The Conde de Hernán Núñez to Baltasar de Fuenmayor, December 1674

Summary. The catalogue listed four letters from the Spanish envoy in Stockholm to his colleague in Copenhagen as "noted": the cipher was said to be deciphered in the margin, and how far that decipherment went had not been checked. Each letter is mostly clear Spanish, with one to three cipher passages, 1,716 groups in all. A marginal decipherment accompanies every passage, but DECODE’s transcriber could not read parts of that hand. The margins were lined up against the cipher with seven anchors from one repeated phrase (representado y representaré). The values that emerged were those of the key rebuilt in this project two days earlier for the Marqués de los Balbases’ letters of 1677 to the same recipient, which are in the same volume. Applied unchanged to DECODE’s transcription, that key reproduces the margins of all four letters. Four values were added (167 Suecia, 161 resolución, os para, and 6+ o). The first pass left 7% of groups without a value; a second pass checked each of them on the images, and one illegible group remains (99.9% of 1,716 groups have a value, 99.3% without eleven uncertain ones). The content is Swedish diplomacy in the month Sweden entered the war on France’s side.

Cipher lines with their decipherment in the left margin — R1012 p. 2, 5 December 1674: in the margin, *ya tengo assegurado a VS que he representado y representaré siempre lo que importa que la Suecia tenga el freno desse reyno*, and beside it the cipher it deciphers. Image: Archives générales du Royaume, Brussels, SEG 2559, R1012 p. 2, via DECODE R1012.

01 The letters and the key

There are four despatches, of 5, 15, 19 and 26 December 1674 (DECODE R1012–R1015; the "1674–1677" in DECODE’s summary is a span, and the catalogue names give the dates). All are in the Brussels volume SEG 2559, Fuenmayor’s papers, which also holds the Carpio and Balbases letters of 1677. The cipher is the Balbases syllabic nomenclator: numbers for letters and consonant-vowel syllables (21 a, 28 s, 31 r, 46 de, 58 lo, 66 re, 70 ta), letter pairs with a disguised consonant (xo co, xi ci, af sa, if si, uf su, ac ma), and word codes: struck d que, bef Francia, dan -mente. 13 is a null in the Balbases key but e in this hand (see Method). The key is set out in full on the Balbases page. That it served Hernán Núñez in Stockholm in 1674 and Balbases at Nijmegen in 1677 suggests that Fuenmayor held one cipher for his correspondents among the northern Spanish envoys.

02 What the cipher says

These are the cipher passages, taken from the margins and checked group by group against the key. Spelling is normalised.

5 December 1674 (R1012)

…asegurándole en primer lugar que el reparo que hace del proyecto del tratado deste [reino] con esse reino es muy propio de su gran juicio y prudencia, y que creo ser cierto que estos ministros han convenido con el de Dinamarca en todos los puntos del proyecto que envié a V.S.; pero si la Dinamarca añadiese el de no oponerse a las armas que la Suecia pretenderá ahora, todos los artículos anteriores que contradijesen a esto quedarán anulados… y que las más veces no vienen a ser sino un juego de palabras con que pretextar lo que hacen y lo que no quieren hacer los príncipes. Ya tengo asegurado a V.S. que he representado y representaré siempre lo que importa que la Suecia tenga el freno desse reino.

A later passage concerns the Swedish envoy at Copenhagen. Núñez has told him of his obligations to his father-in-law, the Constable. Fuenmayor should believe him only where other sources confirm it, "siendo hombre lleno de artificios, sin más fundamento a veces que su propia inquietud".

15 December (R1013)

Con grandes promesas de la protección de la Suecia, que les ha costado buenos regalos, y deseando el enviado de Brandenburg enviar un gentilhombre suyo en su navío, estos diputados le respondieron no se atrevían por no dar celos a la Suecia… Hamburg, that is. The despatch goes on to hope that, frightened, the Hamburgers "quiten a los suecos mucha parte de la confianza", which would restrain Sweden and "alentará igualmente a los dinamarqueses".

19 December (R1014)

…la mira principal que este reino lleva en haber enviado a esse su embajador, según tengo entendido, es el tomar tiempo con esto para satisfacer a las instancias que hace este embajador de Francia, y el de no asistirle por ahora con el socorro que pretende en virtud de su tratado último. The marriage of Charles XI to the Danish king’s sister will be raised. The Anglo-Swedish treaty is only a renewal of the one Coventry concluded. …no hay otro medio de retener a la Suecia, y si esa corona se ajustase a la neutralidad, le faltaría a esta el único pretexto con que se [excusa con] la Francia.

26 December (R1015)

…antes de separarse este senado, que será dentro de muy pocos días, se tomará resolución en él sobre el asistir o no a la Francia a mano armada. Ha dos días que he cesado en el remedio de los baños… para salir cuanto antes a hacer las diligencias que me sean posibles para que dicha resolución nos sea favorable, prefiriendo la solicitud del real servicio al riesgo de la vida. The decision went against him: Swedish troops entered Brandenburg at the turn of the year, and Fehrbellin followed in June 1675.

03 Method

DECODE’s ciphertext transcriptions (by MEG, 2020) were parsed into cipher groups and margin text. DECODE reads the clerk’s "q." as "g.3", so it was normalised to que.
The monotone aligner written for Balbases 1677, run image by image, failed: the margin glosses cross page breaks. Run letter by letter, with seven anchors from representado y representaré (66 re, 30 p, ef se, 24 n, 70 ta, 48 do, 22 y), it converged in four rounds.
The converged values (58 lo, 28 s, y n, uf su, 21 a, 31 r, struck d que) were recognised as the Balbases key. Applied unchanged, it decrypted all four letters in agreement with their margins.
Second pass (22 Sept 2026): the 118 groups the key left without a value were each located on the sixteen DECODE images and compared with the margin beside them. 62 were DECODE misreadings (this hand’s closed 4 transcribed as 9, so “96” is 46 de and “189” is 184 sobre; g for y; groups split or run together), 48 were code groups the Balbases table lacks, fixed by the margin (bof guerra, cuf Inglaterra, 187 tiempo, 149 quanto, 111 comercio, C+ ll), 7 were nulls and 1 is illegible. Two key corrections apply throughout: 13 is e in this hand (13 8 el, 13 ef esse), and the underlined N is V.S. DECODE also omits two whole lines of R1012 (“…mas veces no vienen a ser sino un juego de pa-”).

04 What remains uncertain

Of 1,716 groups, one has no value (R1014, illegible). Eleven values from the second pass are graded M (uncertain): among them the triangle sign on R1012 (a, or a null), the nulls 500 and E, and R1015’s 21‡. The first pass had left 118 without a value (R1012 62, R1013 20, R1014 29, R1015 7).
Values added here: 167 Suecia (H: every context), 161 resolución (H), os para (C), 6+ o (C), 4 t (C). 30 = p is DECODE’s transcription of the Balbases 26 (C).
The Spanish above is normalised; it is not a diplomatic edition. The full key output for each letter, with its margin, is in the repository.

05 Sources

DECODE records R1012, R1013, R1014, R1015: images and transcriptions (login).
Archives générales du Royaume, Brussels, Secrétairerie d’État et de Guerre, inv. nr. 2559.
The key: Balbases to Fuenmayor, 1677–78, rebuilt in this project on 19 September 2026.

Notes, key additions, decoder and per-letter decryptions: hernannunez1674/ in the repository.

The Conde de Hernán Núñez to Baltasar de Fuenmayor, 1674