Sidney Godolphin
baptized Jan. 15, 1610
died Feb. 9, 1643, Chagford, Devon, Eng.
English poet and Royalist during the reign of Charles I.
Educated at Exeter College, Oxford (1624–27), and at one of
the Inns of Court, Godolphin traveled abroad and also became
friends with Ben Jonson, Thomas Hobbes, and other men of
letters. He was elected a member of the House of Commons
(from Helston, Cornwall) in 1628 and was again elected to
the Short Parliament in March 1640 and to the Long
Parliament in October 1640. A staunch Royalist, he was a
supporter of the doomed Earl of Strafford and was one of the
last to leave the House of Commons when Charles I ordered
his supporters to withdraw. During the first Civil War, he
joined the Royalist forces of Sir Ralph Hopton and, at age
33, was killed in action while advancing into Devon.
The Earl of Clarendon paid a notable tribute to Godolphin
in his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England,
and Hobbes eulogized him in Leviathan. A few of Godolphin’s
poems were published in the 17th century; of these, the
chief is The Passion of Dido for Aeneas, a translation from
Virgil’s fourth book of the Aeneid, apparently unfinished at
his death and completed and published by the poet Edmund
Waller (1658). Other poems survived in manuscript
collections. The first complete collection was edited by
George Saintsbury, in Minor Poets of the Caroline Period,
vol. 2 (1906).
