Roderigo López

Roderigo López was born in Portugal into a New Christian family of Jewish ancestry and trained in medicine at Coimbra before settling in England. He established a successful London practice, served at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and became a Fellow of the College of Physicians. His elite patients eventually included Queen Elizabeth I, to whom he became a physician in the 1580s.

In 1593–1594 López was accused of participating in a Spanish-backed conspiracy to poison the queen. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, pursued the case, and López was convicted of high treason and executed at Tyburn in June 1594. Historians have continued to debate the evidence against him; the prosecution and public reaction were also marked by anti-Jewish hostility, while Elizabeth’s delay in signing the warrant suggests that she may have doubted at least part of the case.

S. W. Perry places the López affair at the beginning of The Heretic’s Mark. The execution of the queen’s physician and the rumours surrounding the supposed poisoning plot create the atmosphere of fear in which Nicholas Shelby, another unconventional physician with connections to Robert Cecil, becomes vulnerable to accusation.