The case of Dr Roderigo Lopez, the only physician to English royalty ever to be executed for high treason, is not particularly well known, though Dominic Green’s The Double Life of Dr Lopez has done much to fill this gap in our knowledge. The case, however, provides a uniquely fascinating glimpse into the workings of the late Tudor world from the Elizabethan court with its aging, capricious Queen and intense rivalries, to the law in Elizabethan England (remember, almost every senior councillor had studied at one of the Inns of Court) to international relations – both openly diplomatic and dangerously clandestine. All served up with a disturbing seasoning of professional jealousy and antisemitism.
Roderigo Lopez was born around 1517 in Crato, a province of Portugal some 112 miles north-east of Lisbon. His father was personal physician to King John III. The family came from Jewish stock although they were converso (forcibly baptised) Catholics. Roderigo studied medicine at the University of Coimbra where, because of Moslem Moorish influences, the course was particularly advanced. On his final graduation in 1544, therefore, Lopez could claim to be one of the best-qualified doctors in Europe. His brilliance in the field of medicine did not deter the Portuguese Inquisition, however. Lopez was branded as marrano (still secretly practising Jewish rituals) and was driven out of the country. He spent the next few years practising in various European cities – and making a wide web of contacts, further broadened by his extended family. By 1559 he was settled in England, naturalized at the invitation of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. He joined the doctors at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, soon becoming one of the most respected there, and built up a lucrative practice treating the social elite.
Another resident of Crato also ran into trouble at home and abroad. This was Dom Antonio, the Prior of Crato. After a complex dynastic struggle in which Philip II among others claimed the throne after John III’s death, Dom Antonio was crowned King of Portugal in 1580. His reign was short-lived and eventually, fearing Philip’s predilection for employing assassins, he fled to England where Queen Elizabeth offered him her protection – one anointed monarch to another.
Lopez, a well-established London doctor by now and already one of Queen Elizabeth’s favourite physicians, inevitably joined Dom Antonio’s circle. The Doctor was well-to-do; his position at St Bart’s allowed him to widen his circle of patients and so he did. By now he was treating almost all of the leading men at court as well as their Queen, so it was natural that he should begin to do the same for his dethroned King and those of the court in exile who surrounded him. And thus, through them as well as through his earlier travels and his wide-spread family, his network of contacts eventually stretched as far as Constantinople.
Lopez married the daughter of a wealthy colleague (some years his junior; but he was an extremely active man who fathered four sons and two daughters with her and later took at least one mistress as well, whose bastard baby was famously left on his doorstep). However, he settled down into apparently untrammelled marital contentment. But within the next few years, almost every element of his personal and professional life threw up worrying complications which became dangerous complexities and ultimately fatal entanglements. His success bred jealousy, even among colleagues of established reputation like Gabriel Harvey. Although Lopez loudly and repeatedly declared himself a true and patriotic Protestant Englishman, whispers began to circulate that he and his wife were secretly practicing the Jewish religion in all its fancifully antisemitic excesses. But a combination of those assurances and rumours had already come to the ears of Francis Walsingham and William Cecil. Both men were running spy networks based on trade between England and Europe. In no time at all, the patriotic Lopez was inveigled into adding his wider and more flexible network to their own. Because many of his undercover agents were Portuguese, he became their handler for the simple reason that no-one else in the English spy networks spoke the language.
Hardly surprisingly, the down-at heel Portuguese aristocrats who had lost their estates, fortunes and social standing in order to follow the fallen King Antonio into exile were soon adding their best efforts to Lopez’s network, for spying could be a very useful source of much-needed income – though Walsingham and the Cecils (father and son) were as notoriously tight-fisted as the Queen herself. Lopez saw the danger inherent in their participation, however: Philip of Spain was much more generous – an irresistible temptation to some. After a while, therefore, Lopez himself was lending money to his agents and, indeed, to their masters. Dom Antonio soon owed Lopez a fortune and in an attempt to retrieve matters, both men joined the so-called English Armada of 1589, one element of which was designed to return Antonio to his throne on the back of a popular uprising, which would open to the English the wealth of the Portuguese East Indies. The total failure of this project cost the leaders Drake and Norris their reputations, Essex – who joined despite the Queen’s direct order not to do so – a great deal of standing at court, Antonio the last of his hopes and Lopez yet another fortune.
By now, Lopez was more than a spy-handler, he was an agent himself. At Walsingham’s prompting he had undertaken a little ‘speculation’, letting it be known that he was willing to poison the Queen’s syrup and kidnap or kill the troublesome Dom Antonio for the sum of 50,000 crowns. The objective appears simply to see who would crawl out of the woodwork. No-one new seems to have done so (Philip II was already notorious for offering such sums for successful assassinations – as was Duke Henri of Guise) But the rumour continued to circulate – fatally so after the death of Walsingham, which removed Lopez’s only witness to the deception.
But Philip was, of course, very interested. He sent Lopez an emerald ring as a token of his willingness to pay for action. Lopez, sensing the chance to do some good for his adopted country and for himself, began to discuss more openly what a plan to kill Dom Antonio, the Earl of Leicester (or Essex after Leicester’s death in 1588) or the Queen herself might look like. He was successful to the extent that Philip actually sent the money to await collection when Elizabeth was successfully poisoned.
But things eventually ran out of control at home. Essex, having compounded his military failings at the Counter Armada with a humiliating disaster at Rouen, was fiercely set on reclaiming his reputation with a major intelligence coup – so he set his own network to discover the truth behind Lopez’s offer to poison the Queen. Lopez and his network had been employed by the Cecils, father and son, for years. His agents had early-on carried correspondence between William Cecil and Philip discussing a peace treaty, a potentially treasonous undertaking made safe only by the Cecils’ belief that Lopez and his network could be trusted absolutely. So when they discovered Essex was planning to accuse Lopez, the Cecils agreed to look into the matter – and reported the Doctor to be innocent of all charges.
Essex, however, reiterated his accusations in person and in public to the Queen at court, and, despite getting a flea in his ear from the irate monarch, it was clear the examination now had to go further. Essex and Robert Cecil undertook a closer investigation of Lopez and his contacts, Essex determined to find him guilty, Cecil determined to maintain his innocence. But then Cecil’s examination threw up an unexpected and fatal fact. Lopez’s men had actually been working for the Spanish as well as the English and Lopez himself had apparently known – and perhaps colluded – in the treason. Fearful that if they stood too closely by Lopez, they would be accused along with him, the Cecils rapidly changed sides. Refusing to be distracted by the ongoing squabble over whose follower should be promoted to the influential post of Solicitor General – another bone of bitter contention – the Cecils were shocked and horrified to discover that Lopez was even more guilty than Essex believed: there was the matter of King Philip’s ring and of the 50,000 crowns.
With the greatest reluctance, Elizabeth gave permission for Lopez to be charged. On 28 February 1594, the Queen’s Bench court being in recess, Lopez was charged before a Commission of Oyer and Terminer and, despite his protestations of innocence supported by the fact that Her Majesty never drank the sweet syrup he was supposed to poison, he was found, in the words of chief prosecutor Sir Thomas Edgerton, ‘a perjured, murdering villain and a Jewish doctor worse than Judas himself.’ The Queen signed his death warrant with enormous unwillingness. He was, after all, her most effective personal physician and she relied upon him to treat her multiplying ailments. On the other hand she was well aware that gossip suggested that he had let it be known he was treating Essex for syphilis and the vengeful earl was never going to relent. Although she signed the warrant and put it into Cecil’s possession, she also sent to the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, where Lopez was being held, orders that no-one could exercise the warrant and remove Lopez for execution without further specific orders from her. When Cecil tried to do so, the Lieutenant refused to cooperate. Lopez stayed, ailing but alive and incarcerated.
It took some months for Cecil and Essex to find a way round the Queen’s orders. When she went on her Summer progress early in June, Cecil applied to the Lieutenant again; this time to take Lopez to Westminster not for execution but for examination by the senior judges of the Queen’s Bench. This was allowed. Lopez was examined by their Lordships. But, instead of being returned to the Tower, he was taken to the Marshalsea prison where Burghley had sat as a judge. Her Majesty’s orders were not in effect here. Cecil once again produced the Warrant for Lopez’s execution and this time it was acted upon. Roderigo Lopez, still maintaining that he was innocent of all charges, a true Englishman, a faithful subject to the Queen and a Protestant Christian in act and belief, was dragged through London on a hurdle to Tyburn where he was hanged, drawn and quartered on 7th June 1594.
Peter Tonkin is a novelist and the author of Shadow of Poison.
