16/08/2021

Cipher Letter of French Ambassador Published by the Prince of Orange (1684) Identified and Verified

One of my favourite historical characters is William III, Prince of Orange, as I wrote before. When I encountered a cipher used by Comte d'Avaux, French ambassador in the Hague, some months ago (see here), I remembered an episode that the Prince published d'Avaux's letter that was intercepted and deciphered, and I wanted to inspect the original some day.
To my pleasant surprise, it was done by George Lasry. He conducted codebreaking of a ciphertext found in the Dutch Royal Archives, and when some plaintext was revealed, found that it was this famous letter. He verified that the decipherment published by the Dutch was correct, disproving d'Avaux's claim that the Prince deliberately distorted it for propaganda. This result is now mentioned in Section (1C) in "French Ciphers during the Reign of Louis XIV".

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