Tea at Trianon: Katherine of Aragon's Cipher

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

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.)