The Godolphins were typical of many Cornish landed gentry. The family was an old one, rooted to a spot to the west of Tregonning Hill in the parish of Breage. Fortune had smiled on them in the sense that underneath their land lurked rich tin reserves. As mineral lords they were due a proportion of the tin raised, whether or not the mines made profits. On this basis the Godolphins grew rich and built a new house in the late 1400s that replaced the former castle, which became the site of formal gardens.
In the days of Henry VIII the family gained political prominence to add to their economic security. Their rapid move to ensure law and order in 1537 and 1548 defused potentially serious risings by the common people. But even the Godolphins, adroitly trimming their sails to the new Protestantism, could not prevent the Prayer Book Rising in 1549.
The house dates mainly from the seventeenth century, during the course of which Sidney Godolphin – poet and aesthete – gained posthumous fame after being shot in the service of the King in the civil wars at Chagford in Devon. He became a symbol of the Cornish landed class’s devotion to the royal family.
Another Sidney, born in 1645, two years after the first Sidney was killed, became MP for nearby Helston and a client of the up and coming Marlborough family. This Sidney, later Earl, served Queen Anne as Lord Treasurer from 1702 to 1710 and has a better claim than Robert Walpole to be called Britain’s first Prime Minister. He steered the Act of Union with Scotland through Parliament in 1707 and financed the long war of the Spanish Succession against the French. The costs of this war eventually lost Godolphin his post and he was dismissed in 1710, to die at St Albans in Hertfordshire two years later.
In the eighteenth century the family declined and gradually ran out of male heirs, their estate passing to the absentee Duke of Leeds in 1785. The house was left virtually undisturbed for 200 years until the final decades of the 1900s.
Cornish studies resources 
Through DNA I have established that I am descended on my father’s maternal side from The Civil war Sidney’s niece Elizabeth daughter of Sir Francis. And by consequence of being of Godolophin descent I am also connected to other Cornish Gentry such as Killigrew. I have also found a connection to my recent and ordinary Cornish ancestry over several centuries (17th to 19th) to the Boscastle area.
Given the odd older male sibling and a descent once or twice through a female none of the wealth,title, or prestige came down to me. But it has still been cool to find out after 50 years of living, in ignorance, that I can claim roots in a place of legend and romance.
Of course I have got other roots of my identity: Irish, Kent, Devon and elsewhere. But very happy to have the link to historic and ancient Cornish families.
Enjoying your site. Thank you.
You mention of Godolophin’s ‘adroit frimming of their sales’ I read that William Godolphin failed to attend parliament when there was an oath to the CofE. Do you think that there may be a sign of private avowal of the traditonal church – recusant spirit?
Interestingly after the civil war familes such as the Godolphin quickly worked to shore themselves up in the ‘New Establishment’ such as by forging alliances with familes that had fought on Parliament’s side. My female Godolphin ancestor was married off to the younger son of a Devon baron(he eventually succeded to the title) who had been captured and imprisoned by the Royalists in 1644. The father was actually elected as MP for Helston in 1660(voided). I rather suspect the match was made in part with a view to Godolphin’s having an advocate with someone close to George Monck, a fellow Devonian, in the Convention. So I reckon I probably owe my existence from the need of the England to find unity following the Civil war.
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