Benedict Spinola

Benedict Spinola (1519/20 – 1580), born in Genoa and died in London,

Little is known of Spinola's early life, but by 1541 he was in London working as a clerk at a salary of two pounds a year for Bastian Bony, postmaster to the City of London's foreign merchants. Spinola lived his whole adult life in the parish of St Gabriel Fenchurch, latterly joined there by his nephews Hannibal and Ascaneo Spinola. He never married and had a property in Shoreditch known as "Spinola's pleasure".

Despite this, in 1566 he was granted the right to do just the same within his licence. He traded with his three brothers who lived in Antwerp, Giacomo, Francisco, and Pasquale Spinola, and at home in London was an important merchant. and in 1572 Leicester wrote to Francis Walsingham that Spinola was "my dear friend and the best Italian I know in England".

About 1550, Spinola was unhappy that the minister of the Calvinist Italian church in London, Michelangelo Florio was preaching against Papists, but in 1566 the ambassador of Spain in London reported home that Spinola had joined the Church of England, and in 1568 Spinola and his household were attending services at their local parish church. He became an adviser to the English government, gathering intelligence from correspondents overseas and negotiating financial questions, and by the 1570s was dealing in huge sums of money. and that in that year "the said Babtiste", Spinola's father, "did refuse to be Duke of the same Citie".

In 1568, in the letters patent of Elizabeth I which established a new joint stock company called the Society of Mines Royal, Spinola is named as one of the principals of the Society, together with the Earl of Pembroke, the Earl of Leicester, Lord Mountjoy, Lionel Duckett, and others. In 1571, Spinola and Lionel Duckett between them made a loan to Queen Elizabeth I of £4,100. In 1578 Spinola acted as agent for an English loan to the Union of Brussels. Magdalene College, which considered that it had been cheated, pursued legal actions unsuccessfully, and more than four hundred years later in 1989, it avenged itself by erecting a gargoyle representing Spinola, designed by Peter Fluck and Roger Law, the creators of Spitting Image.

On 6 July 1580, after returning from a financial mission to the Netherlands, Spinola made a will in Italian, stating that he was infirm. The church was destroyed in the Great Fire of London and not rebuilt.