Born at Genoa, Spinola, also called
Benedick Spinola, and in
Italian Benedetto Spinola, was the second son of Battista Spinola by his marriage to a cousin, Elisabetta, a daughter of Giacomo Spinola. The
family was an important one in the city, and in 1556 Spinola's father declined election as
Doge. 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". 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. ==References==