by John Guy
Tinoco, Phelippes confirmed, had sneaked out of England in July 1593 for the Continent, supposedly on a mission for Dom António.38 Hoping to keep himself safely under the radar, he went to see Philip’s senior advisers in Brussels, taking with him documents from Andrada. To secure a passport from Burghley for the return journey to Dover, he pretended to have recently escaped from prison in Morocco and claimed he had important information to offer.39 Granted a passport shortly after Christmas, Tinoco made his return around the third week of January 1594, when he was intercepted on the road to London by an increasingly vigilant Essex.40
When searched, he was found to be carrying letters from Brussels addressed to da Gama, ordering him to take over from Andrada the organization of a plot to kill Elizabeth.41 The letters confirmed that King Philip had agreed to the assassination, which Lopez had told da Gama in their furtive conversation at Wanstead he was willing to do for the sum of 50,000 crowns by poisoning the queen’s syrup.42 Tinoco also carried letters of credit, to be shown to Lopez ‘for his assurance’, which proved that the ever-cautious Philip required the bounty to be paid by merchants in Antwerp, so as not to be attributable to him and on no account before the deed was done. This evidence was damning.43
• • •
On Monday, 28 January, Essex wrote in jubilation to Anthony Bacon:
I have discovered a most dangerous and desperate treason. The point of conspiracy was Her Majesty’s death. The executioner should have been Dr Lopez; the manner by poison. This I have so followed, as I will make it appear as clear as the noon day.44
At first, Lopez was detained in Essex’s custody at Essex House, where he was guarded by the Earl’s steward, Sir Gelly Meyrick. Held in isolation while Tinoco and Ferreira da Gama were also arrested, the doctor was left to stew until Essex had compiled a full dossier of charges.
When Elizabeth was shown the dossier on Tuesday, the stakes rose considerably. She reluctantly allowed Essex to transfer all three prisoners to the Tower. Questioned by Essex, Tinoco now revealed that Cristóbal de Moura had previously sent Lopez a valuable jewel (the ring set with a diamond and a ruby). He even explained the meaning of some crucial code words in a seemingly innocent document that had so far baffled Essex. ‘Musk’ and ‘Amber’ referred not to imported goods but to a projected Spanish attack on the English fleet; the ‘Pearl’ was Elizabeth, and ‘the price of the Pearls’ meant the sum that was to be paid for poisoning her.45
Shortly after dawn the next day, Essex and Robert Cecil began interrogating Lopez. Peppering his admissions ‘with oaths, protestations and profane speeches’, the doctor protested that his part in the conspiracy was no more than a feint designed to ‘cozen’ (cheat) the Spanish king so as to recoup his disbursements on Dom António’s behalf. He had never meant to kill Elizabeth. It was common knowledge, he said, that she never touched syrups: she or her Bedchamber servants had only to be asked for confirmation and all would become clear. And it is true, Elizabeth never contradicted Lopez’s claim.46
Essex, however, was convinced that Lopez was lying and he was determined to prove it. The doctor admitted that he had indeed been sent a jewel by de Moura, which he claimed his wife had sold for half its true value.47 He also disarmingly confirmed that he had ‘caused da Gama to offer his services to the king of Spain’ for a large sum of money – Anthony Bacon considered this alone to be enough to hang him.48
But if Essex believed this investigation would provide him with an opportunity to unseat Burghley and his son from their dominant positions of influence, he was sorely mistaken. No sooner had he shown the queen his dossier proving that her chief physician had a definite case to answer than – to cut him down to size – she spitefully warned him that he could expect to lose out to Burghley in the competition to nominate the next Queen’s Attorney. She then taunted him further, saying she was listening intently to her chief minister’s request that Cecil should be given the lion’s share of Walsingham’s old position as her principal secretary, the very role that Essex so desperately coveted for himself.49
To add insult to injury, Robert Cecil dropped the veneer of civility. In a coach they shared on their way back from the Tower to the Strand after interrogating Lopez, he goaded Essex, gloating that Elizabeth intended to appoint a new Queen’s Attorney very shortly and asking him if he had any suggestions. Tetchily, Essex replied that he wondered why Cecil should ask him this question, since it was common knowledge that he was backing Francis Bacon. ‘Good Lord,’ said Cecil insouciantly. ‘I wonder your Lordship should go about to spend your strength in so unlikely and impossible a matter.’ He went on to suggest that it was as simple as ABC to know that Elizabeth meant to appoint Burghley’s candidate, Sir Edward Coke, Bacon’s rival and the more obvious choice – as indeed she soon did.50
• • •
Essex may have been wounded by these encounters, but he was far from conceding defeat. During February, Burghley’s attacks of gout had once more confined him to bed. This time, the severe, unrelenting pain compounded his sense of vulnerability: a cascade of revelations from da Gama and Tinoco, who turned queen’s evidence, dramatically increased the risk that his secret meeting with Andrada three years before would become more widely known.51 Burghley was gradually reconciling himself to the fact that, almost fifty years since he had begun to serve the teenage Elizabeth, he was finally losing his grip. Too weak to scribble more than a few lines, let alone ride, he left his reputation in the hands of his son, who dashed to and fro between the Tower and Elizabeth’s Privy Chamber clutching papers, passing through the Presence Chamber ‘like a blind man, not looking upon any’.52
What Essex always considered to be his biggest breakthrough in the case came on 18 February, when da Gama confessed to having received two letters from Lopez, dictated from the doctor’s own lips, both addressed to de Moura in Madrid. Da Gama had undertaken to see them delivered, and their contents, as he carefully described them, tied the assassination plot securely to Lopez.53 Five days later, Tinoco confirmed that, when he had met Philip’s advisers in Brussels, they had assured him that Lopez had ‘offered and bound himself to kill the queen with poison’. ‘All this’, he said, ‘I certify to have passed in great truth and certainty, and do affirm it under mine oath.’54
On 25 February, Essex interrogated Lopez for the last time. The prisoner was threatened with the rack and told to tell the whole truth. He admitted ‘for the discharge of his conscience’ that he had plotted with da Gama to poison the queen for 50,000 crowns but stuck resolutely to his story that he had never intended to go through with it, since his sole aim was to cozen King Philip. On this point, he refused to budge, and there the matter rested, as Essex was only too well aware that Elizabeth would never allow him to torture her trusted physician. Gossip in the streets of London held that Lopez had been tortured ‘divers times upon the rack’, but this was untrue. He was merely shown ‘the instruments of torture’ in an attempt to terrify him into revealing all he knew.55
When, despite lacking Lopez’s signed confession to a charge of conspiracy to murder, Essex declared his belief that he had enough evidence to convince a jury, Cecil, surprisingly, agreed. Although he and his father still privately maintained that Lopez was innocent, they intended now to do their utmost to send the doctor speedily to the gallows. Far from intervening to save the man’s life in the interests of justice, they wanted him dead before Essex, who was getting too close for comfort, unearthed any trace of Burghley’s clandestine peace diplomacy. On Burghley’s advice, Elizabeth even allowed Essex and Cecil to sit in judgement at the Guildhall as two of the fifteen trial commissioners, despite their prominent role in compiling the case for the prosecution.56
At Lopez’s trial, the Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Coke, put on a bravura performance, his eye firmly fixed on his imminent promotion to Queen’s Attorney:
For the poisoning of Her Highness, this miscreant, perjured, murdering traitor and Jewish
doctor hath been proved a dearer traitor than Judas himself . . . The bargain was made, the price agreed upon and he did undertake it. The fact was deferred but until payment of the money was assured. The letters of credit for his assurance were sent, and before they came to his hand . . . God most mercifully and miraculously revealed and prevented it.57
Further spiced with anti-Semitism in the shape of a report that Lopez’s ‘conversion’ to Christianity had never been more than a sham, Coke’s rhetoric all but guaranteed a guilty verdict.58
• • •
Once the verdict was pronounced, Cecil lost no time in ordering Sir Thomas Windebank, the senior clerk standing in as the queen’s confidential secretary, to inform her that while ‘the vile Jew’ had pleaded not guilty, ‘the most substantial jury that I have seen have found him guilty in the highest degree of all treasons, and judgement [is] passed against him with an applause of all the world.’ Cecil clearly believed that Elizabeth would need this depth of reassurance to be convinced that her doctor should be sent to the gallows.59
Breaking any promises to treat da Gama and Tinoco leniently in exchange for turning queen’s evidence, Cecil resolved to convict and hang them, too. Interrogated afresh in early March, they had little more to say, and a trial date was set for the 14th.60 Da Gama pleaded not guilty, but changed his plea when confronted by the prosecution’s evidence. Tinoco pleaded guilty from the outset, then asked for mercy. Both were sentenced to death ‘for the highest and most horrible and detestable treasons’, though quite how they could have been considered to be traitors when they were Portuguese and had never, unlike Lopez, been naturalized or sworn to Elizabeth’s service was left unexplained. They were returned to the Tower, where they were to await their final journey with Lopez to Tyburn.61
And yet nothing happened. Far from being hanged in the usual way, all three prisoners were alive and well a month later, safely in the custody of Sir Michael Blount, the Lieutenant of the Tower.62 Uneasy about the verdicts, Elizabeth refused to give her final assent to the men’s deaths. At one point, she set a date and time, the morning of Friday, 19 April at nine o’clock, but at the last moment she changed her mind and ordered the executions to be postponed indefinitely.63
Her indecision caused consternation. Lord Buckhurst, the privy councillor who in 1587 had dared to tell her that she would end up looking like a murderer if she summarily hanged the unfortunate William Davison, at once protested to Cecil. Only two days were left, he reminded him, before the authority of the fifteen trial commissioners would lapse. If the doctor and his co-conspirators were not hanged by then, new commissioners would have to be appointed and all three trials begun again.64
Elizabeth’s thinking at last became clearer. As Cecil reported it, she had forbidden Sir Michael Blount from allowing the condemned men to be taken from their cells to execution until she instructed otherwise. She still believed in Lopez’s innocence: to save the life of her doctor, she would use her royal prerogative to stay the due process of law. This, a worried Cecil reported, would create a public outcry, as Londoners were baying for blood.65
Slyly, Cecil now persuaded the judges of the Court of Queen’s Bench to extend the powers of the trial commissioners on their own authority.66 But Elizabeth was too quick for him. When he began a fresh move to have the condemned men sent to the gallows, she stepped in again, ordering Blount not to allow Lopez to be executed on pain of dire punishment, however many death warrants he received.67
Burghley and Cecil broke the deadlock in an underhand way. Joining forces with Essex and commandeering Lord Hunsdon and Lord Admiral Howard, whose opinions on sensitive matters the queen always respected, they confronted Elizabeth on 1 June at Lady Anne Gresham’s house at Osterley in Middlesex, where she had just begun her summer progress. When they all insisted, one by one, that the law be put into effect, Elizabeth yielded to the principle. But that was the easy bit. She did not, at the same time, countermand her restraining order to Blount.68
To circumvent this final hurdle, Burghley and Cecil used a legal trick. Applying on 4 June to the judges of the Court of Queen’s Bench, they secured writs ordering Lopez, da Gama and Tinoco to be brought into Westminster Hall within ten days to answer certain questions. When on the 7th the prisoners appeared, they were first asked if they had anything to add to what they had said before, which none did.69 No one seriously imagined that they would: the objective was simply to take them out of Blount’s jurisdiction. They were then remanded back to prison, but this time they were not sent to the Tower. Cecil, Burghley and Essex had colluded in advance with the most senior judges to make sure that the condemned men would instead be sent to the Marshalsea, where no restraining order from the queen was in force.70
The very next morning, the condemned men were frogmarched to London Bridge and dragged from there to Tyburn. On the scaffold, Lopez vehemently protested his innocence, declaring that he loved the queen and Dom António as much as he loved Jesus Christ. Coming from a man who was universally believed to be a practising Jew and almost certainly was, his words only excited the ribald jeers of the angry crowd.71 It can be no coincidence that, in these very months, London’s best-known theatrical impresario, Philip Henslowe, staged multiple performances of a revival of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.* With its dramatic scenes of poisoning by a Jew who dissembled in religion and possessed a secret knowledge of drugs very closely akin to that taught at the University of Coimbra, the play packed out the Rose Theatre for weeks. A rough draft of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice may even have been sketched out around this time.72
Elizabeth had hoped to spare her chief physician’s life. Outmanoeuvred by her councillors for the first time since the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, she must have been privately exasperated, but she chose not to exact reprisals. Whatever Lopez had meant to her, he was not a queen. She could console herself with the fact that, after all, he might, conceivably, have been guilty. For among Essex’s more tantalizing discoveries was a report that Lopez was planning to retire to Istanbul and had already made arrangements with his Jewish in-laws there to purchase a house.73
Essex appeared to be the victor in this affair. By unmasking what had all the hallmarks of a dangerous conspiracy and driving its architects to the gallows, he had proved he was a force to be reckoned with. He had shown to his own satisfaction his mastery of intelligence matters, oblivious to the fact that Burghley and his son had deliberately allowed themselves to be outflanked on this occasion. Now it seemed that nothing could stop him from succeeding Burghley as the queen’s chief minister. A meteoric career as a statesman, as well as a military man, would surely open up before him.
But would Elizabeth let him and, even if she did, could he restrain his ambition sufficiently to work harmoniously with his fellow privy councillors and so retain her trust? Or would his hunger for glory bring him to the brink of catastrophe?
14. Games of Thrones
While the headstrong Earl of Essex was busy interrogating Dr Lopez, an event of the utmost significance was taking place at Stirling Castle in Scotland. Shortly after three o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, 19 February 1594, Prince Henry, the first child of Anne of Denmark and James VI, was born. In Edinburgh, bonfires were lit in the streets and church bells rung. To demonstrate their loyalty and fidelity, the town council ordered that all good citizens should make their way to the Kirk to join in a public service of thanksgiving to God for sending them a male heir to guarantee the survival and stability of the Scottish monarchy.1
South of the border, the repercussions were very different. Whereas Anne and James now had a healthy son, Elizabeth was a barren spinster. As she had no biological heir, the Tudor dynasty would die with her. Since the ratification of the Anglo-Scottish league in July 1586, James, naïvely, had drawn what seemed to him to be the obvious inference that she would nominate him to succeed her. But when he failed to curb to her satisfaction the actions of his favourite, the Earl of
Huntly, whom Burghley’s spies caught plotting to assist a Spanish invasion of the British Isles for a second time in 1592, she slashed his annual pension from £5,000 to £2,000, throwing her intentions into doubt.2
She then went one step further and began talking openly to her privy councillors of reneging on her league with James.3 So angry with him was she for his failure to call Huntly to account that, three days before Christmas in 1593, she berated him in the manner of a bossy nanny:
To see so much, I rue my sight that views the evident spectacle of a seduced king, defying counsel and wry-guiding kingdoms. My love to your good and hate of your ruin breeds my heedful regard of your surest safety. If I neglected you, I could wink at your worst and yet withstand my enemies’ drifts. But be you persuaded by beguilers, I will advise you void of all guile and will not stick to tell you that if you tread the path you go in, I will pray for you but leave you to your harms.4
He was, she railed, leading himself and all who depended on him to damnation.
She had already lived longer than any English monarch since Edward III. And yet, to Burghley’s despair, she still could not bring herself psychologically to name her successor. In fact, she refused as obstinately now as she had while Mary Queen of Scots was alive. Her reasons were the same: she believed that identifying a successor by name would hasten her own death. With painful memories of the threats she had faced in Mary Tudor’s reign still prominent in her mind, she had once stated, ‘I know the inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present government and have their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed.’5
One of her most celebrated mantras was ‘Think you that I could love my own winding sheet?’6 And no one could forget the ongoing tribulations of the unfortunate Peter Wentworth, who had come close to asking her to do just that.7 A noted parliamentarian and presbyterian sympathizer on cordial terms with Burghley, he had first put his thoughts on the succession down on paper shortly after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. He fell foul of Elizabeth in the summer of 1591, when he started lobbying Burghley and his friends to persuade the queen to summon a special session of Parliament in which all titles and claims to the succession could be discussed. Although he did not say as much, Wentworth clearly envisaged a scenario in which Parliament would confirm the succession of a staunchly Protestant candidate, removing the decision from Elizabeth’s hands. The question was: who?8