RODES, Godfrey (1631-81), of Great Houghton, Darfield, Yorks.

Described by his fellow Cromwellian bureaucrat Samuel Disbrowe* as an ‘honest and able’ gentleman, Godfrey Rodes was a trusted, if minor, figure in the administration of Scotland under the protectorate.11TSP vii. 463; Sheffield City Archives, CM/1573, 1574. In 1655, he was appointed one of the commissaries for Edinburgh by the protectoral council for Scotland, of which his father, Sir Edward Rodes, was a member.12Infra, ‘Sir Edward Rodes’; TSP vii. 463; Scotland and the Protectorate ed. Firth, 306. Similarly, he probably owed his return for Linlithgow Shires in the summer of 1656 to the influence of his father and the president of the council, Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle*). Sir Edward was returned for Perthshire in the same elections.13Supra, ‘Linlithgow Shires’; infra, ‘Sir Edward Rodes’.

Rodes was named to only three committees in this Parliament – including the committee for Scottish affairs – on each occasion in the company of his father.14CJ vii. 427a, 504b, 521a. His appointment to a committee set up on 7 April to desire the lord protector to appoint a time and place for the House to attend him and present reasons for its adherence to the proposed new constitution, the Humble Petition and Advice, and its offer of the crown to Oliver Cromwell*, may indicate that – like his father and most other Scottish Members – he was aligned with the civilian and Presbyterian element among the Cromwellian court party.15CJ vii. 521a. He was certainly listed among the ‘kinglings’ – those in the House who supported a monarchical settlement.16A Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 22 (E.935.5). Even more revealing is his tellership on 20 June with the Plymouth MP Timothy Alsop in favour of including a clause in a bill for the better observation of the Lord’s Day for the punishment of ‘all profane and idle sitting openly at gates or doors, or elsewhere’.17CJ vii. 567b. Many Members, including some of the more godly, regarded this clause as draconian, and Rodes and Alsop lost the division by 35 votes to 37.18Burton’s Diary, ii. 264-5. Rodes’s support for the inclusion of this clause strongly suggests that he shared his father’s Presbyterian sympathies.

With the fall of the protectorate in April 1659, Rodes probably returned to Yorkshire and the family seat at Great Houghton. Unmolested by the Restoration government, he seems to have been much more afflicted by the heavy debts that Sir Edward had incurred during the 1640s and 1650s and for which Godrey himself stood jointly bound with his father.19Sheffield City Archives, CM/1577. At some point in the mid-1660s, he wrote to his Sir Edward, urging him to alter his will in order to make better provision for the repayment of their debts and the care of Lady Rodes: ‘after this’, he continued, ‘I ought to insist upon it to have a present livelihood for myself – all this I humbly conceive is most fitting to be done before any provisions for your younger children, to whose shares the remainder of your estate will come to ...’. Sir Edward ignored this advice, however, and in his will he made bequests to all his younger children and merely left Godfrey the residue of his real and personal estate.20Sheffield City Archives, CM/1577. Sir Edward died early in 1666, and Godfrey and his mother were subsequently forced to sell off a large part of the family’s estate to discharge his debts.21Sheffield City Archives, CM/458-9, 465, 469-76.

Very little is known about Rodes between his father’s death in 1666 and his own in the spring of 1681. He was buried on 27 April at Darfield church, just five days after his mother’s interment there.22Darfield par. reg. He died unmarried, and in his will he assigned all his property to his brother William to hold in trust for the payment of his mother’s debts and to provide £100 for his two sisters in accordance with a similar, but clearly unfulfilled, bequest in Sir Edward Rodes’s will. Besides the £200 left to his sisters, Godfrey made bequests of just £32.23Sheffield City Archives, CM/493. Although Sir Edward’s estate had been worth about £620 a year in the mid-1660s, the sale of many of his properties after his death probably meant that Godfrey’s own estate was worth less than half that amount.24Sheffield City Archives, CM/1577. Godfrey appears to have retained Houghton Hall and the lease of the tithes in Darfield.25Sheffield City Archives, CM/493. He also seems to have inherited his father’s concern to provide shelter and employment to nonconformist ministers, for an elegy written on his death and that of his mother exhorts their survivors to maintain Houghton Hall as a centre for godly exercises.26Add. 4460, f. 82.