Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Goffe, John
GOFFE or GOUGH, JOHN, D.D. (1610?–1661), divine, was the son of Stephen Goffe or Gough, rector of Stanmer in Sussex, ‘a severe puritan.’ In 1624 he matriculated at Merton College, Oxford, and in 1627–8 was made a demy of St. Mary Magdalen College, when, Wood (Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, iii. 524) says, he was ‘aged 17 or more.’ In 1628 he obtained the degree of B.A., and in 1629 was made a probationary and in 1630 a perpetual fellow. In 1631 he proceeded M.A., and taking orders preached in the neighbourhood of the university. On 26 Aug. 1634 he was accused before Sir Unton Crooke, deputy-steward of the university, of having killed Joseph Boyse, a member of Magdalen College, but was acquitted (Wharton, Laud, p. 71). In 1642 he was presented to the living of Hackington or St. Stephen's, near Canterbury, from which he was ejected in the following year for refusing to take the covenant, and was thrown into the county prison at Canterbury. In 1652, by the influence of his brother, William Gough [q. v.], a regicide and one of Cromwell's House of Lords, he was inducted into the living of Norton, near Sittingbourne, Kent, which he held till 1660, when he was again legally preferred to this, and restored to the vicarage of Hackington, and in the same year took the degree of D.D. His name appears among the clergy who attended convocation in 1661, and on 20 Nov. of this year he died, and six days later was buried in the chancel of St. Alphege's Church, Canterbury. Wood describes him as having been a ‘zealous son of the church of England;’ he was certainly an able scholar and a thoughtful writer. His only known works are: 1. The Latin preface to Simson's ‘Chronicum Catholicum,’ 1652. 2. ‘Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ ΘΡΗΝΩΔΙ′A, in qua perturbatissimus Regni & Ecclesiæ Status sub Anabaptistica Tyrannide lugetur,’ London, 1661.
[Wood's Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, iii. 524; Hasted's Kent, ed. 1790, ii. 745, iii. 601; Horsfield's Lewes, ii. 219; Walker's Sufferings, pt. ii. p. 252; Bloxam's Reg. Magd. Coll. ii. cxxiii, iii. 163; Watt's Bibl. Brit.]