Existing comment:
George Digby, Earl of Bristol
Coded letter written for King Charles I, April 27, 1645
This autograph letter, written by the Earl of Bristol for King Charles and sent to Prince Rupert or Prince Maurice to report on the progress of the rebel forces under Oliver Cromwell, shows what a document looks like when encrypted and decrypted using an agreed upon key (or "nomenclator"). In sensitive passages, individual letters and whole words are replaced with a set of arbitrary combination of letters and numbers that have then been translated back into plain text by the recipient or his secretary. |