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maximus otter

Recovering policeman
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Henry VIII’s first wife may have commissioned the design as an act of defiance during the Tudor king’s attempt to divorce her.

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.

163-Catherine-of-Aragon.jpg


Catherine of Aragon

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.

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.

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First she scanned the cipher from left to right, writing down “given” letters that didn’t overlap with any others and therefore had to appear in the final version (in this case, the “X” and “S”). Then she identified the “maybes,” in which “every part of [the letter] is also part of other letters, so they have no unique identifying parts.” (Think of an “F” hiding under an “E.”) Finally, she conducted a “controlled game of anagrams, or word scramble,” arranging the givens and maybes into names based on historical context, including who she knew was present at Henry’s court, whether they overlapped with Holbein’s time as court painter and how they signed their names in documents.

“While we spell her name with a ‘C,’ she invariably signed herself ‘Katherine the Quene,’” says Braganza. “The period just before her exile overlaps with the start of Holbein’s career at Henry’s court, so there’s an opportunity. There’s even an early 16th-century portrait, likely of Catherine, wearing a choker made of K-shaped links interspersed with Tudor roses.”

Outside experts have yet to confirm Braganza’s findings. But James Simpson, a literary scholar at Harvard and one of Braganza’s dissertation advisers, tells the Times the evidence she’s presented is “totally persuasive.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...pher-linked-to-catherine-of-aragon-180980400/

maximus otter
 
As ciphers go, this one isn't particularly difficult. I'm surprised no-one has noticed it before - maybe no-one bothered to look.
 
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