Don Diego de Gardoqui

Diego María de Gardoqui y Arriquibar (born November 12, 1735, Bilbao, Spain – d. 1798, Madrid, Spain) was a Spanish politician and diplomat.

Diego de Gardoqui, the fourth of eight children, was the financial intermediary between the Spanish Court and the Colonies during the American Revolutionary War, meeting with John Jay on various occasions. He was of Basque descent and a member of the wealthy Gardoqui family of Bilbao, Spain. The mercantile business of "José de Gardoqui e Hijos" in Bilbao (of which Diego was one of three sons in a partnership with their father) supplied the patriots with 215 bronze cannon – 30,000 muskets – 30,000 bayonets – 51,314 musket balls – 300,000 pounds of powder – 12,868 grenades – 30,000 uniforms – and 4,000 field tents during the war. After the Revolution he became Spain's envoy to the United States. He arrived in New York in the Spring of 1785. In the summer of 1786, he and Jay, who was Secretary for Foreign Affairs under the Articles of Confederation, worked up a treaty in which the United States would receive a commercial treaty with Spain in exchange for giving up its claims to free navigation of the Mississippi. Although Jay backed the treaty, congress never ratified it.

Gardoqui continued as Spain's Minister to the United States until he returned to Bilbao in October, 1789. He attended George Washington's inaugural address and pronounced it "an eloquent and appropriate address." In honor of the inauguration, Gardoqui decorated the front of his house on Broadway in New York City, near Bowling Green, "with two magnificent transparent gardens, adorned with statues, natural size, imitating marble. . . . There were also various flower-pots, different arches with foliage and columns of imitation marble, and on the sky of these gardens were placed thirteen stars, representing the United States of America—two of which stars showed opaque, to designate the two States which had not adopted the Constitution."

In the early years after the Revolutionary War when congress and the president resided in New York City, Gardoqui's house was also the meeting place of the first Catholic dignitaries representing their countries. There Mass was said for the congregation composed of such men as representatives of France, Spain, and Portugal, as well as Charles Carroll, his cousin Daniel, and Thomas Fitzsimmons, Catholic members of Congress, officers and soldiers of the foreign contingent, merchants and others. Diego de Gardoqui laid the cornerstone of St. Peter's, the first permanent structure for a Catholic church erected in the State of New York, on October 5, 1785. The church first opened on November 4, 1786.

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