Roderigo Lopes
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.
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.
[2][3] His father, António Lopes, was physician to King John III of Portugal, and had been baptised into the Roman Catholic Church under coercion in 1497.
[4] Amid the Portuguese Inquisition, Lopes was alleged to be a Crypto-Jew or marrano—one of Jewish descent who professed the Christian faith, but secretly adhered to the Judaism of his ancestors—and was compelled to leave Portugal.
A colleague there, the surgeon William Clowes, noted in 1591 that "Lopes showed himself to be both careful and very skilful ... in his counsel in dieting, purging and bleeding.
[7] Roderigo and Sarah had four sons and two daughters, of whom at least the eldest five—Ellyn (Elinor), Ambrose, Douglas, William and Ann—were baptised within the hospital precincts at St Bartholomew-the-Less between 1564 and 1579.
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.
[4] 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.
[4] 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.
[9]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.
[4] Learning of this from Pérez, Essex began to assemble evidence implicating Lopes as some sort of fifth columnist in the pay of King Philip II of Spain.
[11] Late in 1593, Essex discovered a secret correspondence between Estevão Ferreira da Gama, one of Dom António's former supporters, and officials in the Spanish Netherlands—and had a messenger, Manuel Luis Tinoco, arrested.
[4] On 28 January 1594 Essex wrote to Anthony Bacon of "a most dangerous and desperate treason", the target of which was Queen Elizabeth: "The executioner should have been Dr Lopus.
[11] A letter written by the Spanish diplomat Count Gondomar to King Philip III of Spain a decade after the trial seems to indicate that Lopes and Ferreira da Gama had been unjustly convicted, and that there had been no plot involving the Portuguese doctor: "the King our master [Philip II] had never conceived nor approved such measures ... the Count of Fuentes neither received nor gave such an order, moreover it is understood that Dr Lopez never passed through his thoughts, because he was a friend of the Queen and a bad Christian.
[11] Some historians and literary critics consider Lopes and his trial to have been an influence on William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (written c. 1596–98), specifically as a prototype for the play's principal antagonist Shylock, a Venetian Jewish moneylender who hates Christians.
