by John Guy
In a patriotic appeal intended for the queen’s ears, Ralegh urged Cecil never to forget that, unless more were done to make England’s war effort self-financing, King Philip would prove to be invincible and the Protestant cause throughout Europe would be crushed. ‘We must not look to maintain war upon the revenues of England,’ he fervently exclaimed.59
But Elizabeth’s ears were shut fast. Only with the arrival of sudden, terrifying news that a second Gran Armada was in an advanced state of preparation and that Calais was under attack by Spanish forces would Ralegh’s career rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes. Then, like the chameleon he had undoubtedly become, he would, once more, be able to reinvent himself and return to the El Dorado of her favour.
13. Conspiring against the Queen
From sunrise until four o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday, 28 February 1594, an event took place at the Guildhall in London that had tongues wagging all over England. Dr Roderigo Lopez, for the past twelve years Elizabeth’s chief physician, stood trial before a panel of fifteen special commissioners on a charge of plotting to poison her. For this heinous act of treachery, he had been offered the vast sum of 50,000 crowns or gold escudos (worth roughly £18 million now).1 Asked how he would plead after the long indictment was read out, he replied, ‘Not guilty’. Twelve jurors, all citizens of London, were then sworn in and the lawyers for the prosecution began to make their case.
Seven or eight hours later, the jurors were asked to deliver their verdict. ‘Guilty of high treason’ came the instant reply. Lopez, who was denied legal representation, as custom in treason trials dictated, was asked if he knew any reason why the court should not proceed to judgement. He replied starkly, ‘I have nothing to say that I’ve not said before.’ He had been closely questioned in the Tower, and everything he and the witnesses in the case had said had been repeated in court.
Without further delay, the prosecution asked the court to deliver its sentence. Lopez was condemned to be led away back to his cell in the Tower, and from there to be dragged on a hurdle to the gallows at Tyburn, where he was to be hanged, drawn and quartered.2 Except that Elizabeth halted the execution the day before it was due to take place. As late as the beginning of June, he was still alive. Why the delay? Did the ageing queen believe her doctor was innocent, or was she finally losing her touch, unable to decide whom to believe, Lopez or his accusers?
The baptized son of a converso Jew who had risen to become King John III of Portugal’s chief physician, Roderigo Lopez had graduated from the University of Coimbra, famous for its teaching of the use of Arabic and Asian medicines and strong drugs. Fluent in five languages, he had fled to London to escape from the hated Inquisition when he was in his mid-thirties, shortly after Elizabeth’s accession. Conforming outwardly in religion by attending his local parish church but reputedly faithful to Judaism in secret, Lopez was appointed house physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London and quickly won a reputation as a society doctor – one of several unsubstantiated allegations was that he performed illegal abortions.3 Married to Sara Añes, the daughter of the queen’s grocer, who was also of Portuguese Jewish descent, he rented a tenement in the parish of St Andrew’s, Holborn.4
With the help of an anonymous celebrity patient, who was almost certainly the Earl of Leicester, Lopez received a grant of denization and became a naturalized Englishman. Soon, Walsingham was another of his patients. And, in 1581, Elizabeth appointed Lopez as her own chief physician at a salary of £50 a year. He was now one of very few men allowed into her Bedchamber and the only one allowed to see her without a wig or cosmetics. When he was accused of plotting the queen’s assassination, he was living in some style with his wife and daughter in a house in Mountjoy Inn, near Aldgate, where Elizabeth’s great-grandmother Margaret Beaufort had once lodged.5
While, however, Lopez was well known by his Portuguese friends to be ‘a man in great credit with the queen’, he was up to his neck in the murky world of politics and espionage.6 When Dom António sought asylum also in 1581, Lopez petitioned Leicester to help get him into England and then acted as his informal ambassador and financial agent.7 Four years later, when Dom António fell sick during a visit to the West Country, Elizabeth ordered Lopez, then attending her at Nonsuch Palace, to ride post-haste to Plymouth to do what he could for him.8 But after the fiasco of Drake and Norris’s bungled attack on Lisbon in 1589, Elizabeth largely went cold on Dom António, who was forced to live in poverty in Windsor before moving to France to eke out a living on a meagre pension. As his prospects grew dimmer, his followers began to melt away. Some even put out feelers to King Philip, offering their services to a man they had hitherto denounced as a vile usurper.
From Burghley’s perspective, the situation was threatening, but also an opportunity. The opportunity lay in the relative ease with which the Portuguese could be recruited as unofficial English agents, or better still as counter-spies, working for him; the risk was that they might become Philip’s spies or begin selling information gleaned from Elizabeth’s courtiers or privy councillors.
Lopez, who wisely never put anything in writing if it could possibly be avoided, began his espionage career in earnest in 1589, when he began feeding Walsingham information on Spanish intentions after the failure of the Armada.9 Using the code name the Merchant, he introduced Burghley to the shadowy circle around a fellow Portuguese exile and head of the Jewish community in London, the physician Hector Nuñez. Among them was Manuel de Andrada, a close confidant of Dom António based in London, who was ostensibly loyal to the pretender but was actually a double agent regularly in touch with Bernardino de Mendoza, Philip’s ambassador in Paris.10
By 1591, even as Burghley lobbied Elizabeth to allow the Earl of Essex’s expedition to Normandy, it was already clear that the costs of the long war with Spain were fast spiralling out of control. Elizabeth’s drawn-out peace negotiations of 1588 with the Duke of Parma, abandoned only once it was known in England that Philip had ordered his Armada to set sail, had made a deep impression on Burghley. Everything that had happened since then had confirmed his belief that, deep down, the queen still wanted peace. He therefore decided to do the unthinkable: to enter into clandestine negotiations with Philip on his own account – just in case. And the Portuguese exiles were the ideal agents to make such secret overtures.11
• • •
Andrada travelled from London to Madrid on his way to the Escorial, using the code name David, in the spring of 1591. Peddling Burghley’s line that Elizabeth wanted a general peace, he secured an audience with Philip.12 In a vivid account, Andrada described the sixty-four-year-old king, whose hand he was invited to kiss, as being tormented with arthritis and sitting in a black velvet chair in which his attendants shuttled him about.13 But, predictably, Philip was interested in extending the hope of peace only to lull Elizabeth into a false sense of security while he rearmed. At a subsequent interview, two of his closest advisers, Cristóbal de Moura and Juan de Idiáquez, both hawks renowned for condoning assassinations, promised Andrada a generous reward if he would eliminate Dom António, either by killing him or by arranging for him to be kidnapped.
At the second of these interviews, Andrada – purely, as he later claimed to Burghley, to ‘sound out’ Philip’s inclinations – asked what might be available should someone be willing to assassinate Elizabeth. De Moura answered warily, but to point Andrada in the right direction he (or just possibly, Philip; the sources differ) gave him a gold ring set with a diamond and a large ruby worth over £100. This came as a gift for Dr Lopez or his daughter as a token of the Spanish king’s high esteem. Already, it seems, Lopez was a name to conjure with at Philip’s Court.14
Since Andrada meant to sell his services to the highest bidder, it is likely that he secured these interviews by offering to double-cross Burghley. But things went badly awry. His ship foundered off the coast of Saint-Malo on his return journey to London and he was forced to make his way overland thro
ugh France before hitching a lift at Le Havre on a Flemish sloop. Intercepted and searched by three of Henry IV’s patrol vessels near Dieppe, he attracted the attention of Ottywell Smith, an English merchant driven out of Rouen by the Leaguers, who was one of Burghley’s most reliable informants. Writing on 6 July 1591, Smith warned the Lord Treasurer that Andrada had been caught carrying a bundle of highly incriminating documents, along with letters of credit to receive money from Philip in Flanders. And this despite professing himself loyal to the queen.15
• • •
On landing at Rye, on the south coast of England, Andrada was quickly arrested. He immediately wrote to Burghley, pleading to be called to account only by him or ‘some other person whom Her Majesty hath great trust in’.16 Burghley sent his servant Thomas Mills, accompanied by Lopez, to question Andrada and search his luggage.17 Then, in the second week in August, Burghley made what would turn out to be a costly error. He himself met Andrada.18 It was a short meeting. Andrada falsely reported that Philip had agreed to the idea of a general peace in principle, but Burghley did not believe him: he had just read the documents confiscated at Dieppe.19
Covering his tracks for fear he would be in trouble for his unauthorized diplomacy, Burghley sought an audience with Elizabeth. Carefully minimizing his role in the proceedings, he reported disingenuously that Andrada had arrived unexpectedly, claiming to be sent by Philip to make overtures for peace. What should he do? Somewhat bemused, the queen ordered Burghley to send Thomas Mills to put fresh, more detailed interrogatories to the now imprisoned Andrada, to which the double agent was to give written answers, either in French or Italian, but not in Portuguese, which neither she nor Burghley could read.20
Eventually released from prison and put under surveillance, Andrada went to lodge with Lopez, but on 24 April 1593 he slipped away from London late in the evening and fled to Calais and then Brussels. He would never return.21 He was spotted at Vlissingen in December and in Amsterdam shortly afterwards, still posing as one of Dom António’s diplomats but in reality fully exposed for what he had long ago become: a dangerous spy in Philip’s pay. The one outstanding niggle in Burghley’s mind was that Lopez had been far too friendly with him and might have been told of Burghley’s secret overtures to Philip. It was a worrying loose end.22
• • •
The sensational accusation that the queen’s chief physician was a traitor would be levelled not by Burghley but by a triumphant Earl of Essex, making his debut as a serious politician. It took him a discouragingly long time to hit this mark, since, after the debacle of the scaling ladders at the siege of Rouen, his career had languished in the doldrums. In the twenty or so months since his return from France, Elizabeth had chiefly used him as a stage prop at official ceremonies such as the reception of visiting ambassadors.23
To give him credibility as a co-host, she permitted him to occupy Leicester’s vacant lodgings at her palaces and to move into Leicester House on the Strand, which he renamed Essex House. She loaned him furniture (all his stepfather’s possessions and artworks had been auctioned off) and even ordered her bailiffs to give him the keys to Leicester’s country retreat at Wanstead. But she ignored all his pleas for patronage and career advancement for himself and his friends.24
On account of the plague, Elizabeth celebrated Christmas 1593 with a much-reduced Court. She moved from Windsor Castle to Hampton Court shortly after finishing her translation of The Consolation of Philosophy, but she was still suffering bouts of depression. When Robert Carey arrived on Boxing Day, he found the lords and ladies dancing, as usual, in the Presence Chamber but the queen in a bad mood and refusing to leave her Bedchamber.25 Forced to emerge on Twelfth Night to receive Bernard of Anhalt, the younger brother of Prince Christian of Anhalt, who had commanded Henry’s German Reiter at the siege of Rouen, she watched a play in the early evening and stayed up to see the dancing afterwards until one in the morning.26 She ‘appeared there in a high throne’, as an eyewitness, the spy Anthony Standen, one of Walsingham’s shadier veterans, reported, ‘richly adorned, and as beautiful . . . as ever I saw her’. Beside her, tall, svelte and clean-shaven, apart from his pointed moustache, stood the Earl of Essex, ‘with whom she often devised in sweet and favourable manner’.27
Standen’s report is sometimes misread to mean that a sexually frustrated, sexagenarian spinster openly flirted with Essex, a man less than half her age, kissing or caressing him.28 Lytton Strachey’s entire theory that ‘her heart melted with his flatteries, and, as she struck him lightly on the neck with her long fingers, her whole being was suffused with a lasciviousness that could hardly be defined’ depends on this solitary reference.29
But ‘to devise’ in Tudor speech normally means ‘to plan, contrive, design, converse’, not to kiss or caress. It can also mean ‘consider, scan, survey, examine, look at attentively’, and something along these lines is likely to be what Standen had in mind. Undoubtedly, Elizabeth liked having Essex around her. She needed the reassurance of his attentions. He made her feel young again, but, for all her attachment to him, he was not like his stepfather, whom she had several times kissed or fondled in public. Only recently, she had quarrelled violently with Essex, which was hardly surprising, as the Court was ablaze with rumours that he, too, had become Dr Lopez’s patient and was being treated for a highly embarrassing venereal disease.30
Most likely, she enjoyed dangling him on a string, forcing him to dance attendance on her. We do not know what they spoke about that evening, but this was almost exactly the moment when Essex began lobbying her to appoint his new confidant and adviser, the brilliant forensic lawyer and polymath Francis Bacon,* to the sensitive post of Queen’s Attorney, which was about to be vacated by Sir Thomas Egerton. If indeed he raised the topic that evening, she would have answered him evasively. She had no intention of promoting Bacon. She was too irked with him, because, posing as a taxpayers’ champion, he had dared to criticize the scale of her war taxation in Parliament.31
Keen to advance his bid for power and influence, Essex concluded that only a spectacular intelligence coup would convince Elizabeth that he could beat Burghley and Robert Cecil at their own game. Some ten weeks earlier, he had heard whispers from those still loyal to Dom António that Lopez, coaxed by Andrada, had offered to kill the queen for a large sum of money in some sort of ingeniously undetectable way.32 To advance his plan, Lopez was said to be in secret communication with King Philip’s advisers via yet another Portuguese double agent, Esteban Ferreira da Gama, whom Essex had tracked down and questioned. The Earl did not yet have much by way of proof, but he suspected a conspiracy. He remembered that he had spotted Lopez in furtive conversation with da Gama earlier that summer at Wanstead.33 And, after all, where political assassinations were concerned, Philip had form: memories of the brutal murder of William of Orange were still fresh.
• • •
It was typical of Essex that he should have fired his ammunition prematurely. A few days after Twelfth Night, having notified Cecil and Lord Admiral Howard of his suspicions, he marched into Elizabeth’s Privy Chamber and accused Dr Lopez of hatching a plot to assassinate her. When he burst in, febrile with excitement, she thought he had gone mad. She scolded him witheringly, calling him a ‘rash and temerarious youth’. He had no business, she said, to venture into a matter ‘which he could not prove’, against a man ‘whose innocence she knew well enough’.34
She even accused him of levelling this accusation maliciously, to take revenge for the rumours of his venereal disease. The good doctor, she said, had already been questioned once by Burghley and his son. Cecil had searched Lopez’s house, but nothing incriminating could be found. Essex, she fumed, had acted presumptuously. His unwelcome intervention had put her honour at stake: she must now see justice done, and he should leave her presence, go home and recover his senses.
Returning to the Strand, Essex locked himself in his study, slamming the door. There he sulked for over
an hour before retiring to his bedchamber, where he remained for two days. Only when he had calmed down did he realize that all was not lost. When questioned, Lopez had said that yes, he had indeed dabbled in what might look like a conspiracy with Andrada and Ferreira da Gama, but he was simply out to recover from King Philip the considerable sums he had personally spent on behalf of the Portuguese pretender, who was unable to repay a penny. Burghley and his son were convinced that Lopez was innocent. As Cecil jotted down in a brief note to his father, ‘In Lopez’s folly, I see no point of treason intended to the queen, but a readiness to make some gain to the hurt of Dom António.’35
But Essex was convinced of the doctor’s guilt. Since Walsingham’s death, he had recruited several of his father-in-law’s spies and cryptographers, notably Thomas Phelippes, the man who had infamously added the ciphered postscript to the ‘bloody letter’ of Mary Queen of Scots. Phelippes had been inveigled into working for Essex by Francis Bacon and William Sterrell, an expert at penetrating the networks of English Catholic exiles in Flanders.36
Sterrell (whose aliases were Henry St Main, Mr Franklin and Robert Robinson) had long been on the track of a cell of Catholic exiles who were promoting the idea of a false peace with Elizabeth so that they could kill her. At the time, the trail had led nowhere, causing Essex and Phelippes huge embarrassment, but after a courier for one of Sterrell’s informers chanced on a suggestive scrap of evidence during a trip to Antwerp, one Manuel Luis Tinoco, a Portuguese spy, friend of Andrada and close associate of Ferreira da Gama, came firmly into the spotlight.37