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William Lamport (1615-1659) was an Irish-born Catholic adventurer who according to at least one historian gained a nickname of El Zorro, the Fox, due to his exploits in Mexico. The attribution of the nickname, however, is disputed.

William Lamport, a child genius, was born in 1615 in Wexford, Ireland to a family of Catholic seafarers. He received Catholic education from Jesuits in Dublin and London. By the time he was twenty-one he spoke no fewer than fourteen languages.

In 1627 Lamport was arrested in London for sedition for distributing Catholic pamphlets. He escaped, left Britain for Spain and became a pirate for the next two years. He also fought for the French at the Siege of La Rochelle against the Huguenots.

In 1643 he joined one the three Spanish-sponsored Irish regiments and took part of the combat against Swedish forces in the Spanish Netherlands. His accord in the Battle of Nordlingen in 1634 attracted interest of Duke of Olivares, chief minister to the Philip IV of Spain, who eventually helped him to enter the service of the King. By that time he had hispanised his name to Guillén Lombardo.

Exiled from the royal court, allegedly because of a scandalous love affair with a noblewoman, Lamport was sent to Mexico, to spy for the Count-Duke of Olivares. Here he began to sympathize with local Indians slaves and studied native medicine. Inquisition documents merit him with bravery, a love affair with one Spanish noblewoman and the support, if not the initiation of, a burgeoning independence movement.

In 1642, when he was about to be engaged to the noblewoman Antonia Turcious, the Spanish Inquisition arrested him and accused him of plotting a war of independence against Spain. He was sentenced to ten years in jail. He escaped in 1650 and survived just two days as a fugitive. He sneaked out at night and plastered anti-Inquisition pamphlets on the walls of Mexico City. In 1659 the Spanish Inquisition condemned him to death as a heretic and sentenced him to be burned at the stake. Legend holds that he struggled out of his ropes before he would burn to death and strangled himself by his iron collar.

In the late twentieth century it was suggested by an Italian historian that Lamport was the inspiration for Johnston McCulley's fictional hero "Zorro". The treatment of this claim in the popular press led to Lamport being labelled in the popular imagination as "The Irish Zorro". Such claims, along with many others such as the idea that he was either a gigolo, a famous swordsman, the secret lover of the viceroy's wife, or the subject of a painting by Rubens are disputed by Irish historians. Apart from his amazingly adventurous life, his only undisputed claim to fame probably lies in the fact that he was the author of the first declaration of independence in the Indies, a document that promised land reform, equality of opportunity, racial equality and a democratically elected monarch over a century before the French Revolution.

• Gerard Ronan - The Irish Zorro: The Extraordinary Adventures of William Lamport (1615-1659)