Marquis de la Ensenada
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His Excellency Zenón de Somodevilla Marquis of Ensenada |
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| Secretary of State | |
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In office 1748–1754 |
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| Prime Minister | Ricardo Wall |
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Admiral of the Fleet Minister of Finance |
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| Prime Minister | José de Carvajal y Lancáster |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
20 April 1702 La Rioja, Spain |
| Died | 2 December 1781 (aged 79) Medina del Campo, Spain |
| Profession | Statesman |
Don Zenón de Somodevilla y Bengoechea (April 20, 1702 in Alesanco near Logroño – December 2, 1781), commonly known as the Marquis of Ensenada, was a Spanish statesman.
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 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. While an ensenada is a roadstead or a small bay, some of the ancestry-conscious upper-classes and nobility of the court, envious of the rise of this upstart self-made man delighted in the pun, that the name from the title can be phonetically divided into three Spanish words "en si nada," which means "in himself nothing."
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Wikipedia