Roderigo Lopes

Roderigo Lopes (c. 1517 – 7 June 1594) was a Portuguese physician who 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. Insisting on his innocence, the doctor was convicted of high treason in February and hanged, drawn and quartered in June, reportedly after averring from the scaffold that "he loved the Queen as well as he loved Jesus Christ"—a statement that, from a man of Jewish background, prompted mocking laughter from the crowd. Elizabeth's three-month delay signing Lopes's death warrant is sometimes interpreted as evidence that she doubted the case against him. In any case she returned almost all of his estate to his widow and children.

Rodrigo Lopes was born in Crato, Portugal into a family of Jewish origin around 1517. 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. Lopes was baptised and raised in the Catholic faith as a converso or New Christian, and educated at the University of Coimbra. He received a BA degree under the name Ruy Lopes on 7 February 1540, then an MA on 4 December 1541; he enrolled for a medical course on 23 December that year. Records do not survive regarding his doctorate, but according to his biographer Edgar Samuel it is probable that he received it in 1544.

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. He settled in England in 1559, anglicising his first name as "Roger", and successfully resumed his practice as a doctor in London. He joined the Church of England. He soon became the house physician at St Bartholomew's Hospital in Smithfield. 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."

Around 1563 Lopes married Sarah Anes (b. 1550), the eldest daughter of another New Christian refugee from the Portuguese Inquisition, the merchant Dunstan Anes, who had settled in London in 1540. According to Samuel, both the Anes and Lopes households secretly practised Judaism, which was then illegal in England, while outwardly conforming as Anglicans. Other scholars are ambivalent on the matter; Lopes would always insist that he was a Christian. 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's brother Lewis lived with them in Holborn; a second brother, Diego Lopes Aleman, became a merchant in Antwerp and Venice.

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's 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.