Orphaned at the age of three, Godolphin inherited his mother’s north Norfolk estates, including a seat at Wighton. Doubtless raised in Cornwall by his uncle, Sir Francis Godolphin*, he matriculated at Oxford in 1624, though as a member of Exeter College he had already contributed in the previous year to a volume of verses celebrating Prince Charles’s return from Spain.
Godolphin’s inheritance left him ‘liberally supplied for a very good education, and for a cheerful subsistence, in any course of life he proposed to himself’. Following a period of private foreign travel, in 1632 he accompanied his distant kinsman Sir Robert Sidney*, 2nd earl of Leicester, on a diplomatic mission to Denmark. Thereafter, he successfully sought a place at Court, ‘where his excellent disposition and manners, and extraordinary qualifications, made him very acceptable’.
Despite his diminutive stature and delicate disposition, Godolphin rallied to the king in the First Bishops’ War. Returned for Helston to both the Short and Long Parliaments, he opposed the attainder of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth*), and emerged as one of Cornwall’s leading royalists at the outbreak of the Civil War. He declined an army commission, but saw active service under (Sir) Ralph Hopton* across much of the West Country. Killed during a skirmish at Chagford, Devon on 8 Feb. 1643, he was buried at Okehampton two days later.