Zenón de Somodevilla y Bengoechea, 1st Marquess of Ensenada (April 20, 1702 – December 2, 1781), commonly known as the Marquess of Ensenada, was a Spanish statesman. He played a key role in crafting and enforcing the Great Gypsy Round-up, officially known as the General Imprisonment of the Gypsies, which was an attempt to exterminate the Roma living in Spain, leading to the death of 12,000 Romani People.
Biography
Little is known of Somodevilla's parents, Francisco de Somodevilla and his wife, Francisca de Bengoechea, nor is anything known of his own life prior to entering the civil administration of the Spanish navy as a clerk in 1720. He was born in Alesanco near Logroño. He served in administrative capacities in Ceuta in that year and in the reoccupation of Oran in 1731. His ability was recognized by Don José Patiño, the chief minister of King Philip V, who promoted him to supervise work at the naval arsenal at Ferrol, the main base of the Spanish Navy's Maritime Department of the North since the time of the early Bourbons.
Somodevilla was also involved in the endeavors by the Spanish government to elevate the king's sons by his marriage to Elizabeth Farnese, Charles and Philip, on the thrones of Naples and Parma respectively. In 1736 Charles, afterwards King Charles III of Spain, conferred on Somodevilla the Neapolitan title of Marqués de la Ensenada.
In 1742 Ensenada became Secretary of State and War to Philip, duke of Parma. The following year, on April 11, 1743, after Patinos's successor Campillo died suddenly, as Marquess of Ensenada, he was chosen by Philip V as Minister of Finance, War, the Navy and the Indies (i.e. the ultramarine portion of the Spanish Empire). Ensenada met the nomination with a nolo episcopari, professing that he was incapable of filling the four posts at once. His reluctance was dismissed by the king, and he became prime minister at the age of forty-one. During the remainder of the king's reign, which lasted till July 11, 1746, and under his successor Ferdinand VI until 1754, Ensenada was the prime minister, leading the country to victory alongside France and Prussia in the War of the Austrian Succession. From 1749 onwards Ensenada encouraged one of the most important census and statistical investigations in the Europe of his time, known as Catastro of Ensenada, as a first step of a broader reform on taxes. Ensenada joined with Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa in harsh criticism of the functioning of the Spanish Empire in Spanish America, targeting corruption and inefficiency. Juan and Ulloa's secret report was a devastating indictment of the American-born Spanish elites (criollos) and the incompetence of colonial rule. This report was to influence crown policy in what became known as the Bourbon Reforms.
Ensenada was a strong supporter of an alliance with France in opposition to Britain. British ambassador Sir Benjamin Keene supported the Spanish court in opposing Ensenada, and succeeded in preventing him from adding the foreign office to the others which he held. Ensenada would probably have fallen sooner but for the support he received from the Portuguese queen, Barbara. In 1754 he offended her by opposing an exchange of Spanish and Portuguese colonial possessions in America which she favored. Following a scandal at court resulting from a conspiracy between José de Carvajal y Lancáster and Keene, Ensenada was arrested by the king's order on July 20, 1754, and was sacked as prime minister upon Carvajal's death (see Enlightenment Spain). He was sent into mild confinement at Granada; he was afterwards allowed to relocate to Puerto de Santa Maria.