14/11/2020

Letters Deciphered by John Wallis Sold at Auction for £29,000

It is well-known that a collectioin of fifty-two letters deciphered by John Wallis was deposited at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Wallis actually made multiple copies of the volume, and on 7 October 2020, one (possibly Wallis's own) was sold at an auction for £29,000. It even includes a fifty-third letter not included in the copy at the Bodleian Library. I added a reference to this in "John Wallis and Cryptanalysis", and also made a few additions from Philip Beeley's paper (2016) referenced by the auction site.
The auction site has some images.
One is Charles I's letter to his son in February 1647, which I already covered in "King Charles I's Ciphers".
Another is a letter from French agent Graymond to Cardinal Mazarin. The cipher used seems to be the same as Graymond's cipher I recently reconstructed from another source and presented in "Ciphers Early in the Reign of Louis XIV".
Another is a letter from the Earl of Lauderdale to the Countess of Carlisle. I now added this in "King Charles II's Ciphers during Exile".
According to the auction site, nearly half of the collection are "from royalist agents in Breda to Dutch and English merchants and other contacts in London: dating from 1650, these relate to the negotiations by which the exiled Charles II was offered passage to Scotland and a means of recovering the throne in England, in return for accepting the authority of the Scottish kirk and parliament." These may include a key between Charles II and the Duke of Hamilton used in some undeciphered letters. I noted this possibility in "Unsolved Historical Ciphers".

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