At a very early epoch Marranos reached England. We hear of them, almost immediately after the expulsion from Spain, figuring in a lawsuit in London.[7] In 1550 a Marrano physician was discovered living in London. Another, Roderigo Lopes, was court physician to Queen Elizabeth, and the original of Shakespeare’s Shylock.[8] When the Earl of Essex, after the sacking of Cadiz in 1596, brought the Spanish Resident, Alonzo de Herrera, a prisoner to England, he turned out to be a Marrano. After his liberation, this descendant of the great Captain Gonsalvo de Cordova proceeded to Amsterdam, entered the synagogue, and spent his old age in the compilation of cabalistical treatises.[9] Amador de los Rios states that the Marranos founded secret settlements in London, Dover, and York;[10] and it has been shown that they possessed a secret synagogue in London early in the seventeenth century, if not before.[11] As in Amsterdam and Antwerp, they were largely concerned in the development of the Spanish trade, in the importation of bullion, and in the promotion of commercial relations with the Levant and the New World. While the people of England were unconscious of this immigration, it could not have been altogether unknown in the continental Jewries. That no trace of this knowledge is to be found in printed Hebrew literature is not strange, since the keeping of the secret was a common Jewish interest. It no doubt helped to stimulate Jewish hopes of a return to England, which more public circumstances had already founded. The Reformation in England first turned Jewish eyes towards the land from which they had been so long excluded. They were especially interested by Henry VIII.’s appeal to Jewish scholars during his conflict with the Papacy in regard to his divorce from Catherine of Aragon.[12] Still more deeply must their feelings have been stirred by Elizabeth’s struggle with Spain. All over Europe, indeed, Jewish sympathies were with Elizabeth. The secret negotiations carried on by Roderigo Lopes, through his influential Marrano relatives, with the Grand Turk and with the Hebrew bankers of Antwerp and Leghorn, have yet to be made public; but it is certain that they played an important part in the story which culminated in the confusion of the Great Armada. But it was the increasing Hebraism of English religious thought, as represented by the Puritan movement, which chiefly attracted the Jews. This movement sent not a few Englishmen and Englishwomen to the continental ghettos to seek instruction at the feet of Hebrew Rabbis, and even to obtain entrance to the synagogue as proselytes.[13] When the Commonwealth, with its pronounced Judaical tendencies, emerged from this movement, the Jews could not fail to be impressed. The more mystical among them began to dream of the Golden Age. Indeed the doctrines of the Fifth Monarchy Men, carried to Smyrna by Puritan merchants, paved the way for the rise of