Elizabethan England was newly freed from Spanish dominance when Roderigo Lopez found shelter there from the Portuguese Inquisition. This Jewish doctor took grave risks to protect his new queen from Spanish conspirators – or was he in fact a double agent working against her? 

“Kill the Jew!” the mob howled. “Hang him! Rip his guts out!” A bent old man in a tattered, black coat was hauled off the straw pallet on which he’d been dragged from the Tower of London. Yanked to his feet on the scaffold of London’s infamous Tyburn Tree, he was stripped of his outer garments, exposing his frail, white body to the bloodthirsty crowds. As the noose was lowered around his neck, he shouted vainly, “I love the queen! I love Jesus Christ!” But within minutes, his half-strangled body was lowered to the ground for the barbarous practice of drawing out his entrails and quartering his body, a savage punishment reserved for those convicted of high treason.

Who was this old man who died with Jesus and Queen Elizabeth on his lips while mocked for being a Jew? The last of his coreligionists had left England just over three centuries earlier. So what was this wretch doing in the country, and how had he earned such a dreadful fate?

 

Avoiding the Inquisition

Roderigo Lopez (sometimes Lopes) Gallo was born circa 1520 in Crato, Portugal, a small town some two hundred kilometers east of Lisbon. His Jewish-born father, Dr. Antonio Lopez, had ministered to John III after being forcibly converted to Catholicism along with the rest of the country’s Jews in 1497, when the previous monarch, Manuel, had married Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter. Thus, Roderigo was raised Catholic. Lopez entered Portugal’s prestigious University of Coimbra as a teenager and graduated three years later with a science degree. Moving to Spain, he completed medical school at the University of Salamanca in roughly 1544. Lopez then returned to Coimbra and opened a practice. Like many other New Christians, he seemed destined for an illustrious career.

Yet the doctor was also a crypto-Jew, continuing to observe at least some Jewish practices. Portugal had established an Inquisition to root out such renegades in 1536, and by 1559, Roderigo Lopez no longer felt secure. Cloaked in his Christian identity, he set sail for England. When necessary, he called himself Roger Gallo, anglicizing his first name and avoiding the Spanish associations of Lopez.

Settling in London, Lopez resumed his medical career. In the anti-Spanish atmosphere of Elizabethan England (see “The Anglo-Spanish Love-Hate Relationship,” p. 41), he protected himself by joining the Church of England. Nevertheless, he took the risk of becoming involved with the city’s small, unofficially tolerated Jewish community too. Lopez married Sara Añes, the daughter of a Portuguese Jewish merchant. Over the next few years, they had four sons and two daughters. All were baptized to conceal their Jewish descent, with their father’s name recorded as Master Doctor Lopus.

In September 1562, thanks to some Jewish friends in London, Lopez was hired by St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, which recorded that he would be employed “for one year from next Christmas in curing, helping and comforting the sick and sore in the House of the Poor” (Corporation of London Records Office, Repertory 15, fol. 118v., September 1562). Wellknown colleague William Clowes enthused that Lopez “shewed himself to be both careful and skillful, not only for his counsel in dyeting, purging and bleeding, but also for his direction of Arceus apozema […]. I have found it a treasure for the curing of wounds in the breast” (William Clowes, A Prooved Practise for All Young Chirurgians [1591]). (Reprints of Clowes’ treatise, published after Lopez’s demise, omitted this passage.)

As his reputation flourished, Lopez developed international connections through his far-flung family and fellow physicians. Contacts in the Netherlands, Flanders, and the Ottoman Empire allowed him to help struggling Jews and their communities. These activities attracted the attention of two prominent Elizabethans: Lord Burghley, principal secretary to Elizabeth and therefore a formidable potential ally, and Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen’s chief spymaster. The pair decided to exploit Lopez’s ties and knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese to gain information on his Iberian homeland.

In the meantime, Spain under Philip II, Elizabeth’s erstwhile brother-in-law and briefly co-ruler of England, had become England’s greatest enemy.