For some time before the development of the Vigenère cipher, “anybody sending an encrypted message had to accept that an expert enemy codebreaker might intercept and decipher their most precious secrets.” (Singh, p. 45) How is this environment different from the one that Mary Queen of Scots experienced, where one didn’t know how likely it was that one’s encrypted message was secure?

Before the tragic execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the majority of people believed that the monoalphabetic substitution cipher would be sufficient in enciphering secrets. This is the exact reason why Mary Queen of Scots and her conspirators were extremely blunt and honest. Once the cipher was deciphered, she was immediately incriminated. However, at the same time of her death, a new polyalphabetic substitution cipher was used, the Vigenère cipher began to be involved greatly. The Vigenère cipher changed the landscape of all ciphers because it used twenty-six different alphabets for enciphering instead of only one. This made the deciphering process much more arduous or even close to impossible for the interceptor.
Back in Mary Queen of Scots time, it was not known that a number of people had figured out how to easily solve a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. Therefore, people kept using it. Once the news broke about the Mary Queen of Scots and the interceptor, mathematicians knew that it was necessary to create a much more difficult cipher in order to make sure secrets could be safe. The interceptors had made the adjustment, and it was time for the mathematicians to make their move. The Vigenère cipher was groundbreaking in that it stumped decipherers for years and years. Perhaps, had the fiasco involving Mary Queen of Scots not occurred, the advancement of cryptography as a whole could have been delayed hundreds of years. After this incident, anybody who used the simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher knew that they were under great risk of having their secret deciphered; this led to the rapid increase of technology and intelligence in the realm of cryptography.