page_title: Roderigo Lopez
section_title: Royal physician
hierarchical_section_title: Roderigo Lopez / Royal physician
context_page_description: Roderigo Lopes served as a physician-in-chief to Queen Elizabeth I of England from 1581 until his death by execution, having been found guilty of plotting to poison her. A Portuguese converso or New Christian of Jewish ancestry, he is the only royal doctor in English history to have been executed, and may have inspired the character of Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, which was written within four years of his death.
  The son of a Portuguese royal physician of Jewish descent, Lopes was raised a Catholic and educated at the University of Coimbra. Amid the Portuguese Inquisition he was accused of secretly practising Judaism, and compelled to leave the country. He settled in London in 1559, joined the Church of England and became house physician at St Bartholomew's Hospital. Gaining a reputation as a careful and skilled physician, he acquired several powerful clients, including the Earl of Leicester and Sir Francis Walsingham, and eventually the Queen of England herself.
  The Earl of Essex accused Lopes of conspiring to poison the Queen in January 1594.
context_section_description: Lopes developed a large practice among powerful people, including Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and the principal secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, and in 1581 he was made physician-in-chief to Queen Elizabeth I of England and her household, with a life pension of £50 per year. In June 1584, Elizabeth granted him a monopoly on the importation of aniseed and sumac to England for ten years; this was renewed in January 1593. In 1588 he was given land and tithes in Worcestershire belonging to the Bishop of Worcester Edmund Freke. Gabriel Harvey, an English scholar of the era, remarked on Lopes' rise on the title page of a book he owned, Judaeorum Medicastrorum calumnias:
  Doctor Lopus, the Queenes physitian, is descended of Jewes: but himselfe A Christian, & Portugall. He none of the learnedest, or expertest physitians in ye Court: but one, that maketh as great account of himself, as the best: & by a kind of Jewish practis, hath growen to much wealth, & sum reputation: aswell with ye Queen herselfe as with sum of ye greatest Lordes, & Ladyes.
  There were sections of English society at the time that believed there to be a plot, orchestrated by Catholics and carried out by Jewish physicians, to poison patients. Converso doctors in Iberia were similarly often accused of murdering their patients or attempting to poison them. In 1584, an anonymous Catholic pamphlet denouncing the Earl of Leicester suggested that "Lopes the Jewe" was one of the earl's agents "for poysoning & for the arte of destroying children in women's bellies".
  Fluent in five languages, Lopes was involved in diplomatic intrigue, as many Christians of Jewish origin were at this time. Amid England's war with Spain in the 1580s, Lopes became  an important member of a circle of Portuguese exiles in England, and the Queen's intermediary with the Portuguese pretender Dom António, Prior of Crato, who was staying near Windsor Castle. Lopes supported Dom António, but in 1586 one of the pretender's entourage, António da Veiga, wrote to the Spanish Ambassador in Paris, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, claiming that he could persuade Lopes to poison Dom António. The Spanish did not act on this idea.
  In 1590, Lopes approached Mendoza, possibly on Walsingham's behalf, with the intention of opening peace negotiations. The Spanish gave  Manuel de Andrada, Lopes' intermediary, a jewelled ring worth £100 as a gift for Lopes' daughter. After Walsingham's death in 1591, Lopes continued exchanging letters with Spanish officials without the English government's knowledge or authority. There is no surviving evidence to suggest that Lopes conspired against England or Elizabeth personally, but these Spanish connections would come back to punish him—according to Samuel, "Lopes had acted stupidly and dishonestly".
caption: Queen Elizabeth I of England, to whom Lopes was physician from 1581
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