The Babington Cipher

The most famous cipher of Mary, Queen of Scots, is the one she used in her fatal correspondence with Anthony Babington, in what is known as the Babington Plot. Some pupular books even discuss Mary's cipher as if all her ciphers are like this. It should be remembered that this is only one of the simplest kind among more than a hundred ciphers Mary used with various people at various times.
I now added a section for this famous cipher in "Ciphers of Mary, Queen of Scots". It presents images based on Wikimedia Commons and describes only minimal facts. 

 

A Cipher used between Marchioness of Ormonde and Edward Nicholas (1649)

Kilkenny Castle's website presents an image of a letter partially in cipher from Elizabeth Butler, Marchioness of Ormonde, (Wikipedia) to Edward Nicholas, dated 20 June 1649 (from Egerton MS 2533). At this time, Elizabeth was in Caen, France, while the Marquess of Ormonde was fighting in Ireland for the royalist cause.
The interlined decipherment allows reconstruction of the cipher.
The following is transcription of the ciphertext aligned with the plaintext.

42 36 27 4 21 18 29 366 9 89 264 5 470 452  523  483   4 328  80    37 18
o  b  j  e c  t  i  on  s be in  g the same with those I made again s  t

262 95     551  306    22 12 28 30 525   493             471   44 13 31 320 477
it  before your letter c  a  m  e  which Colonel Traford to    u  l  d  me  that

167        230 76     31 476  32 217 268 471 477  12 21 34 31 30 321 89 194  30 67  36 18 10 30 32
Lord Digby had advise d  thei r  go  ing to  that A  c  a  d  e  my  be for  e  any o  t  h  e  r

90  470 264      12 320 15 18 261 348 550 217 15 438 14 34 32 90
But the arrange? ?  me  n  t  is  not yet go  n  soe f  a  r  but

477  4 453   194  12 520 471 364    523  368 218 268 67  398
that I shall find a  way to  oppose with out giv ing any offense

364     14 46 40 22 57 6 75 130 512
(oppose f  *  *  c  *  *  *  *  *)

(objections being the same with those I made against it before your letter came which Colonel Traford tould me that Lord Digby had advised their going to that Academy before any other But the arrangement is not yet gon soe farre but that I shall find a way to oppose with out giving any offense)

The cipher is like many other royalist ciphers at the time, but this particular cipher is new to me. It is yet to be seen whether the cipher used in a letter from Nicholas to Ormonde, dated 28 October 1648 (see "King Charles I's Ciphers") is the same as this.

Correction: Upon closer look, "oppose" is not in the manuscript. 364=of. So, the last part may read: 398(par...?) 364(of) 14(f) 46(e) 40(n) 22(c) 57(e)

Cipher Letters to Charles I of England (1645) in the Parliamentary Archives

The other day, I ran into a blogpost of the Parliamentary Archives: Katherine Emery (2020), "Cracking the code: Love, war and letters". This made me aware that some images of cipher letters to Charles I are available at the Parliamentary Archives (and reminded me of ciphers in the British Library I had noted before for future study).

(1) Letter in "Cipher with Ministers in Oxford (Spring 1645)"
Nicholas to Charles I, 22 May 1645 (Parliamentary Archives)

(2) Letters in "Third Cipher between Charles I and Henrietta-Maria"
(2-1) Jermyn to Charles I, 12 May 1645 (Parliamentary Archives) *This record cannot be reached by the search terms such as "cipher", "decipher", but the ID in the official blog readily led to the relevant page.

(2-2) Henrietta Maria to King Charles I, 6 January 1645 (Parliamentary Archives)

(2-3)Henrietta Maria to King Charles I, 13 March 1645 (Parliamentary Archives)

(2-4)(Jermyn?) to Charles I, 21 April 1645 (Parliamentary Archives)

(3) Letter in "Second Cipher between Charles I and Henrietta-Maria in Holland and the North (Aug. 1642-Jul. 1643)"
Henrietta Maria to Charles I, 27 June 1643 (Parliamentary Archives)

(4) Letter in "Cipher with Prince Rupert, Digby, and Ormonde (1644-1645)" (formerly called "Cipher with Prince Rupert (Summer 1644)")
(4-1) Charles I to Prince Maurice, 25 June 1644 (Parliamentary Archives)

(4-2) Letters from Charles I to Prince Rupert, March 1643 to April 1645 (Add MS 18983 (BL))
One from 29 April 1645 is not deciphered but can be read.

(5) "D: of Richemonds Cyfer"
Charles I to Prince Rupert, 31 July 1645 (Add MS 18983, ff.15-16).
This letter shows Charles changed his cipher used in correspondence with Rupert after Naseby. There is a note in the margin, "This is in the D: of Richemonds Cyfer." The Duke of Richmond had returned from exile to defend Oxford for the King (Wikipedia).
This is the same as what I previously reconstructed from Add MS 18982 f.79 (privately designated THE=g4). This cipher is interesting in providing for many nulls among low numbers, where typically single letters are assigned.
Specifically, while many of numbers 1-112 are for letters but most of 20-40 are nulls. When these nulls are well used (as in this letter), the codebreaker may have been led off track.
About the same time, Rupert used a different cipher with Nicholas ("Nicholas-Rupert Cipher after Naseby (July 1645)").
These specimens will help fill the gap in my reconstruction of the ciphers.

For the specific ciphers, see "King Charles I's Ciphers" (this article started with the few printed sources available at first, and need an overhaul with many archival materials now available online).

A Letter in Napoleonic Small Cipher found in Dresden

A private email drew my attention to a letter (1813) found in Dresden of General Rapp (defending Danzig for Napoleon). It was posted on Klaus Schmeh's facebook and solved instantly by Geoge Lasry, who had "developed a special tool for syllabary ciphers of this kind" (see my previous post). I now mentioned this achievement in "Great Ciphers of Napoleon's Grande Armée".
For this particular case, General Rapp's small cipher is printed in Bazeries' Les chiffres secrets dévoilés (p.275) as mentioned in my article "A Specimen of Napoleon's Small Cipher (1813)". Bazeries' table allows what couldn't be identified by an algorithm:
44(deux) 44(deux) 7(zero) 8 8
46(une) 5 46(une) 7(zero) 8
46(une) 26(trois) 2(neuf) 46(une) 7(zero) i.e., 13910
*7(zero) is not in Bazeries' table, but I think I saw it somewhere. 5 and 8 most probably represent digits.

Inventory of Edward Nicholas' Ciphers in Egerton MS 2550

After vacillating for a night after uploading an article about Edward Nicholas, I uploaded an inventory of his ciphers in Egerton MS 2550 in a CSV format for what it's worth (I'm sure it includes many transcription errors).

*It seems downloading does not work for security reasons. Try a link in the article "Polyalphabetic Cipher Exercise by Royalist Minister Edward Nicholas".

Royalist Minister Edward Nicholas Studies Vigenere/Beaufort Cipher

Among papers of Edward Nicholas, secretary of state to Charles I and Charles II, I found a worksheet of the Vigenere/Beaufort cipher (Egerton MS 2550, f.39). A printed Vegenere table (f.86) seems too neatly printed to belong to the seventeenth century, but I believe the worksheet (at least the main part of it) shows Nicholas experimented with the polyalphabetic scheme.
I uploaded a new article on this: "Polyalphabetic Cipher Exercise by Royalist Minister Edward Nicholas".
It is yet to be found out how and when Nicholas learned of polyalphabetic ciphers.

Three Ciphers of Nicholas Throckmorton Identified, Two Remain Unsolved

Among Throckmorton's ciphertexts in Add MS 4136 mentioned the other day, I identified three ciphers after all, and reported them in "Ciphers during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I" (and updated the records in the DECODE database).
Two ciphertexts remain unidentified.

A Telegram from Switzerland (1937)

A private email made me aware that two unsolved encrypted telegrams from Switzerland are on Klaus Schmeh's facebook page. It was sent to "London Mcl." and one has a handwritten note "via angleterre Eastern." The timestamp for both is "8 JAN 37."

Both telegrams begin with "BLUME SALAMANCA", followed by a sequence of five letter groups. These are part of the body text (because they are reckoned in the word counting penciled as "50" and "100".)
While a codebook may have been used, it is pointed out that the index of coincidence matches that of English, pointing to a possibility of transposition.

Side information:
- These telegrams are mentioned in Regula Bochsler (2022), Nylon und Napalm - Die Geschäfte der Emser Werke und ihres Gründers Werner Oswald (Google).
- Bengt Beckman, C.G. McKay (2013), Swedish Signal Intelligence 1900-1945, p.110 Google describes the basic structure of telegrams at the time.
- Klaus' Cipherbrain article presents a telegram, apparently sent from Switzerland to London (1942), where the discussion seems to have agreed on a hypothesis that it is encoded in the British Government Telegraph Code, unofficially called the ABABY Code or the BABY Code for the first codeword ABABY standing for fullstop. I suppose this codebook does not apply to the BLUME telegram because it has codewords earlier than ABABY (e.g., AAATI).
- The Riegner Telegram (Wikipedia) (1942) is a telegram sent from Geneva to London and New York. It was sent from Gerhart Riegner of World Jewish Congress and conveyed an early report of the Nazi's plan of extermination of Jews. It was sent in "CYPHER", but the original cipher message does not seem to be extant.

(Additional Notes) Bochsler, the author quoted above and the historian who discovered the telegrams, provided background information in a comment on Klaus' facebook page. The telegram was sent from an enterprise owned by Werner Oswald. When questioned by the Swiss Federal Police, he claimed that the telegrams were related to "wool business" in Spain, but Bochsler doubts this because he had a good relationship with fascist Spain.

Excerpts of Nicholas Throckmorton's Cipher Letters (1559)

 BL Add MS 4136 includes many papers related to Nichlas Throckmorton. Sheets after sheets are filled with numbered segments in cipher. I found many of them can be read with a key reconstructed from Add MS 35830. Although the papers from Add MS 4136 are annotated with the dates and the writer (Nicholas Throckmorton, ambassador in France, and his successors), the letters calendared in CSP foreign did not seem to quite match.
When I deciphered a sequence "marques d'Alboeuf and Martigues" in one letter, it allowed me to find the decipherment of full letters printed in Forbes (1740), the source of CSP. It confirmed that the cipher segments in Add MS 4136 are excerpts corresponding to the text in italics (i.e., those portions in cipher) in Forbes (1740).
I'm still working on this. Hopefully, I can report the results in near future.

By the way, Nicholas Throckmorton's cipher seems to have a fairly large number of code symbols. Often, a symbol consists of the initial letter of the word it represents and some additional stroke.

I Reconstructed a Cipher but Lost Its Source.

When I reconstructed a cipher from some deciphered material, I don't upload it right away, but usually wait some time until more materials are collected in order to see how best to present them.
The downside of this practice is that I sometimes forget what it is about.
The other day, I made some additions from Henry VIII's time ("Earliest English Diplomatic Ciphers" and "Ciphers during the Reign of Henry VIII"), but I lost a source of one of the ciphers I reconstructed. It may have been taken from the same volume from which I took the other ciphers.