GODFREY, Thomas (1586-1664), of Halling, and Hoddisford, Sellindge, Kent.

Godfrey’s family had a long pedigree in Kent, and a long association with the town which he twice represented in Parliament.24Hasted, Kent, viii. 426; L.L. Duncan, Monumental Inscriptions (1927), 41. Although well-established among the county gentry, they were not prominent in public life, and as the son of a second marriage Godfrey himself would not have been raised to play a leading role. Nevertheless, he appears to have been free from financial concerns, and although admitted to the Middle Temple (on the same day as future secretary of state Francis Windebanke*), does not appear to have pursued a legal career.25MT Admiss. i. 80. Instead, he gained a position within the household of Henry Howard, 1st earl of Northampton, lord warden of the Cinque Ports, where he remained until his marriage to a daughter of one of the greatest jurists of the period, William Lambarde†.26Coll. Top. and Gen. ii. 451, 455.

Godfrey secured election at Winchelsea on his own interest (as a resident) in the Addled Parliament, but did not sit at Westminster again until 1628. Having twice made short visits to the continent, he secured a place at court, as sewer extraordinary to James I. In 1624, following the deaths of both his father and his elder half-brother, he was briefly head of the family during the minority of the latter’s eldest son, but it was Thomas’s younger half-brother Richard Godfrey II† who secured election to Westminster, as member for New Romney in 1624, 1625, and 1626.27Lydd par. reg.; HP Commons 1604-1629. Godfrey failed to secure a position at the court of Charles I, but resumed his parliamentary career in 1628 by taking his brother’s place at New Romney with the support of powerful local magnates, including Sir Edward Scott† and Sir Peter Heyman*, in opposition to the court candidate, Sir Edward Dering*.28HP Commons 1604-1629.

Having in the meantime served on numerous local commissions, in the elections for the Short Parliament, Godfrey was re-elected as Member for New Romney, and although the electoral patronage in the port is unclear, it seems unlikely that he received the support of the lord warden, Theophilus Howard†, 2nd earl of Suffolk. In a heavily contested election, Godfrey secured his place alongside his nephew William Steele*, a lawyer, ahead of another local man, Sir Christopher Abdy, and three outsiders, Thomas Withring*, Thomas Cook, and John Harvey*, all of whom had connections with, and the support of, courtiers like the 4th earl of Northumberland (Algernon Percy†), Secretary of state Sir John Coke†, and the lord warden.29E. Kent RO, NR/Aep/3/1; NR/AC2, p. 265. Godfrey played little substantive role in the proceedings, however. He was appointed to keep note of MPs who took communion on 3 May – the effective test of admission to the House – and spoke in a debate relating to a petition from an inhabitant of Winchelsea.30CJ ii. 11, 12a; Aston’s Diary, 49, 60. He was named to just two committees: one on a minor land bill; the other to consider the act for reformation of abuses in ecclesiastical courts.31CJ ii. 17b, 18b.

It is not clear if Godfrey sought re-election to the Long Parliament, but he was not returned. During the 1640s and 1650s he played little part in either local or national affairs. Although he remained a justice of the peace until the establishment of the republic, he was named to few other commissions, and played no part in the work of the county committees. His place within the county elite was effectively taken by his son, Lambarde Godfrey*, who became an active parliamentarian in the region and an MP in the 1650s. Yet there is little firm evidence that Godfrey himself was inclined towards royalism. He appears to have been arrested on the orders of the Committee of Both Kingdoms in July 1648, in the aftermath of the second civil war, but it seems likely that this was a case of mistaken identity, and that the local royalist activist who had been involved in organising the provocative county petition of May 1648, was his nephew Sir Thomas Godfrey.32CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 170, 226; A Declaration of the Several Proceedings of Both Houses (1648), 9-10 (E.446.1). Indeed, Godfrey’s inactivity may merely have reflected his advanced age. Although he lived until October 1664, when he was buried at Sellindge, he had drawn up his will, which included a portion of £1,000 for his unmarried daughter, in April 1657. The will revealed Godfrey’s religious zeal, particularly in the provision of money for an annual sermon to be preached in his parish every 5 November, to mark the Gunpowder Plot. Perhaps ironically, therefore, it was the mysterious death of one of his younger sons, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, which sparked another important popish scare later in the century.33Canterbury Cathedral Lib. PRC 17/72, f. 49.