Part II

By Dr. Jean Jofen

� 1985

From the Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society (vol. VI, 1908) by Major Martin Hume, the first of "the So-called conspiracy of Dr. Ruy Lopez" becomes clear. He points out that in the last 20 years of Elizabeth’s reign, and after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Protestants of England under the leadership of the Earl of Essex, inflamed the minds of Englishmen against Spain and the Catholics.

Lopez was of Portuguese origin but appears to have come from Antwerp to which city many Jews fled after their expulsion from Portugal. He seems then to have lived in London early in Elizabeth’s reign. He obtained the post of household physician to the Earl of Leicester, a favorite of the Queen. Unfortunately, Leicester had many enemies whom he was accused of removing by poison, and his physician Lopez shared in this evil reputation. In 1586, he was appointed principal physician to the Queen, and house physician to Batholomew’s Hospital.

When Philip II of Spain conquered Portugal in 1581, the Portuguese Pretender to the throne fled with the crown jewels to France which accepted him with open arms. After two unsuccessful attempts to regain his crown with French aid, he came to England to ask for the support of the Queen. Doctor Lopez was his interpreter and he gave him "a diamond ring worth 100 pounds." This ring caused Lopez’s downfall at his trial where it was said to have been sent by Philip of Spain to Lopez to murder Queen Elizabeth.

Afterwards, Lopez made an enemy of the Earl of Essex. "He was said to have divulged some very discreditable detail about an illness for which he had treated the Earl of Essex." In January 1594, "the blow fell from Essex" and Dr. Lopez was arrested:

"He began by indignantly denying his guilt; and then in terror and distress he broke down, and admitted that he had made a promise to poison the Queen; but only with the intention of cheating the Spaniards out of a large sum of money and not doing the deed. He withdrew the confession as soon as his composure returned, but it was too late. He was tried at Guildhall on February 28 by a special commission upon which Essex and Cecil sat."

He begged for his life and for a long time, the Queen did not sign the death warrant, but in 1594 he was hanged "and disemboweled at Tyburn, amidst the laughter and cheers of the ribald crowd, and with circumstances of revolting cruelty."

Major Hume concludes: "But whatever Ruy Lopez was, he was not a fool; and quite apart from the absence of any serious confirmatory evidence against him of a desire to kill the Queen, it appears to me quite apart from the absence of any serious confirmatory evidence against him of a desire to kill the Queen, it appears to me quite incredible that he, in high favour in England, should poison his benefactress to gain a reward from a king that he and all Jews had reason to hate, and who, moreover, was a notoriously bad paymaster. Lopez had made England his home for 40 years, and if the Queen had died at his hands, not only England, but every Protestant country in Europe would have been closed to him thenceforward, and he would have been ruined professionally. It would have been equally impossible for him to have trusted to the mercy of Philip and the Inquisition in a Catholic land."

What was the religious history of England? It was a Catholic country before Henry VIII broke with the Pope and established the Anglican Church.

Henry VII, the father of Henry VIII, had four children. For his eldest son Arthur, he arranged a marriage with the Catholic princess, Catherine of Aragon. When Arthur died and Catherine was left a widow, her father-in-law promised her in marriage to his younger son, Henry.

Henry VIII waited only a month after his brother’s death to marry Catherine. Was this a legal marriage? There are two passages in the Hebrew Bible which deal with this problem and, in fact, contradict each other:

"If there are brothers living at the same time and one of them dies, leaving no son, the wife of the deceased must not be married to a stranger; her brother-in-law must go to her and marry her" (Deut. 25:5).

"And if a man shall take his brother’s wife it is an impure deed; since he has had intercourse with her who belongs to his brother, they shall be childless" (Leviticus 20:2).

These passages are contradictory and according to Biblical interpretation the passage in Leviticus forbidding the marriage supersedes the passage in Deuteronomy. And the law regarding a brother who dies childless is stated as follows: