Roderigo Lopes

Roderigo Lopes was the son of a Portuguese royal physician of Jewish descent, raised Catholic and trained at Coimbra. Accused during the Portuguese Inquisition of secretly practising Judaism, he left the country and settled in London in 1559, where he became house physician at St Bartholomew's Hospital and, from 1581, chief physician to Queen Elizabeth I. Caught in a factional intrigue around the Earl of Essex, he was convicted of plotting to poison the Queen on evidence that historians regard as fabricated, and hanged, drawn and quartered in 1594. He is the only royal physician in English history to have been executed, and the trial's antisemitic rhetoric is widely thought to lie behind Shakespeare's Shylock, written within four years of his death.