💌 How the Tudors Kept Their Love Letters Secret
- Dorothea Dickerman
- Dec 16
- 5 min read
Elizabethan letterlocking, wax seals, silk threads, codes – and the covert delivery of Peregrine Bertie’s love letter to Mary Vere
Part II of a two part series: Writing and Delivering a Secret Love Letter in Elizabethan England
In Elizabethan England, privacy required art. Lovers, courtiers, and spies relied on paper, wax, code and trust to keep secrets safe. Every fold, seal and silk thread whispered in a language of discretion that could mean the difference between safety and scandal.
In my last post, 💌 Love in Lockdown: How Peregrine Bertie Wrote a Secret Love Letter to Mary Vere , Peregrine Bertie wrote Mary Vere a forbidden love letter. You can revel in the romance by clicking on the link. But the greater mystery remains: How did he get his forbidden letter to her without anyone reading it?
The answer lies in the ingenious world of Tudor letterlocking and the choreography of folding, sealing, coding and delivery, turning fragile paper into fortresses of privacy and couriers into unwitting co-conspirators.
Shakespeare describes the process:
Of folded schedules had she many a one,
Which she perused, sigh'd, tore, and gave the flood;
. . .
Found yet moe letters sadly penn'd in blood,
With sleided silk feat and affectedly
Enswathed, and seal'd to curious secrecy.
A Lover’s Complaint by William Shakespeare
💌 The Art of the Fold: The Architecture of Secrecy
An Elizabethan letter began as an uncut sheet of handmade paper. When the message was complete, the sender folded the sheet again and again in a kind of origami, tucking the text deep inside layers of blank paper until nothing could be read from the outside.
But how the letter was folded could betray its contents.
Love letters often appeared tightly fan-pleated, their intimacy hinted by the format long before the seal was broken. Governmental letters were folded entirely differently. Check out the sample below from William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who preferred his paperwork disciplined and his readers obedient.
🔐 The Art of the Lock: Silken Threads, Waxen Seals
Fan-folded love letters begged to be tightly bound. Lovers wound them with silk embroidery thread, then cemented the threads to the paper with wax embossed by a signet ring. My favorite Elizabethan bad boy, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (👉See: The Untold Backstory of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester: Queen Elizabeth I's Favorite) sent Queen Elizabeth I such letters, fan-folded, silk-bound, sealed with a wax kiss and dripping with longing.
Break Leicester’s seal or cut his silk embroidery thread? Who would dare do that to a love letter addressed to the Queen?
Exactly.
Meanwhile, binding top secret government correspondence became a competitive sport. Elizabeth and James VI of Scotland played mine-is-more-expensively-sealed-than-yours, favoring gold and silver threads before embossing them with those big dollops of wax and royal seals.
But there are ways, be you clever villain or cleverer servant, of lifting a wax seal and reattaching it with no one the wiser. More cautious senders used another form of letterlocking: cutting a narrow slit or V-shaped flap through the folds and threading through it a long triangle of fresh paper. Lightly moistening the rag fibers until they swell makes any attempt to tear or cut the letter lock instantly apparent.
A perfectly intact letter was a silent victory in a world laced with spies and nosy relations.
🕵️ The Art of the Code: When Folding and Letterlocking Wasn’t Enough
Sometimes even the best folds and letterlocks needed a chaser. If you were trying to dispossess one queen of her throne and set another on it, for example (here’s looking at you again, Lord Henry Howard), the text should be written in code. Elizabethan England was a golden age of encryption.
Mary Queen of Scots’ famous downfall came when her ciphered letters smuggled through beer barrels’ bung holes were intercepted and deciphered. The ever-suspicious Burghley wrote the inventory of the treasures in his (many, elaborate) homes in ancient Greek to disguise the valuable items from sticky-fingered servants. And lovers? Some hid their declarations in recipes, mixing sugar and spice into a custom-made deliciousness for a single intended tongue.
🐎 The Art of the Post: A Network in Saddlebags
Within Elizabethan England, no letter could outrun a horse. Even in the Armada year of 1588, the only official postal service in the country was the crown’s. Its couriers galloped, changing horses every ten miles at posting inns along rutted roads fanning out from London like the wheel spokes. Fresh riders and mounts took the most important messages at top speed. The outside of urgent messages read like a travel log: location to location, date and time. “Post haste, haste, haste—for life!” commanded the exterior of Burghley’s famous Armada letter, still bearing stains from its race from London to Canterbury in a single day.
But a man in love and lockdown couldn’t use the Queen’s post. He needed to trust someone. Peregrine may have written two letters, folding Mary’s inside a second letter begging a confident to deliver hers by hand.
In Tudor England, letters might drop from a lady’s sleeve, cross kitchens and guardrooms via servants’ visits, or pass hand to hand across trusted networks of friends, fellow courtiers, and ambassadors.
🔥 The Art of Assured Secrecy: Burn This Letter
Fire was the sixteenth-century’s delete key because even the safest routes carried risk. 👉 See: Burn This Letter: Yet More Scandals, Moral Corruption and Maidenly Missteps in Queen Elizabeth's Court . Yet not all were destroyed. Some survived, singed at the edges, kept for love, revenge or that handy evidence that someone just happened to send to you when he needed a big favor from you. (Here’s looking at both of you, yet again, Lords Henry Howard and Burghley.)
Whatever Peregrine did to protect and deliver his love letter to Mary, it worked. Against every obstacle and all odds, she married him.
🌍 Across the Narrow Seas
Once love triumphed and marriage legitimized their correspondence, Peregrine and Mary’s letters crossed seas and war zones. When Peregrine became Commander-in-Chief of all English forces in the Netherlands, their letters traveled back and forth by courier from English ports (often Dover or Harwich) via ship across the Channel to Flushing or Ostend. When Queen Elizabeth sent Peregrine to Elsinore in Denmark, the very setting for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and later to France with 4000 English troops to take Harfleur just like Henry V in Shakespeare’s Henry V, some of the Berties’ letters, folded, sealed, and entrusted to ship captains and envoys, survived their perilous journeys for us to read today.
The story of Elizabethan secret letters doesn’t end here. In a future post, we’ll follow another that missed its intended recipient. Instead, Leicester opened it, revealing rather more about him than he wanted anyone to know!
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🎥 Want to meet the real Mary Vere and Peregrine Bertie?
