Lopez's letter of confession is not in the archives although everything else is - so did it really exist?

Lopez's lawyer argued that he and the double agents confessed in order to avoid the rack. He'd only taken the money and promised to kill the Queen to trick the King of Spain.

Lopez said he would put the poison in the Queen's syrup but knew that she didn't take syrup.

Elizabethan treason laws were catchall: "speech was treason". Virtually any speech or action could be branded treason.

It is possible that Lopez was framed because he was Jewish and fell foul of the anti-Semitism of the day.

The jury may have been rigged.

The case was brought as a result of the general paranoia of the time. Lopez was also linked to Irish-Catholic conspiracies.
Queen Elizabeth may never have been convinced. After the execution she responded positively to a petition by Lopez's wife by reinstating her husband's houses and assets.

Evidence

The Queen ordered several stays of execution over a period of five months, so it was possible that she still thought Lopez was innocent. Letters between Sir Michael Blount, Lieutenant of the Tower, Cecil and two of the Commissioners who had tried the case, all show the confusion and anger at the stays of executions.

Thinking History

Q. Why might Elizabeth wish to believe in Lopez's innocence?

The Renaissance court had a model for a woman, which gave her a role of moral superiority but political powerlessness. Baldassare Castiglione's famous 'Book of the Courtier', a best seller amongst the 16th century elite, depicted an idealised, clever, pure, inspirational duchess. Her male courtiers were devoted to her because she was no threat, she obeyed her lord. But the reality of a female monarch who intended to exercise royal power meant considerable mental adjustment. And successful though Elizabeth was in projecting an image of herself as a virgin Queen who nevertheless had the 'stomach of a king', she was always vulnerable to innuendo at a personal level. Could she afford to contemplate the guilt of someone who had intimate knowledge of her physical weakness? The dilemma of the male Elizabethan courtier faced with a powerful female monarch is expressed in Elizabethan court verse, one of the aspects of the Renaissance considered in the Open University course AA305 The Renaissance in Europe: a Cultural Enquiry

Comments