Week 5 - Encoding Challenge: The Babington Plot

My group members - the lovely Laurel and rad Raquel - and I decided to encode the fatal letter Mary Queen of Scots sent to Anthony Babington with details of Queen Elizabeth I's assassination. The letter which sealed Mary's fate is full of markup, code and sabotage.

I was on Twitter earlier this morning and came across a post by Bibliophilia @Libroantiguo in my newsfeed which read:
#OnThisDay (1587) Mary, Queen of Scots, was beheaded after Sir F Walsingham did a frequency count on Mary's cipher, read her message, and uncovered her plot to assassinate Elizabeth I, Queen of England.

As a lover of historic intrigue, I thought this would be a thrilling piece of evidence to encode for this assignment. The challenge will be to first decode Mary's script and then determine the best means of translating the results as an XML file. In terms of portraying the deciphered words we must ask ourselves whether we ought to integrate punctuation, spelling, grammar, line breaks and divide the block of text, or to portray the fated message as it was intended to be read (which can vary depending on the reader, as we discussed in class earlier today). I think this is a unique example that has a tragic twist and plays a large role in English history.

~ Fareh