Camden’s account of this affair (greatly abbreviated) is that certain Spaniards prevailed on Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew, the Queen’s physician, Stephen Ferreira Gama, and Emanuel Loisie, both Portuguese, to poison the Queen. The convictions were obtained on the strength of confessions. “How far,” says Lingard, “these confessions made in the Tower, and probably on the rack, are deserving of credit, may be doubted” (ed. 1849, vol. vi. p. 554). It is a strange feature in the case that while Camden, like Stow, speaks of the execution of all three, Lingard shows that Ferreira was saved. The probability seems to be that Lopez fell a victim to the rivalry between Essex and the Cecils, each eager to prove greater zeal in the Queen’s service.[181] Arising out of similar plots, real or pretended, were at this time other executions:— On March 2, 1594, an Irish fencing master was hanged and quartered at Tyburn for a design to kill the Queen (Camden: Stow, “Summary,” p. 439), and “in less than two months from the beginning” of 1595, Edmund Yorke and Richard Williams were for the same reason executed at Tyburn (Camden, in Kennett’s “Complete History,” ii. p. 532). [Illustration: EXECUTIONS AT TYBURN, _temp._ ELIZABETH.] =1595.= The 20. of February, Robert Southwell, a Jesuit, was arraygned at the Kinges Bench barre, and the next day executed at Tyborne (Stow, p. 768). Southwell was not only a Jesuit and martyr, but a poet of whom Ben Jonson said that he would willingly have destroyed many of his own poems could he have claimed the authorship of Southwell’s “Burning Babe.” Southwell was ordained priest in 1584. With a full knowledge of the danger he incurred, he desired to go to England as a missionary priest. He landed in England in 1588. After many narrow escapes he was at last arrested by Topcliffe, the English Torquemada, in 1592, kept in prison for more than two years, and so brutally tortured and ill-used that his father petitioned Elizabeth that he might at once suffer death if guilty, or be better treated. Southwell had inspired sympathy, for at his execution the bystanders prevailed on the executioner to let him hang till dead. =1598.= The 25. of January, one named Ainger was hanged at Tyborne, for wilfully and secretly murthering of his owne father a Gentleman and Counsellor of the Law at Graies Inne, in his chamber there (Stow, p. 786). About the middle of November, 1597, a body was found floating on the Thames, and was identified as that of Richard Ainger, Anger, or Aunger, “a double reader” of Gray’s Inn, who had been missing for some time. On view of the body the surgeons gave it as their opinion that Ainger had met his death, not by drowning, but by suffocation, and that the body had been thrown into the river after death. Suspicion attached to one of his sons, Richard, and to Edward Ingram, a porter of the Inn.