Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Katherine of Aragon's Cipher


 From Smithsonian:

In July 1531, Tudor king Henry VIII rode out of Windsor Castle with his mistress, Anne Boleyn, at his side. He left without warning, failing to bid farewell to Catherine of Aragon, his wife and queen of 22 years. When Catherine sent a letter to Henry inquiring after his health a few days later, he declared that he “cared not for her adieux.” The couple never met in person again.

Henry’s harsh response was prompted by the queen’s refusal to agree to a divorce. Despite the fact that Henry had abandoned her (and would, over the next five years, exile her to a series of increasingly decrepit estates), Catherine remained steadfast in her attempts to preserve the pair’s marriage. Even as Henry publicly announced Anne as his new queen, Catherine refused to relent, maintaining that she was the king’s one true wife until her death in January 1536 at age 50.

 Now, almost 500 years later, Vanessa Braganza, a literary scholar and self-described “book detective” at Harvard University, has uncovered a long-overlooked example of the Tudor queen’s defiance. As Jennifer Schuessler reports for the New York Times, Braganza used a method she describes as “early modern Wordle” to decode a cipher containing the hidden words “Henricvs Rex” (Henry the king) and “Katherine” (an alternate spelling of the queen’s first name). Created around 1532, the intricate puzzle appears in the Jewellery Book, a volume of jewelry designs by Tudor court painter Hans Holbein. (Read more.)


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