GODWIN, Francis (1562-1633)

Godwin’s father, from Wokingham, Berkshire, was a schoolmaster under Edward VI, but re-qualified as a physician under Mary, thereby evading scrutiny for his Protestant views. Ordained in 1560, he secured the bishopric of Bath and Wells in 1584, at the recommendation of John Whitgift^†, archbishop of Canterbury. He was accused of despoiling his see for the benefit of his own family, with some justification: Francis Godwin, the subject of this biography, acquired four Somerset livings, a prebend and a canonry at Wells Cathedral during his father’s tenure.24 F. Godwin, A Catalogue of the Bps. of Eng. (1601), 312-13; Oxford DNB, xxii. 616-18; CCEd; Fasti, v. 38, 108. Francis also enjoyed the patronage of his father-in-law, John Woolton^†, bishop of Exeter, who presented him to a Cornish rectory, a prebend, a canonry and the subdeanery at Exeter Cathedral. Shortly after Woolton’s death, Godwin was also instituted as vicar of Heavitree, Devon by the dean and chapter of Exeter.25 Fasti, xii. 36-7, 54, 102; CCEd.

A contemporary recalled that Godwin’s sermons were ‘sharp against the vices most abounding in that time, sacrilege, simony, contempt of God in his ministers, and want of charity’, but Godwin was chiefly noted for his antiquarian interests: in 1590 he accompanied William Camden, a longstanding friend, on a tour of the antiquities of Wales;26 J. Harington, A Briefe View of the State of the Church of Eng. (1653), 167; Oxford DNB, xxii. 611; V[iri] Cl[arissimi] Gulielmi Camdeni et illustrium virorum ad G. Camdenum Epistolae (1691) ed. T. Smith, 109; ‘Camden Diary’ (1691), 66; W.M. Merchant, ‘Bp. Francis Godwin, Historian and Novelist’, Jnl. of the Hist. Soc. of the Church in Wales, v. 46. and 11 years later he published a catalogue of the bishops of England and Wales, both current and past. This included substantial entries for many medieval prelates – laced with a dose of scepticism for the more fabulous tales of their exploits – but (his own father excepted) outlined the careers of most post-Reformation bishops only sparsely; in the case of Tobie Matthew^*, dean of Christ Church, Oxford during his undergraduate days, and bishop of Durham at the time he wrote, he forbore to say more because ‘I am greatly bound unto him, and may be deemed partial’. Godwin’s volume carefully avoided discussing the major controversies of Elizabeth’s reign: the Marian appointee Cuthbert Tunstall^† was coyly deemed to have been ‘justly deprived of his bishopric’ of Durham in 1559; while he made no mention of either the suspension of Edmund Grindal^† as archbishop of Canterbury in 1577, or the more recent harrying of nonconformity by Archbishop Whitgift.27 F. Godwin, A Catalogue of the Bps. of Eng. (1601), 131-2, 312-13, 533, 535.

One contemporary claimed that this book clinched Godwin’s nomination as bishop of Llandaff only two months after its publication. However, his position as a chaplain to the lord treasurer, Thomas Sackville^*, Lord Buckhurst (later 1st earl of Dorset), to whom he dedicated the study, doubtless assisted his prospects. He also expressed an obligation to Sir Robert Cecil^* (later 1st earl of Salisbury), assisting one of the latter’s clients to obtain a lease from the chapter at Wells Cathedral in 1602.28 Harington, 165; HMC Hatfield, xii. 371, 382, 508-9. Valued at only £139 a year, Llandaff was not an inviting prospect for an ambitious cleric, and consequently Godwin was licensed to hold his Somerset rectory and cathedral posts in commendam. He was also given permission to retain his Devon parish and cathedral prebend for two years, doubtless to assist in the payment of his first fruits which (unlike many bishops at the time) were not paid by lengthy instalments. In 1603, shortly after paying off his first fruits, his living in Devon was replaced by a Monmouthshire rectory.29 Trans. Congregational Hist. Soc. vi. 56; CCEd; B. Usher, Ld. Burghley and Episcopacy, 1577-1603, pp. 183, 228.

Godwin was consecrated four weeks into the 1601 parliamentary session, and appears not to have been sent a writ of summons; the 1604 session was thus his first, during the course of which he held the proxy of William Morgan^*, bishop of St Asaph (his predecessor at Llandaff). While present at most of the Lords’ sittings on this occasion, he left little trace on their proceedings, being named to a committee for the bill to ban the export of iron ordnance, two others for private bills, and a fourth to scrutinize eight disparate items of social and private legislation.30 LJ, ii. 263a, 285a, 295b, 311a, 324b.

A diocesan survey conducted at the start of King James’s reign revealed the poverty of Llandaff’s parish livings. Many were served by curates, and Godwin later admitted having to appoint lay readers in some parishes where the stipend was not sufficient to maintain a clergyman.31 SP14/48/121; K. Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 286. Godwin apparently toured his diocese at the time of this survey, and in September 1603 issued a set of injunctions to his clergy which enjoined strict observance of the Sabbath, regular preaching and catechizing, exclusion of excommunicates from divine service, maintenance of terriers of glebe lands and the encouragement of bequests, which were needed to raise the 500 marks required to repair his cathedral.32 G. Gruffydd, ‘Bp. Francis Godwin’s Injunctions’, Jnl. of the Hist. Soc. of the Church in Wales, iv. 15-16; Vis. Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church I ed. K. Fincham (Church of Eng. Rec. Soc. i), 1-3. He is not known to have made any efforts to discipline or remove nonconformist ministers from his diocese during the crackdown of 1604-5, nor did he rate himself or any of his clergy when asked to contribute to the privy seal loans raised by the crown at the same time. In the summer of 1605 Godwin was said to have been involved in suppressing the demonstrations mounted by Catholics along the Monmouthshire-Herefordshire border, but the unnamed bishop summoned to Raglan Castle for a dressing-down by Edward Somerset^*, 4th earl of Worcester was undoubtedly Robert Bennett^*, bishop of Hereford, whose officials had provoked the disturbances.33 Illustrations of Brit. Hist. ed. E. Lodge, iii. 165-6; HMC Hatfield, xvii. 304-6; ROBERT BENNETT. Tensions continued to the end of the year, when the retinue of the Catholic Edward Morgan of Llantarnam, Monmouthshire nearly came to blows with the followers of Sir William Morgan^‡ at the Usk quarter sessions. Godwin, one of the magistrates then present, quickly bound the Catholics to keep the peace, which action prevented serious bloodshed and allowed the quarrel to be dealt with by Star Chamber.34 STAC 8/207/24; Reportes de las Cases in Camera Stellata ed. W.P. Baildon, 312-15.

Although he missed the opening of the next parliamentary session on 5 Nov. 1605, Godwin attended most of its sittings, but was only named to a handful of bill committees, including one for legislation to confirm the endowment of a divinity lectureship at Oxford University, another for the maintenance of Chepstow bridge in his diocese, and a third to regulate the manufacture of Welsh cottons.35 LJ, ii. 386b, 408b, 421a. He attended most of the 1606-7 session, except for several weeks after the Christmas recess, when he left his proxy with Thomas Ravis^*, bishop of Gloucester and Richard Parry^*, bishop of St Asaph. He played no recorded part in the Union debates which comprised the chief business of this session, but was named to the committee for the free trade bill, and another to consider the bill to reinstate ministers deprived for refusing to subscribe to the 1604 Canons, a puritan measure which the bishops ensured never emerged from committee. He was also included on the committee for a local measure to improve pasture in Herefordshire, probably because of Bishop Bennett’s absence through illness.36 Ibid. 449a, 464b, 503a, 512b.

In the autumn of 1609 Ralph Eure^*, 3rd Lord Eure, lord president of the council in the Marches, then on a tour of south-eastern Wales, held a lengthy discussion with Godwin, who lamented that little occurred in his diocese ‘which is not made a question betwixt the Protestant and the recusant’. He blamed this on ‘the scarcity of preaching ministers’ and proposed the allocation of £200 of recusancy fines each year (the fines from Llantarnam alone came to £240 p.a.) to pay for preachers in the main towns of the diocese. Eure endorsed this proposal, noting its similarity to the system of ‘king’s preachers’ recently instituted in Lancashire, but it was never adopted.37 SP14/48/121.

Godwin arrived promptly in Westminster for the parliamentary session which began in February 1610, but on 5 Mar. Richard Bancroft^*, archbishop of Canterbury, excused his absence; a servant had come to his house infected with the plague, and he kept quarantine until 1 May.38 Procs. 1610 ed. E.R. Foster, i. 186; LJ, ii. 585b. He played no recorded part in the negotiations over the Great Contract, but was included on three bill committees: one of these, a fresh draft of the ecclesiastical Canons bill, he doubtless intended to frustrate; another required all those naturalized to prove their conformity by taking the oaths of supremacy and allegiance; while a third dealt with the repair of a weir near his former living of Heavitree, Devon.39 LJ, ii. 606b, 611a, 623a. He was absent from the autumn session of that year, assigning his proxy to Archbishop Bancroft (who died during the session) and George Abbot^*, bishop of London (later archbishop of Canterbury). In 1614 he attended the Lords regularly, but was named to only one committee, for the bill to confirm the endowment of Monmouth grammar school in his diocese. He was present in the House on 24 May, when all the bishops except Tobie Matthew (then archbishop of York) joined the privy councillors to quash a motion for a conference about the Commons’ objections to increases in customs tariffs imposed without parliamentary approval.40 LJ, ii. 706b-7a, 711b; Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McClure, i. 533. Godwin gave £30 towards the benevolence raised in the aftermath of the session, and secured a further £90 from his clergy, sums proportionable to the modest resources of the diocese.41 E351/1950.

Like his father, Godwin had no qualms about using ecclesiastical resources for the benefit of his family. In 1605 he lobbied Sir Thomas Lake^‡ to secure a scholarship at Christ Church, Oxford for his eldest son Thomas; a decade later he persuaded the university to allow his son and his son-in-law John Hughes to exchange two livings they held in Monmouthshire.42 SP15/37/66, 70; Bodl., OUA, NEP/supra/Reg.K, ff.157v-8v. During his tenure at Llandaff he also conferred a prebend and two rectories on his son Thomas; and all four of the clerics who married his daughters secured cathedral prebends. Godwin’s translation to Hereford in 1617 led to a fresh round of preferments: his son Thomas acquired a prebend at Hereford (1618) and the post of cathedral chancellor (1621); the bishop’s younger son Morgan Godwin – one of the ‘running boys in London’ in his youth – was granted a prebend and the archdeaconry of Salop in 1631; three of his sons-in-law secured prebends at Hereford, including John Hughes, who was appointed archdeacon of Hereford in 1623.43 Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1854), ii. 260-1, 265-6, 268; Bradney, iv. 67; Fasti, xiii. 23, 26, 29, 35, 40, 79, 105, 108; CCEd; E112/185/56, 59; Add. 64917, f. 41 (we owe this ref. to Ken Fincham).

Keen to secure further preferment for himself, in 1607 Godwin approached Sir Thomas Lake for a grant of the archdeaconry of Gloucester after the incumbent, Bishop Ravis, was translated from Gloucester to London. The archdeaconry was worth £80 a year, and its borders lay, as Godwin observed, within a few miles of his episcopal palace at Mathern, Monmouthshire.44 SP14/27/6; Le Neve, Fasti (1854), i. 446. However, his plea was unsuccessful. In 1613 Godwin secured another Somerset rectory, in succession to his kinsman Robert Godwin, which he surrendered in 1616, around the time he was promised a reversion of the see of Hereford after the death of Bishop Bennett. As with Llandaff, Godwin probably secured the offer of Hereford with his pen, publishing an updated version of his Catalogue of bishops (with a dedication to King James) in 1615, and a Latin history of England under Henry VIII, Edward VI and Queen Mary in the following year (which was translated, with additions, by his son Morgan Godwin in 1630). A precursor to Camden’s Annales of the reign of Elizabeth, the first half of which was then in print, the tone of this work was, for its time, measured. In it, Godwin praised Henry VIII for his success in war and promotion of the Reformation, but lamented his ‘frequent exactions and subsidies, and sacrilegious spoil of the Church’. He also insisted that Lady Jane Grey ‘only personated a queen’ and rated Queen Mary and Reginald Pole^†, archbishop of Canterbury highly for everything but their persecution of Protestants. It may have been the lack of polemical content which led one contemporary to remark, ‘I hear not much of it, neither en bien, nor en mal’.45 CCEd; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 2, 118; Merchant, 46-7; Oxford DNB, xxii. 611; F. Godwin, Annales of Eng. (1630), 207, 272, 337-8.

Despite the promise of the reversion of Hereford, Godwin had to fight off a challenge from the Cambridge head of house Nicholas Felton^*, who was consoled with the bishopric of Bristol. The surviving records suggest Godwin was an active administrator at Hereford: in 1620 he vetoed the creation of an extra proctor’s place in his consistory court, which he considered unjustified by the level of business; he circulated the royal preaching instructions of 1622 to his rural deans; and he regularly updated the lists of clergy required to provide armaments for the county militias covered by his diocese.46 Chamberlain Letters, ii. 147; Herefs. RO, AL19/16 (ii), pp. 129-36, 164, 233-42, 319, 385-92, 395-400, 434-5, 471, 474-80, 487-92, 539-43. However, he was embarrassed by revelations of irregularities in the accounts of his diocesan receiver at Llandaff, and in 1624-6 his son’s tenure as cathedral chancellor was successfully challenged on the grounds that he lacked any legal training.47 C2/Jas.I/H6/39; SP14/174/70; SP16/10/13; CSP Dom. 1625-6, 172; Staffs. RO, D1287/18/2, P399/110; B. Levack, Civil Lawyers, 64, 269.

Godwin was laid low by illness in 1619-20, and had clearly not fully recovered in 1621, when he attended the House of Lords only intermittently during the opening weeks of the parliamentary session. He vanished from the House entirely after 5 Mar., leaving his proxy with Archbishop Abbot, Bishop Parry, John Buckeridge^*, bishop of Rochester and John Howson^*, bishop of Oxford – a politically even-handed mix of Calvinist and anti-Calvinist prelates. Thus, while included on the newly created standing committee for privileges, and also the subcommittee appointed to draft a set of standing orders for the House, he cannot have contributed much to their proceedings. Ordered to attend a conference with the Commons on 3 Mar. about the fugitive Sir Giles Mompesson^‡, it seems likely that he absented himself.48 LJ, iii. 3b, 10b, 27a, 28a, 31a, 34a. Shortly after the end of the session, Godwin forwarded Archbishop Abbot’s instructions for the collection of a benevolence for the Palatinate to his diocese. While there were complaints at delays in remitting the money to the Exchequer, his own donation of £100, and the £410 raised from his clergy, amounted to a reasonably generous contribution from his diocese.49 Herefs. RO, AL19/16 (ii), pp. 280-1; SP14/133/13; E401/1908; 401/2434-5; Kent Hist. and Lib. Cent., U269/1/OE347.

Godwin attended at Westminster for much of the first half of the 1624 Parliament. He was again included on the privileges’ committee and its subcommittee for standing orders, but otherwise was named only to two committees for private bills. On 22 Mar., once the king had accepted the Commons’ offer of supply, he departed, leaving his proxy with William Laud^*, bishop of St Davids (later archbishop of Canterbury), who later tabled a petition to the House on behalf of one of Godwin’s chaplains.50 LJ, iii. 212a, 215a-b, 257a-b; PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/3, f. 40. Godwin may have chosen Laud as his proxy simply because he held an adjacent diocese, but in a session in which the anti-Calvinists came under attack in the Commons, it hints at his political preference. Godwin clearly planned to attend the 1625 Parliament, being present at the two preliminary sittings of 31 May and 13 June, but then secured a royal licence to depart, leaving his proxy with Buckeridge, Howson and Laud.51 CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 540; Procs. 1625, p. 590. At the end of the year he was well enough to lead a party of magistrates to search for arms at Raglan Castle, and to circulate royal instructions for strict enforcement of the recusancy laws; but he was again excused attendance at Parliament in 1626, awarding his proxy to the same three bishops as he had in the previous year – a small measure of support for George Villiers^*, 1st duke of Buckingham, who faced impeachment charges during this session.52 SP16/11/60-1; Herefs. RO, AL19/16 (ii), pp. 522-5; Procs. 1626, iv. 14. In 1628, Godwin attended much of the first half of the parliamentary session, but left no trace on its proceedings, and vanished from the Lords after 15 May. His decision to leave his proxy with Buckeridge and Howson suggests that his sympathies lay with the crown, but his absence from the House ensured that he left no hostages to fortune. Nor did he reappear in 1629, when his proxy went to Howson and Laud.53 Lords Procs. 1628, p. 25; SO3/9, unfol.; LJ, iv. 3a.

Godwin probably spent the final years of his life in semi-retirement, when he may have revised a juvenile work of fiction, published posthumously, in which a Spanish narrator described being taken to the moon by a flock of geese. This eccentric plotline allowed Godwin to discuss contemporary voyages of exploration, scientific discoveries, and the implications for revealed religion if life were discovered on other planets – the ‘lunars’ he portrayed were devout Christians, yet devoid of most earthly vices, except for tobacco.54 F. Godwin, The Man in the Moone (1638); Oxford DNB, xxii. 612; H.W. Lawton, ‘Bp. Godwin’s Man in the Moone’, Rev. of Eng. Studies, vii. 23-37; D. Cressy, ‘Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon’, AHR, cxi. 961-82. Godwin was buried on his episcopal estate at Whitbourne, Herefordshire on 29 Apr. 1633. Administration of his goods was granted three weeks later to his daughter Frances Robotham, but as the latter’s husband, appointed to the rectory of Dilwyn in Herefordshire through Godwin’s influence, had recently been in dispute with his father-in-law over a lease of tithes, a fresh grant was subsequently made to Godwin’s widow. The Exchequer subsequently pressed his estate for substantial arrears of tenths and clerical subsidies.55 Bradney, iv. 67; PROB 6/14A, pp. 166, 174; SP16/237/89; 16/252/51.