Godolphin was one of 16 children born into a family of royalist and Anglican gentry, part of ‘the intricate network of kinship which linked the Killigrews, the Berkeleys and the Jermyns’. As a younger son, in receipt of only a small annuity upon the death of his father, he had to seek his own fortune, although family connections provided an entrée at court.
Godolphin was married in the Temple Church on 16 May 1675, by Mr Lake, ‘chaplain to the duke’, presumably Dr John Lake, the future bishop of Chichester.
During the Exclusion Crisis Godolphin was very much associated with his fellow ‘chits’ Sunderland and Hyde. He opposed the first exclusion bill, but followed Sunderland in supporting exclusion in 1680, although he did not suffer the consequences, the king blaming Sunderland for his actions. His reputation for financial acumen stood him in good stead and when he left the treasury to become secretary of state in April 1684, his fellow commissioner, Sir Edward Dering‡, thought ‘the removing of Godolphin is taking out a cornerstone, which if it do not ruin and dissolve doth at least much weaken the building’.
On 19 May 1685 Godolphin was introduced into the Lords by Robert Shirley* [1613], 8th Baron (later Earl) Ferrers, and William Maynard, 2nd Baron Maynard. He attended the House every day before the adjournment on 2 July, 31 days in total, and was named to 10 committees during that part of the session. On 25 June he acted as a teller, in opposition to Charles Cornwallis, 3rd Baron Cornwallis, on the question of whether to call in counsel in Eyre v. Eyre. Two days later he acted as a teller, again in opposition to Cornwallis, on the question of whether the committee on the bill reviving acts should sit at the time to which it had been adjourned. He attended the adjournment on 4 Aug., and on every day following the resumption of the session on 9 Nov. until the prorogation on 20 Nov., being named to one further committee.
On 14 Jan. 1686 Godolphin was one of those peers who found Henry Booth, 2nd Baron Delamer, not guilty of treason.
Despite his protestantism, Godolphin was perceived as a loyalist, and various commentators have assumed that he was in favour of the king’s policy of repealing the Test acts; his name appears on four lists compiled between January 1687 and January 1688 implying his support. Godolphin’s closeness to Sunderland can only have perpetuated this opinion; it was underlined by his presence early in January 1688 at the marriage of Lady Anne Spencer to James Hamilton, earl of Arran [S], the future duke of Hamilton.
Godolphin remained at the centre of events as the regime contemplated a change of policy and seems to have welcomed a turn back to the old alliance with the Anglican establishment. On 22 Sept. 1688 Henry Hyde, 2nd earl of Clarendon, recorded in his diary that the lord chancellor, George Jefferys, Baron Jeffreys, had written the Declaration resolved upon on the previous day to accompany the issuing of the writs calling a Parliament and that although Sunderland, Charles Middleton‡, 2nd earl of Middleton [S], George Legge, Baron Dartmouth, and Godolphin had agreed it, amendments had been made in council, and that ‘Lord Godolphin had broke loose from him and endeavoured to trim in the new wording some clauses.’
Godolphin’s closeness to the regime put his position at some risk as the king tried to satisfy his domestic opponents. On 12 Nov. 1688 Van Citters reported that rumours that Jeffreys and Godolphin ‘were to be removed from their offices, but as these gentlemen are in possession of many secrets, it is thought the king will not make up his mind to this so easily now things are placed in such an extreme point’. Two weeks later, on 26 Nov. Van Citters reported that ‘some of the cabinet council’, including Godolphin and Richard Graham‡, Viscount Preston [S], had ‘ventured to advise the king, to assemble his Parliament without delay’.
The Convention, 1689-90
Godolphin was present when the Convention convened on 22 Jan. 1689. On the crucial issue of the settlement of the Crown, Godolphin was entirely consistent: on 29 Jan. he voted in favour of a regency; on 31 Jan. he voted against declaring the prince and princess of Orange king and queen; on 4 Feb. he voted against agreeing with the Commons that the king had ‘abdicated’. On 6 Feb. Clarendon noted him as one of the peers that ‘usually support the king’, who were absent from the Lords, using the excuse that he had to attend the prince of Orange at the treasury.
On 20 Apr. 1689 Godolphin was named to report from a conference on the amendments made by the Lords to the bill abrogating oaths, duly reporting back later in the day. He was then named to a committee to draw up reasons for adhering to the amendments and to manage the resultant conference on the 22nd. On 31 May he voted against the bill to reverse the judgments against Titus Oates, and on 30 July he voted against adhering to the Lords’ amendments to the bill. On 13 July he was named to a committee to draw up reasons in support of the Lords’ views on the house of Hanover in the bill settling the succession of the Crown, and was named to a conference on the bill on the 16th. On 10 Aug. he acted as a teller in opposition to Cornwallis on an instruction to the committee on the bill prohibiting trade with France to bring in a clause to give the king power to dispense with the act. He attended on 149 days of the session up to the prorogation of 21 Oct. 1689, 91 per cent of the total. He was named to a further 33 committees.
As one contemporary put it, Godolphin was ‘the only man that had the cunning or else the good fortune to be at once in some favour with both the king and Prince of Orange’.
Godolphin was present on the opening day of the second session of the Convention, 23 Oct. 1689. On that day, Henry Fitzroy, duke of Grafton, registered his proxy with Godolphin (as he did also on 5 Dec.). On 25 Oct. he acted as a teller in opposition to Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford, on whether the House should resolve itself immediately into committee of the whole House on the bill against clandestine marriages. He attended on 57 days of the session, 78 per cent of the total, and was named to 14 committees.
The Parliament of 1690
Godolphin persisted in his desire to retire.
Godolphin was present when the new Parliament convened on 20 Mar. 1690. On 2 May Clarendon recorded that Godolphin went away without voting ‘in the matter which was upon the tapis’, presumably the bill securing the king and queen against King James.
Despite being out of office, Godolphin’s name was never far from the thoughts of political commentators. In May 1690 Roger Morrice reported that ‘it’s highly probable’ that when William left on campaign, Carmarthen, Nottingham and Godolphin would be entrusted with ‘the conduct of all affairs under the queen’. In June Morrice heard that Henry Sydney, Viscount Sydney, and Godolphin had been instrumental in removing Sir John Maynard‡ and replacing him as a commissioner of the great seal by Sir John Trevor‡, although ‘I know not well upon what grounds’. Godolphin, Sydney and Trevor attended the king to Tring on the first stage of his journey to Ireland, and Sydney and Godolphin had brought Sunderland to kiss the king’s hand at Northampton on the same journey.
Godolphin was afflicted with kidney stones in the summer of 1690, recuperating at Cranbourne Lodge and then Tunbridge Wells, where Morrice noted his presence among ‘a great number of the English nobility and gentry’. Godolphin’s companions included Shrewsbury and Thomas Wharton, the future 5th Baron Wharton, who all ‘lodged together, and were very much in conversation at Tunbridge’.
Godolphin was present when Parliament met on 2 Oct. 1690 and a draft of the king’s speech in Godolphin’s hand is extant, giving credence to the claim of Charles Montagu, the future earl of Halifax, that he was in great credit with the king.
On 11 Dec. 1690 Godolphin was named to draft two clauses to be added to the bill against the export of gold and silver. On 17 Dec. he was named to manage two conferences on the Lords’ amendments to the mutiny bill. On 3 Jan. 1691 he reported from the committee of the whole on the bill for encouraging the distilling of brandy and spirits from corn. On the last day of the session, 5 Jan., he was named to manage several conferences on the Lords’ amendments to the bill suspending part of the act of navigation, and was then named to a committee to draw up reasons for the Lords insisting on their proviso to the bill. He had attended on 48 days of the session, 66 per cent of the total, and been named to 23 committees. On 8 Jan. a newsletter reported that Godolphin was one of those named by the king to be the council for the administration of affairs during his absence.
Having only just returned, following the end of the session, Godolphin evinced a desire to retire again from the treasury. The king asked Marlborough to persuade him to stay in office. On 2 Feb. 1691 Godolphin hoped that the king would ‘let me live the summer at least in the country; the occasion admits of no delay’, and on 3 Feb. Sydney affirmed that Godolphin wished to retire using his forthcoming marriage as an excuse, it not being ‘convenient for a man of business that is not very young to bring a wife near the court’.
In the summer of 1691 Godolphin was preparing to suggest that the financial difficulties of the government should be met by legislating for a general excise on domestic commodities, and at the beginning of July encouraged a scheme by Dr Charles Davenant‡. He also asked permission to visit Tunbridge in eight or ten days.
Godolphin was present on the opening day of the session, 22 Oct. 1691 and there is an extant draft of the speech in his hand broadly similar to the one delivered by the king on that day.
Godolphin was one of those implicated by the Jacobite defector William Fuller’s testimony to the Commons on 9 Dec. 1691, but was exonerated on 24 Feb. 1692.
Following the dismissal of Marlborough from his posts on 20 Jan. 1692, Godolphin continued his avowed friendship with the disgraced man. Indeed, on 29 Jan., Princess Anne received a letter containing the postscript ‘it has been taken great notice of Lord Godolphin and Cherry Russell’s being at Lord Marlborough’s lodgings so late the night he was turned out.’
Godolphin wrote to the king on 13 May 1692 that ‘among many other mortifications’, he had suffered ‘a very severe fit of the stone, which for some days made me unable to write or do anything’, so that ‘my ill health, as well as other reasons, make me desire to be at liberty’.
In the autumn of 1692 Carmarthen included Godolphin implicitly in his list of the government’s supporters, noting that the commissioners of the treasury were to ‘speak to all their friends and to attend diligently’.
Godolphin was not present when the Lords met on 4 Nov. 1692, attending the next sitting on 7 November. He was named to manage a conference on 20 Dec. to deliver to the Commons the papers brought in by Nottingham and to the resultant conference on 21 December. Following the report of this conference he was named on 22 Dec. to inspect the Journal in relation to free conferences and on 29 Dec. he was named to a committee to consider whether the resolution of the Commons, delivered to the Lords at a conference the 21st, was consistent with the usual procedure, and to consider of what was to be said at a free conference on the matter. He was named to manage the resultant conference on 4 Jan. 1693. On 21 Dec. 1692, following the report of the committee of privileges on the petition of the lord chief baron (the then Speaker of the Lords) concerning the auditing of the customs accounts, Godolphin was heard as to the transactions of the treasury in the case. On 31 Dec. he voted against committing the place bill.
At the turn of the year Godolphin was forecast as a likely opponent of the Norfolk divorce bill. On 3 Jan. 1693 he attended a private dinner with the king held at the house of William Russell, 5th earl of Bedford, where Sunderland, among others, was present, an indication of the re-emergence of Sunderland as an adviser to the king.
In May 1693 Godolphin opposed a descent on France on financial grounds. On 19 May he wrote to the king that ‘I have been so unwell the last two or three days, that I am forced to go out of town for a little rest and air, but hope to be back again the beginning of the week to receive your commands’.
Godolphin attended on the opening day of the 1693-4 session, 7 Nov. 1693. On 24 Nov. Godolphin brought into the House the observations of the treasury upon the report of the commissioners for public accounts, which were read and a copy sent to the commissioners. On 11 Jan. 1694, after the House had debated the intelligence failures that were the cause of the Smyrna convoy disaster, Rochester and Godolphin were deputed to ask the king to allow the ‘lords of the council’ to provide an account of when the intelligence of the sailing of the Brest fleet was sent to the English fleet. On 15 Jan. Godolphin and other members of the cabinet had to explain that they had assumed that the intelligence presented to them by Nottingham had been conveyed to the fleet by Secretary Sir John Trenchard‡.
Before the king left England, he designated Godolphin as one of the ‘cabinet council’ to the queen, though he may have been irritated to have been excluded from the small committee of council charged with advising the queen, which he was not summoned to attend until late in the summer.
Godolphin was also annoyed by the purges planned in the revenue departments by the Whig ministers. On 28 May 1694 Sunderland told Hans Willem Bentinck, earl of Portland, that ‘there is but small progress made in the business of the commissions and the justices, the first will go on as slowly as [Lord Godolphin] can make it, who by the way has been mistaken in everything and is very much out of humour’.
Nevertheless, by July Godolphin was impressed with two of ‘our new brethren at the treasury’, John Smith‡ and Sir William Trumbull‡, who ‘are in a very different temper from those we parted with’, Hampden and Seymour, ‘for these love dispatch in business as well as the others did trifling, so that if we had wherewithal to work upon, I should flatter myself you would be satisfied with our endeavour, but it is hard to make bricks without straw’.
Godolphin attended the prorogation on 18 Sept. 1694 and the opening day of the 1694-5 session, 12 November. On 21 Jan. 1695 he acted as a teller twice in the committee of the whole on the treason trials bill, both times in opposition to Richard Lumley, earl of Scarbrough, on the rights of peers to be summoned to trials.
Godolphin attended on the day the House adjourned for Easter on 21 Mar. 1695, and on the first day after the recess (27 Mar.), but then there was a gap in his attendance until 8 Apr., when he was presumably taking a break at Newmarket. On 13 Apr. he was named to report a conference concerning papers to be delivered by the Commons about Sir Thomas Cooke‡, who was at the centre of allegations concerning the misappropriation of East India Company funds. On 16 Apr. he was named to draft a bill indemnifying Cooke for any discoveries he might make. On 17 Apr. he was named to draw up reasons for a conference on the Commons’ bill to oblige Cooke to account for money received from the East India Company, and also to manage the resultant conference. On 22 Apr. he was elected in equal last place (with 26 votes) to the joint committee appointed under the act to examine Cooke.
On 5 May 1695 Godolphin attended the first meeting of the commissioners for building Greenwich Hospital, being the ‘very first of the subscribers who paid any money towards this noble fabric’.
The Parliament of 1695
According to Harley, on 20 Aug. 1695 all the lords justices ‘who can write, have written for a new Parliament or at least their opinion, except Lord Godolphin’.
Godolphin attended on the opening day of the new Parliament, 22 Nov. 1695, and was described as one of the ‘lords of the council who met about the king’s speech’, which was delivered on the following day. The speech asked Parliament to take action on the coinage.
On 28 Jan. 1696 Godolphin acted as a teller in a division on the East India Company bill in the committee of the whole House in opposition to Cornwallis, in favour of a motion that the trade should be carried on by a joint-stock company by act of Parliament.
When discussing the regents, on 1 May 1696, L’Hermitage characterized them as all Whigs, except Pembroke and Godolphin, whose views were ‘beyond the ability of the most penetrating to discern’.
Meanwhile, Sir John Fenwick‡, who had been arrested in June 1696 for his part in the Assassination Plot, had made several discoveries under interrogation in early August, which implicated Godolphin among others. Although the king professed to discount his allegations, Fenwick made a fresh confession on 23 Sept., again accusing Godolphin. With the town awash with speculation, another of those allegedly implicated, Monmouth, reacted by spreading rumours about Shrewsbury, Russell and, especially Godolphin.
Godolphin had not been present on the opening day of the 1696-7 session, 20 Oct., first attending on the 26th. After his resignation, he went to Windsor, and was absent until 23 Nov., the date upon which he had been ordered to attend at a call of the House on 14 November.
Meanwhile, Monmouth’s intrigues had been exposed by Fenwick’s relatives and he was called to account for his actions. Monmouth had suggested to Fenwick a series of ways he might help to defend himself by publicizing his allegations, and that he should request that the king be asked to lay before the House the letters from the late king and queen, and others in France, intended for Godolphin, which had come into his possession, as well as evidence against Marlborough and Shrewsbury and others. The aim was to charge Godolphin ‘with a correspondence with the late queen, and to prove it, the earls of Portland and Romney were to be examined what they knew of intercepted letters, that had been shown to the king’. Papers in which Monmouth’s scheme was discussed were read out in the House on 9 Jan. 1697. Marlborough and Godolphin spoke on behalf of themselves and of Shrewsbury. On 12 Jan. Godolphin defended Shrewsbury again when Monmouth’s associate, Matthew Smith, attended the House and spoke about how he had first revealed evidence of a plot to Shrewsbury the previous February. Godolphin defended Shrewsbury’s conduct and Smith himself denied knowing anything incriminating against Godolphin when questioned by the House.
On 10 Feb. 1697 Godolphin and Rochester raised their concerns about the ineffective protection of shipping. Vernon believed that ‘something … like to what the House of Commons were framing last year’ was intended.
Godolphin spent the early summer of 1697 with the Marlboroughs at St Albans.
Godolphin first attended the 1697-8 session on 6 December. On 30 Dec. John Methuen‡ wrote to Galway that Godolphin approved of his conduct in Ireland, and that this would be passed on to the king, ‘with whom my Lord Godolphin is very well, although not like as yet to be employed.’
After 2 Apr. 1698, the day on which a bill to overturn the will of Sir William Godolphin’s passed the House, he attended the king to Newmarket, the party arriving on 4 April.
Following his return to London, Godolphin on 18 Apr. 1698 settled Pell Mell Fields (later St James’s Market House and Market Place) on his son as part of his marriage settlement with Lady Henrietta Churchill.
In the summer of 1698 ‘the unfortunate book of Mr Molineux’s’ (as Methuen called it in a letter to Galway), The Case of Ireland’s being bound by Acts of Parliament, addressed the issue of England’s right to legislate on Irish matters, raised in particular by a bill that had passed the Commons to restrict Irish woollen exports. Godolphin helped to reduce the impact of Molyneux’s publication on the delicate issue, arranging for Methuen to show Rochester and others ‘a new draught of the linen bill’, and ‘instructed them’, as a result of which on 3 June, ‘upon a long debate the bill is openly and fairly laid aside for this session, declaring that if they in Ireland do not settle the matter before the next session it shall be again begun there’.
In May and June 1698 Godolphin helped to promote the Aire and Calder navigation bill. He wrote to the absent Lonsdale on 17 May, promising ‘to attend very carefully the bill your Lordship was pleased to mention. Some of the northern lords in our house seem to think it against their particular interest but surely the making a river navigable in any country has a face of being for the good of the public’?
The Parliament of 1698
In late August 1698, Godolphin and Marlborough visited Wharton at Winchendon for Quainton races.
Godolphin was present at the opening of the 1699-1700 session, 16 November. On 7 Dec. Godolphin wrote to Harley returning a book, and also making a reference to the proceedings against Thomas Watson, bishop of St Davids, the Lords on the 6th having voted that the bishop should not be allowed his privilege. Godolphin wrote that ‘the strength of the argument in the matter relating to the archbishop’s power of depriving a bishop, seemed to me to be of one side, but it must be owned the strength of votes was much greater against us’.
When Peterborough took notice on 10 Jan. 1700 of the Darien scheme and raised the prospect of Union, ‘the gravest men’, such as Godolphin ‘were for setting apart another day to consider the business’, which was appointed for 16 January. On A month later, on 16 Feb., Vernon wrote to Shrewsbury, ‘I find there are as great jealousies of my Lord Sunderland as ever, which my Lord Marlborough and Lord Godolphin are involved in’.
The illness and death of the lord privy seal Lord Lonsdale in July 1700 provoked speculation of a return to government for Godolphin as part of a revamped ministry.A return to the treasury was blocked by his refusal to serve under the first lord, Ford Grey, earl of Tankerville.
Godolphin was expected to be in town on 14 Oct. 1700, preparatory to discussion with his political allies, in readiness for the king’s return and the sitting of Parliament. He was supposed to meet Rochester on the 15th, before they met Harley together.
Meanwhile, Godolphin, Harley and Rochester continued to meet with each other, and with the king, to hammer out further details of the new ministry.
a beginning with a Tory ministry and an essay made of this kind by first throwing out the chancellor [Somers] and afterwards others. Now since this Lord Godolphin … Lord Rochester and the rest of that party have been esteemed the undertakers and to be the managers in a new Parliament chosen by their interest.TNA, PRO 30/24/20/36-37.
On 24 Nov. Godolphin sent Harley a letter from Rochester arranging a meeting for the 26th. There was another request for a meeting on an unnamed Sunday, for the three of them to meet the king at eight in the evening.
The two Parliaments of 1701
Before the new Parliament met, Guy expected Godolphin in London on 15 Jan. 1701, from where both Godolphin and Rochester urged Harley to attend to make arrangements in readiness for the new Parliament.
Godolphin was consistent in his support for the impeachment of the Whig Lords. He made a series of protests and dissents against decisions limiting the impeachment: on 3 June 1701 he dissented from a resolution insisting on the right of the Lords to limit the time for bringing the charges before them; on the same day he dissented from including in the Lords’ response to the Commons a suggestion that the Commons should not act in a way which might tend to the interruption of a good correspondence between the Houses; and on 9 June he dissented from the decision not to appoint a committee to meet with a Commons’ committee regarding the impeachments. On 17 June he entered his dissent from the resolution to proceed with the trial of Somers in Westminster Hall and to the resolution to put the question acquitting him, and then he voted against the acquittal itself.
Writing to Lord Nottingham on 8 June, Godolphin said that he had been visited by a number of Members that there was some dissatisfaction in the country ‘with the proceedings of the Parliament’, the chief criticism being that ‘they do nothing but quarrel with one another to the neglect of the public business.’ Worried that the sentiment might make the king more susceptible to the suggestion of a fresh election, he proposed that the Commons should ‘pass some vote before the conclusion of the session which may leave a good impression with both’ the people and the king, possibly in a response to the speech to be made by the king when giving royal assent to bills; he suggested that Nottingham should approach Thomas Thynne, Viscount Weymouth, ‘or any of our friends of the House of Commons’, to arrange it, so that ‘when I wait upon you tomorrow your Lordship will have put it into such a form as may be proper to receive the opinion of all our friends together at our next general meeting’. Following the king’s speech on 12 June, the Commons’ address duly referred to the king’s ‘approbation of the proceedings of your Commons’.
Godolphin spent the summer of 1701 in London and Windsor, dealing with business relating to the treasury and his role as a lord justice. In August he was sufficiently worried about the direction of royal policy to fear that the ministry did not have the king’s full confidence, and even informed Marlborough of his intention to resign when the king returned to England. He was particularly concerned about a turn towards the Whigs and its concomitant the dissolution of Parliament. On 9 Sept., at Marlborough’s instigation, Godolphin wrote a letter to him (to be shown to the king) that defended the record of the Parliament and its support for the king’s foreign policy.
On 22 Aug. 1701 Godolphin wrote to Harley that he, Lord H[alifax] and Mr [Gilbert] Heathcote‡ ‘will attend you at your own house this night between 7 and 8. I have just written to Sir Thomas Cooke‡ to desire his company at the same hour.’
On 3 Oct. 1701 Godolphin was writing from St Albans about the king’s imminent return from Holland. He was back in London on 20 Oct., although at the end of the month Marlborough assumed that he had gone to Newmarket.
The election was inconclusive, and Godolphin on 4 Dec. 1701 encouraged Harley to come up to town in good time, as ‘the choice of a speaker will be a very decisive stroke in this ensuing Parliament’: he added that he was about to write to Jonathan Trelawny, bishop of Exeter, ‘to muster up his squadron so as to have them here by the 30th.
Godolphin attended on the second day of the new Parliament, 31 Dec. 1701, and signed the address on 1 Jan. 1702 against the Pretender being recognized by Louis XIV. Indeed, Godolphin drafted a reply for the Commons in response to the speech, although the address actually adopted on 2 Jan. bore little resemblance to it.
As a long-term adviser to the new queen and a confidante of the Marlboroughs, Godolphin was the obvious choice for the treasury. Although not officially appointed lord treasurer until 8 May 1702 he was active as a royal adviser from the beginning of the reign: he was sworn a privy councillor on 18 March.
The cabinet council was to have considered this evening of the communication to be made to the Parliament. I have not yet had any account of what they have done. The enclosed draught contains some of my notions upon that matter. I should be glad you would freely tell me how far it agrees with the form you think ought to be given to it and send it me again tomorrow morning with your alterations. If no supply be asked, perhaps the form of a message is best, but if a supply be asked, I doubt it should be desired from the throne.Add. 70285, Godolphin to Harley, Fri. 1 [May 1702].
Godolphin was much involved in political management, particularly meetings with Tories. Of one such meeting on 15 May he wrote, ‘I am glad the gentlemen had any satisfaction in last night’s conversation; I had very little’.
On 18 and 20 May 1702 Godolphin was named to manage conferences on the prevention of correspondence between England and the allies with France and Spain. Also on 18 May, Thomas Wentworth, 2nd Baron Raby, was given leave to withdraw his appeal of 19 Jan. against several proceedings in the Irish court of chancery, as it had been agreed to refer the matter to Rochester and Godolphin, who having heard counsel, made an award on 20 April. On 20 May Godolphin wrote to Harley that ‘Lords N[ottingham] and R[ochester] desire to meet tomorrow night at your house to consider of the queen’s speech’ at the end of the session, adding on 21 May, ‘I take it I am to be at your house tonight about the speech’.
As soon as the session had ended, Godolphin complained to Harley about the ‘humours so changeable and uncertain’ of Sir Christopher Musgrave‡, whom ‘I never took so many pains in my life to satisfy’, over a place in the ordnance and a tellership of the exchequer. His heartfelt wish was ‘that four or five of these gentlemen that are so sharp set upon other people’s places had mine amongst them to stay their stomachs.’
As treasurer, Godolphin was called upon to adjudicate between the competing claims of Peregrine Osborne, Baron Osborne, styled marquess of Carmarthen, and Halifax for the lucrative post of auditor of the exchequer. After a hearing on 3 July 1702, Godolphin refused to admit Carmarthen to the post, but also declared Halifax’s possession of the office should not be construed so as to prejudice Carmarthen’s claim when it came to be tried in Westminster Hall.
The Parliament of 1702: the 1702-3 session
On 19 Oct. 1702 Godolphin wrote to Harley about Convocation. He had left a book with Harley that had been given to him by Archbishop Tenison, which showed, Tenison had told him, how Convocation showed little interest in accommodation. Godolphin hoped that the Speaker could find a way to quieten the matter, as ‘all matters of difference at this time must needs have very ill consequences both in Church and State’. He himself was not ‘willing… to meddle with it one way or another’.
Godolphin attended the opening of the new Parliament on 20 Oct. 1702. He would keep up a regular correspondence with Harley about the management of the House of Commons, particularly at the beginning of the session. He was immediately determined to ensure a favourable address in response to the queen’s speech of 21 October. On 22 Oct. he wrote to Harley,
to me it seems not a matter of much difficulty, the words of the speech leading so naturally to it. Why might it not run in words to this effect; that this state will stand by and assist her majesty in the just and necessary war in which she is engaged for the support and encouragement of her allies and for disappointing the boundless ambition of France.Longleat, Portland misc. f. 110.
The address agreed to in the Lords on the 22nd did not use these phrases, though it referred particularly to the success of the allies under Marlborough’s command: on the following day Godolphin sent for John Granville, the future Baron Granville, told him of the Lords’ address and made clear his hope that the Commons would follow suit ‘in which I thought he would have an opportunity of doing a thing very agreeable to my Lord Marlborough, if he would take care he might be as honourably mentioned by them as by the other House’.
On 3 Nov. 1702 Godolphin wrote to Harley that he was detained at Nottingham’s office till after the Commons had sat, so that ‘I cannot speak to the persons necessary to move anything this morning there, upon the subject of your letter, but will take all the care I can that they shall be furnished with all the necessary papers for the information of the House’: Ranelagh, Coningsby, Hedges and Blathwayt would meet at the treasury ‘to adjust what shall be opened to the House before they go into the committee, and by whom, unless you offer me a more proper method’. As planned, when the order of the day was read on the 4th for the Commons to go into a committee of supply, the House agreed an address to ask for copies of the treaties relating to the war. These were provided on the 6th and included detailed breakdowns of the financial commitments of the crown to the allies. Meanwhile on 4 Nov. Godolphin grumbled to Harley about ‘how untowardly we proceed about our land forces’, having complained to the solicitor general, Sir Simon Harcourt, the future Viscount Harcourt, who seemed to think another meeting at Harley’s might adjust matters. In response Godolphin noted that he was ‘so out of patience with Sir Edward S[eymour] that I am sure I can meet him nowhere but to scold’.
Nevertheless, by 7 Nov. 1702 Godolphin could write to Harley, presumably apropos the committee of the whole on supply in the Commons, that
the votes of yesterday with the assurances which I have had that no angry thing shall be stirred in the House of Lords without further provocation from the House of Commons, give a fair prospect of a speedy and quiet end of this session, of which I am extremely glad for many reasons that you need not be troubled with particularly till I see you, and I wish that might be either at your own house or mine Sunday about nine at night, as will be most easy to you.Add. 70020, f. 234.
Three days later Godolphin asked Harley ‘if the bill about occasional conformity is to extend to any persons that are not her majesty’s natural born subjects’, because Granville had asked the queen ‘if the prince would have any clause offered to exempt him from the force of the intended act’.
Following the arrival of Marlborough in England at the end of November 1702, plans for the forthcoming campaign went forward rapidly, as did the queen’s desire to provide the material basis for Marlborough’s dukedom.
On 9 Dec. 1702, at the third reading of the bill against occasional conformity in the Lords, Godolphin was one of those arguing that although the bill was ‘just in itself’, yet it was ‘now unseasonable.’
A new issue arose on that day: Godolphin wrote to Harley, ‘I am told advantage is taken from the clause added this day to the prince’s bill to blow up the House of Lords into the thought that this is a tack against which they have lately declared themselves so positively’ (on 9 December). This was the decision in the Commons to add a clause to the bill for settling a revenue on Prince George of Denmark, to make clear that he was not affected by the provisions in the Act of Succession disabling those born outside the kingdom from holding office. Godolphin warned Harley that the clause risked the loss of the bill, which would upset the queen; ‘I do not see how to prevent it unless upon the report so many other saving clauses be offered as will tire the House and give them a handle to leave out all the clauses of the bill and this amongst the rest.’ On 19 Dec. Godolphin wrote again more cheerfully that since the prince’s bill was not to be reported in the Commons until 21 Dec., ‘there’s no danger of its being in our House so as to disturb our passing the bill for the land tax before the holidays’. A free conference about the occasional conformity bill could also, he hoped, be put off till after the adjournment, which it was. However, on 24 Dec. (the day after the Commons had added numerous clauses to Prince George’s bill, as Godolphin had envisaged) he again complained about the action in the Commons, and warned that ‘if the prince meets with a disagreeable opposition in the House of Lords to his bill, he is obliged to his own servants for it. The whole proceeding of that House [Commons] yesterday looks to me as if they were afraid the time were too short for madness and extravagance’.
The House adjourned on 23 Dec. 1702, and on the 26th Godolphin went to St Albans to bring Marlborough back to town with him on the 27th.
Despite it being reported at the beginning of February 1703 that a chapter of Order of the Garter had been appointed for choosing Godolphin, it was an honour he did not accept until the following year, probably because he wished first to be made an earl.
No meetings of the treasury board were held between 25 Mar. and 6 Apr. 1703 and on 27 Mar. it was reported that Godolphin and ‘most of our great men’ were going to Newmarket for ‘the horse racing the next week,’ where he duly lost ‘the great horse race … for 1,000 guineas’ to John Campbell, 2nd duke of Argyll [S].
On 17 July 1703 a newsletter reported that Godolphin would attend the queen to Bath.
The session of 1703-4
Perhaps owing to the enhanced threat to his position, on 4 Nov. 1703 Godolphin outlined a plan of parliamentary management to Harley for the ensuing session: he had left with Hedges ‘the paper of names and settled the method he is to take in concerting matters from time to time’; Hedges was willing to ‘receive his instructions from you’. Sir Edward Seymour, he suggested, had to be called to two or three meetings at least, till his opposition asserted itself. ‘Besides these meetings and those agreed upon last night to be at your house’, Godolphin continued, ‘it is necessary above all the rest that the duke of Marlborough and you and I should meet regularly at least twice a week if not oftener, to advise upon everything that shall occur.’
He attended the Lords on the opening day of the 1703-4 session, 9 November. At the end of November and beginning of December Sunderland forecast that Godolphin was likely to support the occasional conformity bill. On 7 Dec. Methuen reported that Godolphin had told Seymour that ‘it was an ill time to press this bill and if it did pass the Commons it would not pass in the Lords’.
Godolphin attended on the first day after the Christmas recess, 12 Jan. 1704. There is a draft in Godolphin’s hand of the queen’s speech to the Commons on 21 Jan., which he had sent to Harley the day before with the request that ‘you would let me know your sense of this, or what alterations or objections you would propose because the words will not be finally settled till night’. The speech remained Godolphin’s in essence, but with subtle changes of tone which bore the hallmarks of Harley.
Sir William Simpson reported that in the Lords on 25 Mar. 1704, ‘a question was put and carried that the lords of the cabinet, in not committing Robert Ferguson upon the evidence which appeared against him and his own confession when he was first brought before them tended to the endangering the constitution and other hard words’ Simpson added that neither Godolphin nor Marlborough had been present at the relevant meeting, but that they ‘laboured mightily to oppose the vote by which the cabinet was censured though not concerned.’
Over the spring Nottingham’s dissatisfaction with the ministry and its policies was coming to a head, particularly his claims that the queen was being hindered from following a Tory agenda by Godolphin and Marlborough. On 18 Apr. 1704 Godolphin revealed that he had ‘had a very long conversation’ with Nottingham, replete with some threats and a demand that Archbishop Tenison and Somerset be removed from the Cabinet and the earl of Carlisle from the lieutenancy. This did not deflect the queen from ordering the removal of Seymour and Jersey, and thus preparing the way for Nottingham’s resignation and his replacement by Harley, whom Godolphin, ‘contrary to the advice of all his friends’, promoted in his place.
In July Godolphin recorded his support for the appointment of Francis Atterbury, the future bishop of Rochester, as dean of Carlisle, noting to John Sharp, archbishop of York, that it had been done ‘as an earnest only’ of the queen’s intention to promote him further.
As early as late August there is evidence that Godolphin, Marlborough and Harley were being ‘called the triumvirate and reckoned the spring of all public affairs’.
The Session of 1704-5
Godolphin attended on the opening day of the 1704-5 session, 24 Oct., when he registered the proxy of James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond. In about November his name appears on a list which may have been a forecast of those likely to support the Tack. Having returned to London on 5 Nov., Godolphin found ‘the hot, angry people continue obstinate in endeavouring to give all the disturbance they can’, although Harley had been ‘very industrious’ in working against them.
On 12 Nov. 1704 Godolphin informed Harley that with Seymour `being at last come to town’, the 14th ‘is designed for the day of battle,’ when leave would be asked to bring in a bill against occasional conformity.
Meanwhile, in the Lords, on 23 Nov. 1704, after Godolphin had laid before the House accounts of parliamentary grants for the previous three years, John Thompson, Baron Haversham, launched a general attack on the ministry, which included reference to the passage of the Scottish act of security.
On 1 Dec. 1704 Godolphin wrote to Harley about plans for a meeting at Secretary Hedges’ two days later ‘about the roll of sheriffs’, to be followed by another on the 4th ‘of the gentlemen of the H. of Commons to concert what should be done next day about the Aylesbury business and about making the recruits and getting the 5,000 men’: he added that ‘it may not be amiss also to think of what shall be said about the business of Scotland upon which I find by Mr Sec. Hedges the angry gentlemen are very keen’. He ended the letter with the thought that ‘some measures should be speedily concerted to contain our present majority to the end of this Parliament which might also lay a foundation of having one of the same kind in the next’.
On 15 Dec. 1704 Godolphin presented to the Lords an account of quotas of ships furnished by the States General the previous summer. On 5 Jan. 1705 he wrote to James Ogilvy, earl of Seafield [S], excusing himself for not being able to meet on the next day (when he was to go into the City for Marlborough’s feast) and arranging to meet him instead on the 7th, along with Marlborough.
On 25 Jan. 1705 Godolphin wrote to Harley, `I am very much concerned and troubled at yesterday’s easy defeat’—meaning the passage of the place bill through committee in the Commons—‘and the business of this day coming so immediately upon it’, meaning the security of the kingdom from acts passed in Scotland: ‘I must own I think these bills will bring the greatest difficulties imaginable on the queen.’ Possibly hearing that the third reading of the place bill had been put off until 27 Jan., later that day he passed on Marlborough’s request for him to meet them that evening after nine, ‘that we may think a little what is next to be done.’
Godolphin was absent for a few days in February 1705, going on the 14th with the court to Windsor and then to Woodstock.
The 1705 election
On 24 Mar. 1705 Godolphin wrote to Harley asking him to come to his house about 7 in the evening, one reason for the visit being the disposal of the ‘great seal’, which ‘must not lie as long as it does; I wish you would think what ought to be done in it, as soon as you can’ (the lord keeper, Sir Nathan Wright, had come under extreme pressure from the Whigs, and would be replaced in the autumn).
Godolphin was concerned to see that public approbation of ‘Tackers’ did not in any way aid their re-election to Parliament; thus on 2 May 1705 he suggested to Harley that the promotion of several Tackers to be serjeants-at-law should be put off until the term following the election.
The results of the elections were evenly balanced. Given that, and Godolphin’s view of the Tories following the ‘tack’, it was essential that the Whigs be brought into a closer relationship with the ministry, and in order to ensure that, to replace Lord Keeper Wright with the Junto Whig, William Cowper, later Baron and then Earl Cowper. Johnston thought in July, however, that Godolphin ‘begins to neglect 6 [the Whigs] here, and they grow very mutinous’.
In August 1705 the publication of Dr James Drake’s The Memorial of the Church of England caused Godolphin some anguish as it pictured him as an enemy of the Anglican establishment.
On 24 Sept. 1705 Godolphin went from Windsor to Woodstock, intending to go on to Newmarket on the 26th for his pre-sessional entertainment.
Throughout the summer, Godolphin had continued to press the claims of Cowper to succeed Wright. He finally prevailed in October, thereby fulfilling his part of the deal in which the Junto had rescued him over the Scottish act of security.
The session of 1705-6
As the parliamentary session grew closer, Godolphin devoted more time to his scheme of management. He wrote to John Holles, duke of Newcastle, on 11 Oct. 1705, ‘this day fortnight being appointed for the meeting of Parliament, you will give me leave to put you in mind that your grace’s assistance will be very necessary, as in other particulars so in choice of a Speaker’.
Godolphin attended the opening of the new Parliament on 25 Oct. 1705, asking Harley’s leave after ‘the hurry and anxiety of this day’ to ‘put you in mind that the draught of the speech must not be brought tomorrow to the Cabinet Council in my hand, and besides the amendment you may have made to it, there are some, which, upon reflexion, I think myself, more proper to be made’. Further, the winning margin on the speakership had not been ‘so great, but that it will concern the court not to be either negligent or imprudent, any false step will easily spoil this session’, and although ‘so many of our friends have played the fool… unless we have a mind to so too, it must not be resented’.
Godolphin then faced a problem with the chairmanship of the committee of ways and means, the key position in managing supply legislation through the House. From December 1699 this had been John Conyers‡, and Godolphin must have acquiesced in his continuance when he returned to the treasury in 1700. Conyers, though, voted against the court in the contest for the chair of the committee of elections on 7 Nov., raising fears that the Whigs would not back his re-election. As Godolphin wrote to Harley on 8 Nov., ‘I am sorry to hear, Mr Conyers played the fool last night, but I could wish that might not be so resented as to contest against his coming into the money chair tomorrow, since his being there will, in my opinion, make the session a month shorter than else it will be’.
In the Lords, Nottingham moved on 12 Nov. 1705 to address the queen to lay before the House the proceedings of the Scottish Parliament on the succession and union. There was a long debate over whether it should encompass only the Acts of Parliament, or the whole proceedings: Godolphin, who, Cowper wrote in his diary ‘was most concerned in what passed in the Parliament there’, proposed the words used in the address, which were general and did not even mention the Scottish Parliament.
Debate on the state of the nation continued in the committee of the whole on 22 Nov. 1705, with Nottingham criticizing the disappointing campaign of the last summer. It occasioned a four hour debate, chiefly between Nottingham and Godolphin, before the committee rejected the motion, in favour of one promoting good relations between the allies.
On 6 Dec. 1705 Godolphin intervened in the debate on the ‘Church in danger’ to prevent it becoming diverted by Archbishop Sharp’s motion to ask the opinion of the judges on how the law stood in relation to dissenting schools and seminaries. Godolphin pointed out that ‘the order of the day determines what is the main question and that is to take place of any incidental question. The main question is whether the Church be in danger from her majesty’s administration’.
On 5 Jan. 1706 Godolphin visited Halifax, who was engaged in the middle of a management meeting with the Speaker and other, presumably Whig, Members in preparation for the resumption of business after the recess.
The major preoccupation over January and February was the progress of the regency bill, and the attempt by the ‘whimsical’ whigs to insert a clause excluding officer holders from the Commons. On 22 Jan. 1706 Godolphin wrote to Harley, ‘I don’t hear when they intend to proceed upon the place bill, but my thought is that the sooner it comes the better’, while the previous day’s committee of the whole on the regency bill was fresh in Members’ minds: ‘I am apt to think gentlemen will be more easy than if you give them time to harden one another’.
On 21 Feb. in the Lords, Godolphin (with Wharton, Halifax and Marlborough) opposed Lord Rochester’s motion (supported by Somers and Nottingham) to dispense with the standing order allowing 14 days after the commitment of a private bill.
By the end of the session, the germ of future disagreement between Godolphin and Harley can be discerned. On 22 Mar. 1706 Godolphin replied to a letter from Harley concerning political strategy: with 190 Tories, 160 Whigs and 100 ‘queen’s servants’, Godolphin thought ‘our business is to get as many [as] we can from the 190, without doing anything to lose one of the 160’. The behaviour of the Tories in the previous session had ‘shown as much inveteracy and as little sense as was possible’, and even if some of them could be separated from their fellows they would be unreliable. Any move towards them would result in a loss of Whig support.
On 23 Apr. 1706 Godolphin recorded that ‘we gave yesterday the first proposal for a union to the commissioners of Scotland’.
The prospect of taking Ostend in May 1706, and with it a direct link into the markets of the Spanish Netherlands, saw Godolphin keen to ensure that the possibilities for trade were enhanced by executive action and then parliamentary statute, with all laws dealing with the prohibition of lace being lifted in the following session. In early June Godolphin had to deal with a threat from Ormond to quit his Irish lieutenancy, an inconvenience given the pretensions of Wharton to the post. Also in June he expressed his concern at the influence of George Churchill‡, Marlborough’s Tory-inclined brother, on Prince George, for although Churchill ‘had contributed to make some things easy’, the ‘uneasiness’ shown at times by the Prince was attributed to Churchill. On 5 Aug. Godolphin went ‘into Wiltshire for three or four days to see my horses’ at his stables at Tilshead.
Godolphin accepted the implications of his analysis that the Junto should be compensated for its political support, recognizing that Sunderland should be accommodated in the ministry. During the summer of 1706 he attempted to persuade the queen of the efficacy of such an appointment.
On 27 Aug. Godolphin went to visit Wharton at Winchendon, where he was expected to stay until the 31st.
After holding a treasury board on 23 Sept. 1706, the next day Godolphin set out from Windsor for Woodstock, from where on 25 Sept. he wrote to Harley, enclosing a letter for the queen, in which he again pressed for ministerial changes: ‘I propose nothing but what is necessary for carrying on your majesty’s business, especially in this next winter, which is like to be the most critical of your whole reign’, he had written, plaintively: ‘I doubt whether all we can do will be able to keep off the peace this winter’.
The sessions of 1706-7
In the run-up to the session, Godolphin turned his mind to more specific issues of parliamentary management. He was interested in the possibility of a treasury nominee filling the Devizes seat of John Methuen, who had died in July. In October he used Simpson to dissuade Methuen’s son, Paul Methuen‡, currently serving as ambassador in Portugal, from standing in the seat, and to persuade him to use his interest to secure the election of someone else who ‘might be useful to the government during your absence and quit it to you at the next election’.
By the end of October 1706 Godolphin was anxious for Marlborough’s return ‘for several things which ought necessarily to be done before the Parliament. And your being here before their sitting down, must needs have a very great influence toward hastening their preparation for next year’.
In a list of promotions in the peerage in Godolphin’s hand on 29 Nov. 1706, Harley had inserted Godolphin’s advancement to an earldom.
On 1 Mar. 1707 Nicolson recorded that Godolphin had spoken in favour of Nicholas Barnewall, 3rd Viscount Barnewall of Kingsland [I], during the debate upon his appeal, noting that Kingsland had married the duchess of Marlborough’s niece, Mary Hamilton, the daughter of the countess of Tyrconnell. Godolphin was not present on 8 Mar., preferring to attend at St James’s where Nicolson preached a sermon to commemorate the queen’s accession.
The short April 1707 session failed to resolve the problem of fraud associated with the Union, which continued to exercise Godolphin. John Erskine, 22rd earl of Mar, reported on 29 July 1707 that Godolphin had said that favour would be shown to the Scottish merchants ‘which was not contrary to the opinion of the queen’s counsel learned, and further he nor none of the queen’s servants durst advise her majesty to do without hazarding their heads.’
Ecclesiastical matters also intruded into Godolphin’s consciousness. The death of Peter Mews, bishop of Winchester, in November 1706 provided Godolphin with the opportunity to fulfil promises to his fellow Cornishman, Bishop Trelawny of Exeter, for advancement in the Church, in return for his electoral interest.
By the end of June 1707 Godolphin feared a difficult winter in Parliament, as the queen’s ‘proceedings in some things will give 89 [Whigs] a handle to be uneasy and to tear everything in pieces if they can’t have their own terms’. Further, Harley hated Somers, Sunderland and Wharton so much ‘that he omits no occasion of filling 42’s [the queen’s] head with their projects and designs’. As usual when he faced difficulties with the queen, Godolphin urged Marlborough to return early from the campaign otherwise ‘there must be the greatest confusion imaginable in all the affairs of 88 [Parliament]’.
The session of 1707-8
On 25 Aug. and 1 Sept. 1707 Godolphin held meetings of the treasury board at Windsor. In between, on 27 Aug. he was at Wharton’s house at Winchendon, for the horse-racing at Quainton.
Godolphin was present on the opening day of the session, 23 Oct. 1707. Both Whigs and Tories were now willing to unite in an attack on the ministry, for its military failures in Spain, the shortcomings of the admiralty and the attempt to tidy up Scottish government after the Union. Godolphin could count on a group of ‘lord treasurer’s Whigs’, comprising men such as Henry Boyle, John Smith, Sir Thomas Littleton, Spencer Compton, Hugh Boscawen, Thomas Coningsby, and Robert Walpole†, the future earl of Orford, who defended Godolphin in the Commons from the attacks of the Junto Whigs.
Godolphin was absent from the first three sittings of the House after the Christmas recess, 7-9 Jan. 1708, first attending on the 12th. On 16 Jan., Joseph Addison‡ reported that both Marlborough and Godolphin attempted to blunt Peterborough’s lengthy and not entirely coherent criticisms of the war in Spain.
Before the crisis, Godolphin had been negotiating with the Bank for a new subscription, on the one hand and drafting a proposal to the House for raising the remainder of the supply. On 4 Feb. Boyle reported that the Bank had agreed to open their books for an additional subscription of £2,200,000, ‘which will make the way easy for them to supply the government in the method my lord treasurer proposes.’
On 14 Feb. 1708, Godolphin, on the advice of Cowper and Somers, proposed the adjournment of the committee of the whole on the cathedrals bill, promoted by Nicolson to overcome his current dispute with his high Church dean, Francis Atterbury, later bishop of Rochester, until the 19th to allow time for the queen to be informed of its import. On 17 Feb., when Bolton reported from the committee of the whole and an address critical of the management of the admiralty was moved by Wharton and supported by both Whigs and Tories, it was carried without a division after ‘a faint opposition’ from Godolphin.
By the end of March, the ministry were hoping for progress on a bill to improve recruitment for the army. Not present, however, at a meeting of Members on 29 Mar., held under the auspicies of secretary of state, Henry Boyle, he received a report of it on 30 Mar., and wrote that ‘they will do nothing tomorrow that will be worth delaying to put an end to the session in expectation of what they may do farther’.
The 1708 election
Harley’s resignation had done little to reduce the pressure from the Whigs on Godolphin; and suspicions of Harley’s continuing influence with the queen were an additional irritant. Already Arthur Maynwaring‡ was arguing that the inclusion of Somers in the cabinet in place of Pembroke would nullify Harley’s influence with Abigail Masham, because he agreed so perfectly with Godolphin, Sunderland and Boyle.
most open, plain man, the freest of art and trick I have ever known. The more heartily zealous and open this Lord is, the worse and worse he grows with the queen and the higher are the terms and demands from the Oaks [Junto Whigs] when even at the same time they do own he does all he can, that never man run greater hazards than he has done to serve them… You may have wagers that we shall see this Lord sacrificed at last and Mr Harley restored and in this Lord’s place.TNA, PRO 30/24/21/45-46 [Cropley to Shaftesbury, 15 Apr. 1708].
And indeed, on 6 May, having read to the queen another supportive letter from Marlborough, Godolphin recorded a conversation of two hours with her in which she resisted ‘all the plainest reasons and arguments that ever were used in any case whatsoever’, while disclaiming ‘any talk of the least commerce with Mr Harley, at first or secondhand, and positive that she never speaks with anybody but 41 [Prince George] upon anything of that kind.’
As usual, Godolphin took a close interest in the 1708 election. In mid May, he had ‘little reason to doubt, but the next Parliament will be very well inclined to support the war and (I hope) to do everything else that is reasonable, if they can have but reasonable encouragement. All seems to turn upon that’, but the queen remained ‘very inflexible’.
Tensions between Godolphin and the Whigs were such that in mid-July 1708, Roxburghe referred them as being ‘quite broke’, owing to the queen’s ‘aversion’ to the Junto, and Godolphin’s belief that he could construct a party from the Whigs and the Tories, which Harley supported. The Whig Lords ‘laugh at it’, he wrote, because the Tories could not be gained: Nottingham was especially averse to an alliance and recently, he recounted, Godolphin had ‘sent a message to Bromley, but that he refused to treat with him’.
Hamilton thought that Marlborough’s victory at Oudenarde on 11 July would make Godolphin ‘see the advantage of 166 [the Whigs’] assistance and will therefore do everything to put them in good humour’ and ‘mind what 134 [Sunderland] says more than ever’: he advised Sunderland that he should insist ‘that nothing should be disposed of here’ until Sunderland’s allies had arrived; Queensberry had been trying to pre-empt it.
On 2 Aug. 1708 Godolphin announced that the following day he would travel to Wiltshire for three or four days. On the 4th he was at Tilshead. No meetings of the treasury board were held between 2 and 18 and 20-30 August.
Godolphin was under considerable pressure in early October because of a looming financial crisis, with the Bank thought to be scarcely able to survive until Christmas. He was said to have urged Marlborough to do ‘something of éclat’ to encourage public credit: ‘the scarcity of money has frightened him out of his wits, and there is nothing he will not do to oblige the Junto’. Private meetings had been held at Godolphin’s direction about raising money, with agreement that no loans could be raised on the general mortgage or almost any other fund: ‘in this exigency they could think of nothing but exchequer bills to be circulated by subscriptions, the interest to be secured by the malt tax for perpetuity, with the proviso usual in mortgages, redeemable however by Parliament.
The difficulties between Godolphin and the Junto were becoming more and more difficult to overcome: Wharton wrote in a letter to the duchess of Marlborough that at one point, possibly during his visit to Winchendon in August, Godolphin ‘had so little disposition to speak to him that if he had not forced himself into his room at six a clock in the morning [the] day he was to go away he had not had a word’s conversation with him. And [wh]at he said to him then was very dry and disagreeable’.
The session of 1708-9
Godolphin was present on the opening day of the new Parliament, 16 Nov. 1708. On 24 Nov. Johnston reported to Trumbull that ‘this day Conyers lost his chair of the committee of supply because he’s the treasurer’s man, say some’: the Whigs pressed the cause of their candidate, William Farrer‡.
Godolphin was in attendance right up until the Christmas recess on 23 Dec. 1708, when he acquainted the House that the queen would receive their address on the capture of Ghent that evening. On 24 Dec. Godolphin warned Marlborough that although things appeared ‘to be upon a very good foot here, as to the support of the war; yet with relation to the credit of the government and the administration at home, they are in a very uncertain precarious condition’. He complained that the queen’s ‘intimacy and conversation seems to lean only to those who are enemies to all that are most useful in the public service’, and those willing to support the government were in consequence uncertain as ‘to whom they should apply, or upon whom they can depend’.
Over the Christmas recess Godolphin continued to worry about the recruitment bill: on 4 Jan. 1709 he recorded a meeting of two hours with Somers and ‘some gentlemen of the House of Commons, hearing Mr Lowndes read over the recruit bill which he has prepared… It will be ready to be offered to the House of Commons at their first meeting after the present recess,’ as indeed it was. In some apprehension, Godolphin on 6 Jan. admitted to ‘the spleen’ at ‘the prospect of nothing but difficulty and trouble in the course of this sessions from the very great unreasonableness one meets with in most people’. By virtue of the late start to the session, he also warned Marlborough that ‘our supplies will be more backward this year, than they were the last. There is only the land tax past hitherto, and the money does not come in upon that so fast as it used to do in former years’.
Godolphin attended on the first day after the recess, 10 Jan. 1709, despite Johnston writing that ‘the treasurer has the stone and voids blood by urine and spits it too.’
There were further battles over Scottish issues, especially the contested election for Scottish representative peers, in February. On 4 Feb. 1709 Johnston wrote that he was now ‘cock-a-hoop’ at having fooled the Junto in the business; he lost a first division by eight votes on a procedural motion on 26 Jan., but on the 28th ‘he carried it by four’ that a peer of Scotland who took the oaths within Edinburgh Castle was thereby qualified to vote at the election of the 16 representative peers; Johnston thought he would have won by a bigger margin in a vote on the following day, but it was not pressed to a division. As a result of the four who had petitioned against the result of the election, only William Johnston, marquess of Annandale [S], was calculated as having been elected ‘and he the only man of the four whom the Juncto did not desire and thought to have kept out’. At this outcome, ‘hard words’ passed between Godolphin and the Junto, but the quarrel was patched up, Queensberry being declared Secretary, John Kerr, duke of Roxburghe [S], and John Campbell, 2nd duke of Argyll [S] and earl of Greenwich, put on the council and Montrose made privy seal in Scotland. The Junto were said to have conceded that they had ‘given the treasurer 16 votes’: ‘the truth is’, Johnston wrote, ‘they are partly out-witted, not knowing Scotch business as he does.’
On 25 Jan. 1709 John Smith, the former Speaker, and one of Godolphin’s allies, told Marlborough that ‘I must do that justice to my lord treasurer to say that all endeavours that the prudence of man can use to quiet men’s minds or to gratify their desires, he has done’.
Godolphin and the Junto could close ranks to meet specific attacks: on 24 Feb. Gibson informed Humphrey Humphreys, bishop of Hereford of plans for a debate in the Lords on Haversham’s speech earlier in the session, in which he pressed for an enquiry into the preparations for meeting the Jacobite invasion. It had been resisted by Godolphin’s allies who argued that it was designed only ‘to perplex and lose time’; though a debate was conceded instead on ‘the present state of North Britain of which I suppose the ministry will be able to give a better account.’ He added that in the last three weeks ‘it has been understood that the treasurer and the Whig lords or Junto as they call them, were breaking, and a country party forming, of Whigs and Tories, in opposition to the court’. However ‘by the turn given’ to Haversham’s motion of the 18th, ‘it appeared plainly enough that they were together; though I am afraid the union is but loose, nor like to continue long, unless my Lord Marlborough’s coming closes some breaches that are made and making’.
Godolphin only attended eight out of 18 sittings of the Lords in February 1709. After attending the first three sittings in March, 1st-4th, he next attended on 22 March. On 7 Mar. Johnston wrote an interesting commentary on the address sent by the Lords to the Commons on 1 Mar. ‘for the preservation of the repose and quiet of Europe’. The Commons sent it back on the following day with an amendment relating to the destruction of Dunkirk. According to Johnston, the Junto claimed to have ‘resolved and proposed the address without my lord treasurer’s knowledge, that they believe he takes it ill, but they say they can’t help it, for having saved him this winter in both Houses, if that do not satisfy him nothing can.’ Though the address was popularly believed to present an argument for continuing the war, the Junto conceded that the inclusion of a reference to the demolition of the fortifications at Dunkirk by ‘may indeed delay the Peace’, but disclaimed responsibility for the passage demanding the removal of the Pretender from the French dominions (Mohun, they said, ‘is not theirs’. ‘In short’, Johnston concluded, ‘this motion of theirs may have proceeded from their jealousy of which my Lord Somers seems full and Wharton to have none at all, or from a design not to be outrun by Rochester and Haversham, or in concert with the ministry as all the world believes.’
On 22 Mar. Godolphin was one of those successfully arguing in the committee of the whole that the clause in the bill improving the Union relating to treason trials, which allowed the accused a list of witnesses before the trial, should be thrown out because it made a dangerous change at such a time. On 25 Mar. he voted in favour of Seafield’s proposal to consider the validity of Scottish marriage settlements under the new treason law.
Following the Commons amendment of the bill for improving the Union by adding clauses against forfeitures for treason and for providing the accused with a list of witnesses ten days before the trial, the Lords on 14 Apr. 1709 voted that the clauses should commence from the Pretender’s death. Johnston revealed that Godolphin ‘spoke four times for the amendment’: the Scottish peers spoke against it, hoping thereby to lose the bill.
The 1709-10 Session and the Trial of Sacheverell
Following the end of the session, the Junto stepped up pressure on Godolphin to obtain the admiralty for Orford. On 20 May 1709 James Craggs‡ told Marlborough that Somers had been deputed to speak to him ‘very plainly on this subject.’ The ‘Junctonians’ argued that the next session could not ‘be carried on without it, for as the majority are in the Whig interest, they will not be easy without being of a piece, for though there may be some few whimsicals yet the main would be put in good humour by it’.
On 4 July, Godolphin explicitly linked military success to public credit, worrying of a shortfall of £1,200,000 on the supplies voted for the war.
By September 1709 the Whigs were confident that Godolphin and Marlborough ‘could not propose any safety but in the Whigs’.
never shall any man ever persuade me that the public minister who fixes a liberty of conscience, who unites two discordant nations, who promotes public registers, procures general naturalization, encourages the increase of people, the navigation of rivers, manages the public treasure so well, restores lost credit to a miracle, loves liberty, keeps secrets to a degree not known in England since Queen Elizabeth’s time, provides for all the war in its distant parts, bears disappointments, lives frugally, but not covetously, gives not into the designs of priestcraft of any kind, can do these through any bad intentions or be anything like a Tory.
‘It would be the greatest happiness that can possibly befall these nations’, Molesworth went on, reflecting on recent experience, if Godolphin could be preserved from being ‘ground between two parties like two millstones’.
Godolphin was present on the opening day of the next session, 15 Nov. 1709. It seems likely that he played a role in the motion following the queen’s speech in the Commons on that day for Maynwaring referred to a meeting at which a paper he had prepared for Lord Coningsby was not considered, ‘for Mr Smith brought another paper in the lord treasurer’s hand, upon which they sat in consultation till twelve o’clock; and it was moved by Sir John Holland‡, with some small alteration’.
In the crisis engendered by the death of Algernon Capel, 2nd earl of Essex, and the disposal of his posts in January 1710, Godolphin and Somers tried, but failed, to persuade the queen not to appoint Jack Hill‡, the brother of Abigail Masham, to the vacant regiment and thereby undermine Marlborough’s authority in the army.
On 16 Feb. 1710, when the Lords took into consideration the appeal of James Greenshields concerning the right to hold Episcopalian services in Scotland, Rochester ‘moved to send for the proceedings in Scotland and the person to make out the allegations of his petition’, and, according to Mar, Godolphin ‘and those who were for delaying the affair’ supported it. However, Rochester insisted that he had also proposed sending for Greenshields and the Edinburgh magistrates, which was seen as tantamount to accepting the appeal: a motion for adding the words was lost by 42-39, and the original motion was then passed by a great majority.
had prepared a better in respect to what she said concerning the duke of Marlborough, but when he came to receive her directions about it she had been first prepared by Mr Harley and his cousin [Abigail] and she would have some things altered, some quite left out and would have put in something that was not true, and that would have been a mischief to the duke of Marlborough, upon which my Lord Godolphin argued it with her, and in the debate she said to him that upon her soul what she had desired was from herself and her own thoughts purely, which was not possible to have been true, and Lord Godolphin so far got the better in this as to have the speech tolerable and to do no hurt.Add. 61460, ff. 183-4.
Nevertheless, the duchess was still being urged to put more pressure on the treasurer: as soon as Marlborough had departed on the 19th Sunderland pressed him to persuade the duchess to come to London, criticizing Godolphin for ‘a slowness and coldness about him, that is really terrible, and therefore all that can be must be done, to keep him up, and to animate him’.
The most important domestic issue on which Godolphin needed animation was the impeachment of Dr Sacheverell for a sermon preached on 5 Nov. 1709, on The Perils of False Bretheren. Sacheverell had taken particular note of ‘the crafty insidiousness of such wily Volpones’, a clear reference to Godolphin, who had been tagged with this uncomplimentary nickname since at least 1707.
He was certainly an active participant, for on 1 Mar. he moved for the adjournment of the trial till the next day after a tour de force of a speech by Sir Thomas Parker†, the future earl of Macclesfield.
On 16 Mar. 1710 Godolphin argued against Nottingham’s proposal for voting on the articles of impeachment in Westminster Hall, preferring it to take place in the Lords.
Godolphin last attended on the penultimate day of the session, 4 Apr. 1710, having sat on 66 days, 71 per cent of the total, and been named to 12 committees. He then went on his usual trip to Newmarket, setting out on the 6th ‘for eight or ten days’ and returning on 16 April.
Dismissal, 1710
Godolphin had by now realized that the queen would never be reconciled to the duchess of Marlborough.
The intimation, possibly as early as 12 May 1710, that there were plans to replace Sunderland, was a direct provocation. Godolphin realized that Marlborough ‘must look upon it as personal’ and couched his counter-argument in terms of the ‘hurt’ it would do abroad and the mortification it would be to Marlborough, while urging the duke that he should not be ‘provoked to any rashness or precipitation by any rumour from hence’; in return Godolphin would ‘obey your commands in not being wearied out of my life, as long as flesh and blood can bear it’. On 8 June Godolphin floated the idea that the grand pensionary of Holland, Heinsius, should write to Ambassador Vrijbergen that rumours of Sunderland’s impending dismissal were aiding the peace party in Holland. (His suggestion led to a memorial from the States and Heinsius, presented by Vrijbergen, which backfired: Godolphin had to report to Marlborough on 3 July that Shrewsbury and Somerset had persuaded the queen that they had ‘taken too much upon them’.)
A dissolution of Parliament and new elections was particularly a matter for concern. On 16 June Godolphin was still hopeful of avoiding a dissolution, noting that the argument that a new Parliament would support the war was fallacious because once Parliament was dissolved ‘all the allies are in despair, and making their own terms, before it is possible for 88 [Parliament] to come again and to declare his intentions’. On 22 June Godolphin stressed to Marlborough that with a victory over the French ‘all this may yet come right again, and no other way do I see any prospect of it’. With some subtlety Godolphin realized that those Whigs who wished to show the queen that public credit was falling due to the ‘mortifications’ given to Godolphin and Marlborough, although acting out of good will, were mistaken, as public credit ‘once broken’ would take time to recover and ‘in the meantime the whole must be ruined’.
The political uncertainty was indeed creating a crisis of credit, as Godolphin’s problems at the treasury showed. On 15 June he had requested a routine loan from the Bank of England, which had been refused on the 22nd, and only agreed to a week later after two meetings of the directors. On 18 July he reported that ‘the credit continues to sink and the difficulties to increase, and unless there be a speedy remedy, the government will be very soon in the greatest extremities’. On that day he wrote to Seafield that ‘the continued noises of a speedy dissolution continue to have a most pernicious effect upon all our public credit here.’ When the Bank directors approached Godolphin on 3 Aug. for an assurance that the current Parliament would be continued, he asked them to put their request in writing. Armed with their memorandum, Godolphin saw the queen, but failed to get the assurance he wanted.
The undermining of Godolphin’s position continued. Coningsby’s replacement as vice-treasurer of Ireland by Anglesey he interpreted on 9 July as ‘another very disagreeable alteration’, caused by Coningsby’s ‘firm adherence’ to himself and to Godolphin, and by the need to compensate Anglesey for the failure to appoint him as Sunderland’s successor. On 12 July Godolphin reported to Marlborough an approach from James Vernon, on behalf of Shrewsbury, which he thought might be about the duchess’s relationship with the queen, a subject Godolphin thought ‘ought not to be treated with by anybody but’ Marlborough. On 21 July Godolphin reported that Shrewsbury had told Halifax that the queen ‘was resolved to make’ Godolphin and Harley ‘agree’, but that this resolution had been ‘delayed, if not retracted’.
The process by which Harley eased Godolphin from office was not straightforward. On 3 July 1710 Harley drew up a memorandum for an interview with the queen in which he wrote ‘you must preserve your character and spirit to speak to [the] lord treasurer. Get quit of him’.
On 14 Aug. 1710 Godolphin explained his dismissal in terms of the queen being ‘industriously wrought up’ to believe that Mrs Masham could never ‘expect any quarter’ from himself or Marlborough. He predicted the resignation of the Whigs following the dissolution.
This did not mean that Godolphin was happy with what had happened. On 26 Aug. 1710 Harley wrote that Godolphin was ‘very peevish and makes Mr Secretary [Boyle] so’ and on 12 Sept. that Godolphin would not release Boyle from his ‘engagements’ to him.
The Harley ministry and the 1710 election
In September 1710, Godolphin turned some of his attention to the elections. He took part in ‘a great cabal’ at Althorp designed to promote a Whig challenge to Tory hegemony in Northamptonshire, although ultimately to no effect.
According to Harley’s calculations of 3 Oct. 1710, Godolphin was expected to oppose the new ministry.
talking never so big nor voting never so well signifies very little towards carrying on the war with effect, if there be not an entire conjunction and harmony betwixt her majesty and the allies abroad as it has been hitherto, and if, as the French have been already gratified in the first two points, they must also have further satisfaction of seeing assurances from their friends here made good by the duke of Marlborough’s not serving any more, this must needs give the finishing stroke to the drooping alliance, and make it fall to pieces immediately.
The end result would be the allies negotiating separately with France. ‘When the alliance is once broken’, he argued, ‘can it enter into anybody’s imagination that the queen and the British nation will have any terms from France, but what shall be in favour of the Pretender’?
On 5 Jan. 1711 Godolphin spoke in the debate on the war in Spain in defence of Galway’s actions: Nicolson referred to his ‘puzzling remarks’.
Godolphin was absent from the House from 22 Mar. until 9 May. This was partly because of a visit to Newmarket, from whence on 30 Mar. he wrote to Kent, promising ‘a great deal of diversion next week, and a very great appearance’: two of his horses were slated to race on consecutive days on 26-27 April.
Back in the Lords, on 10 May 1711 Godolphin was named to manage a conference on amendments to a bill for the preservation of pine trees in the American colonies. On 12 May he was named to two conferences on the bill for the preservation of game, as he was again on the 17th and 31st. On 15 May Maynwaring reported Godolphin ‘ill of a cold, and more touched by the removal of Lord Rialton than his own’ (his son having been dismissed as cofferer on the 13th).
Over the summer, Godolphin worked on defending his own and his ministry’s reputation, calling on 25 July 1711 for material from Cowper on the Bewdley charter dispute, ‘in order to set the late representation of the House of Commons in a truer light’ (the catalogue of grievances against the Whig ministry which had been compiled in the Commons and voted to be presented to the queen on 31 May, and which referred to the long-running issue of the replacement of Bewdley’s corporation charter).
The tactical advantage of a short Christmas adjournment obtained by the Whigs on 22 Dec. 1711 was obviated on 2 Jan. 1712 when the court (bolstered by the new peerage creations) succeeded in winning a further adjournment. Godolphin spoke against the motion, ‘insisting upon the irregularity of adjourning one house and not th’other’, but it was carried by 63-49.
On 26 June 1712 Godolphin sent a letter to Nottingham noting that ‘the second declaration of the duke of Ormond’s [presumably his announcement that he had received instructions to agree a ceasefire with the French for two months] makes a great noise here, and would have made a greater, I believe if it had not missed of its intended effect’.
Godolphin did not live to see the race. He died at St Albans at 2 o’clock on the morning of 15 Sept., ‘having been long afflicted with the stone in the kidneys’.
An unblemished reputation
After his death, the new earl of Godolphin declared that his father ‘died with no more money by him than £1500 which all people wonders at.’
In the immediate aftermath of his death, the duchess described Godolphin as ‘the truest friend to me and all my family that ever was, and the best man that ever lived’.
Although extremely hard-working, Godolphin could also be good company and was known to enjoy card-playing and, especially horse-racing. Foreign diplomats, such as the Prussian Ezekiel, Freiherr von Spanheim, took particular note of his regular attendance at Newmarket in the spring and autumn of each year.
The traditional view of Godolphin is that of a highly competent administrator, who presided over a treasury which raised unprecedented funds for military purposes, whilst managing the relationship between the executive and the legislature.
In political terms, Godolphin was reluctant to commit the court to a party campaign by sending signals of wholesale removals; what he did do, in Cropley’s words, was ‘dabble a little in a few particular places [to] influence, ’tis so gently done and unseen and so as really to signify very little’. In a sense, the objective was ‘to regulate the extent of official influence … in such a way as to leave one party victorious in the Commons but not uncontrollable’. If he had a weakness as a political manager, it was his distaste for the party battle.