a year meticulously studying all intercepted documents encoded with this new cipher. He gradually began to extract some meaningful material by using letters that contained un-coded words and phrases, so that he could intelligently guess the meaning of the coded sections, or, fill in the blanks with a degree of confidence. Remember that Phelippes managed to break Babington’s cipher also by employing some intelligent guesswork to fill in the gaps.
Scovell’s big catch was the letter sent from Joseph to Napoleon, which was intercepted in December 1812. By this stage, from examining almost a year’s worth of intercepted letters, he had cracked enough of the code to decipher most of Joseph’s letter outlining explicit details of French operations and plans. Scovell’s decoding of this letter allowed Wellington to prepare for the final battle for control in Spain – the Battle of Vittoria - on 21 June 1813. That night British troops seized Joseph Bonaparte’s coaches and amazingly found his copy of the Great Paris Cipher table; now there could be no more doubts; the code was well and truly cracked.
Phelippes would have been maddened by the Great Paris Cipher. His frequency analysis method would have been rendered useless because he would have immediately gone for the cipher text[7] symbol that appeared the most; in the case of both English and French this is the letter ‘e’. So, if the number 5 appeared most frequently in an encrypted letter, the codebreaker could fairly accurately assume that it corresponded to the letter e in plaintext[8]. The Great Paris Cipher though, used a method called homophonic substitution whereby a single letter would take on multiple numbers based on how frequently that letter appeared in the language[9]. To make it even more complicated, some numbers stood for nothing; they were simply included in the cipher text to make enemies even more confused. These nulls were specifically inserted at the ends of words to outwit a common decryption technique of studying similar endings to ascertain patterns. Babington also did this, but Phelippes twigged it pretty quickly.
The Great Paris Cipher must have got the thumbs up then, from Napoleon. The ensuing problem was not with the cipher; it was with the people in the French army who used it, or more accurately, only partly used it. Perhaps from laziness, or from overconfidence in the cipher, the French army decided it was sufficient to encrypt only part of a message, thinking that would be enough. But by leaving some words of their messages unencrypted, they gave Scovell a back door into their cipher, and that was all he needed; just enough unencrypted text to make an educated guess at the encrypted parts. The more ciphertext he gathered, the more clues Scovell accumulated, which meant that decrypting messages was getting easier and easier until finally the cipher was broken. Used in its entirety, The Great Paris Cipher, or, Le Grande Chiffre de Paris, was pretty much unbreakable; partially used, it was a gift to a brilliant cryptologist like Scovell. The Germans also exhibited a similar overconfidence in their Enigma cipher in World War II, and this also proved a gift to a team of brilliant cryptanalysts in Bletchley Park, the secret location for Britain's codebreakers during that war.
Conclusion
C is for cryptography, cipher and confidence. Lesson number one - no matter how confident you are in your cipher it is probably best practice to remain terse and understated in your communications on the off chance that it will be deciphered and your soul will be laid bare to your enemies. Mary Queen of Scots paid for this overconfidence with her royal head. Lesson number two - no matter how confident you are in the strength of your cipher it is probably best practice to fully use it. Napoleon’s Grand Armée paid for their laziness with defeat at the Battle of Vittoria.
Footnotes
[1] Derived from the Greek words kryptos, meaning hidden and graphein, meaning to write
1.1 Mary, Queen Of Scots. The Famous People website. 2016. Available at://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/mary-queen-of-scots-6414.php. Accessed Aug 31, 2016.
Read more at http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/mary-queen-of-scots-6414.php#vErGw0o4PlutRHQz.99
[2] A ruse with no meaning to put you off track
[3] Singh, S. The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-breaking. 2000. Fourth Estate Limited. London.
[4] Urban, M. The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes: The Story of George Scovell. 2001. Faber and Faber.
[5] ibid
[6] ibid
[7] Unintelligible text before it is de-coded
[8] What the message would look like in normal writing
[9] Urban, M. The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes: The Story of George Scovell
