Records from the Old Bailey show that on 16 October 1751 Samuel Bacon was indicted for robbery on the King's Highway and was caught 200 yards from the Spaniards.

In 1780 rioters involved in the Gordon Riots, opposed to the relaxation of laws in England that restricted Catholicism, marched on Hampstead intent on attacking Kenwood House, the home of William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield.

The landlord of the Spaniards at the time is reported to have given them free drinks, keeping the rioters occupied, until the local militia arrived, thus saving the house.

The pub is mentioned in Dickens's The Pickwick Papers and Bram Stoker's Dracula,[5] and was frequented by the artist Joshua Reynolds and the poets Byron and Keats.

According to the pub, Keats wrote his Ode to a Nightingale in the gardens,[6] and Stoker borrowed one of their resident ghost stories to furnish the plot of Dracula.