Sidney Godolphin

Sidney Godolphin ran the English and then British treasury through the War of the Spanish Succession, and financed Marlborough's campaigns for a decade without the state going bankrupt, which is the substantial achievement of his life. He was a Cornish gentleman who came to court as a page and served every regime from Charles II to Anne, taking office under James II, keeping it after the revolution of 1688, and being suspected of Jacobite correspondence throughout - which most senior men then were, as insurance. Charles II is supposed to have said of him that he was never in the way and never out of the way. He was Lord Treasurer from 1702, and his partnership with the Duke of Marlborough, whose son married his, is the reason Blenheim and Ramillies could be fought at all: the money had to be raised in London and remitted across Europe to armies in the field, and the machinery for doing it - the Bank of England, the funded national debt, the land tax - was still new. He also carried the Act of Union with Scotland through in 1707. He was pushed out in 1710 when Anne turned against the Marlboroughs and the Tories came in, and died two years later. He was a famously heavy gambler on horses and cards, and bred racehorses; the Godolphin Arabian, one of the three founding stallions of the entire thoroughbred line, was his. His granddaughter married the Duke of Leeds and the family title survived into the nineteenth century. The Godolphin Arabian is buried in Cambridgeshire and appears in the pedigree of a large majority of racehorses alive today. He died at St Albans in the Marlboroughs house.

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