William Paddy
Sir William Paddy (1554–1634) was an English royal physician. He was born in London and studied at Merchant Taylors’ School, entering in 1569 with friends who would also become notable, such as Lancelot Andrewes. In 1571 he began his college career at St John’s College, Oxford, and earned his B.A. in 1573. He completed his M.D. at Leiden in 1589 and was incorporated at Oxford in 1591. He became a fellow of St John’s and was friends with Matthew Gwinne.
Paddy trained as a doctor and joined the College of Physicians in London. He became a licentiate in 1590, a fellow in 1591, and served as censor in 1595 and again from 1597 to 1600. He was president of the College four times (1609, 1610, 1611, and 1618). King James I appointed him as his physician soon after James came to the throne, and Paddy was knighted at Windsor on 9 July 1603.
In 1605, when James I visited Oxford, Paddy argued before the king against two medical theses: whether a nurse’s morals are passed to babies through milk, and whether smoking tobacco is good for health. Paddy had a house in Blackfriars. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I passed by his property during wedding celebrations, and Paddy gave her a fan.
In 1609, Paddy’s house was attacked by Sir John Kennedy of Barn Elms because Kennedy’s estranged wife was staying there. The attackers were said to be armed with hot irons, possibly because of a suspected affair with Brydges, Kennedy’s wife.
In 1614 Paddy helped defend the College of Physicians’ immunity from arms-bearing before city officials, arguing that the college had privileges under the Physicians Acts of 1523 and 1540. The court sided with the college.
Paddy built a large medical practice and was friends with notable physicians like Theodore Mayerne and Baldwin Hamey. Mayerne praised him in a 1634 edition of an medical work. In 1620 Paddy and Gwinne were appointed as commissioners for garbling tobacco, a duty noted by Raphael Thorius in a Latin tribute to Paddy (1626).
Politically, Paddy sat in Parliament as the member for Thetford, Norfolk, from 1604 to 1611. He supported his fellow college member William Laud and spoke to Thomas Sackville, the Earl of Dorset, to gain support for Laud in his conflicts with Oxford Calvinists.
When James I fell seriously ill in 1625, Paddy attended him at Theobalds. Paddy kept a note in his copy of the 1615 Book of Common Prayer of the king’s final confession of faith. He died in London on 22 December 1634.
Paddy was a generous benefactor to his alma mater, Oxford University. He donated an organ, £1,800 for choir improvements, £1,000 for the commons, and many books to the library. His tomb rests in the chapel of St John’s College.
His only published work, in 1603, was a short Latin verse on Queen Elizabeth’s death and a brief tribute to her successor, ending with a blessing for the new king’s health.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 10:58 (CET).