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 immediately accepted (, Works, v. 62). Goodman set out for his diocese, and in 1636 arbitrated, by order of the privy council, between the city and county of Gloucester as to their liability to ship-money. In 1633, 1636, and 1637, Laud complained that Goodman failed to send in any report as to the state of his diocese.

Goodman's religious views gradually brought him into very close sympathy with the Roman church, and he soon gave grounds for the suspicion that he had secretly joined that communion. Panzani, the papal agent in England, wrote in January 1635–6 that ‘the bishop said divine offices in private out of the Roman breviary, and had asked permission to keep an Italian priest to say mass secretly in his house’ (, Hist. viii. 140). Early in 1638 similar allegations were openly made in Rome, and Sir William Hamilton, the English agent there, wrote to Secretary Windebank that Goodman had been converted about 1635 or 1636 by one William Hanmer, who went by the name of John Challoner. On 13 July 1638 Edmund Atwood, vicar of Hartpury, Gloucestershire, gave Windebank an account of Goodman's intimate relations with Hanmer and with the provincial of the jesuits, who were both repeatedly the bishop's guests at Gloucester (Clarendon State Papers in, Memoirs, App. O.) To escape the threatened storm, Goodman made a fruitless application to Laud for permission to visit Spa on the specious ground of ill-health. On 27 Aug. 1638 he petitioned in vain for a private interview with the king. Laud, in letters to Windebank and Strafford, dwelt on the king's wrath, and wrote with biting sarcasm of Goodman's dejection and cowardice (Cal. Clarendon State Papers, ii. 17–18; Strafford Papers, ii. 158). Finally Goodman appears to have given an assurance of future conformity. He was summoned in the same year (1638) before the high commission court on the charge of having allowed the justices of Tewkesbury to hold quarter-sessions in the church there. In 1639 he showed some vigour in examining residents in his diocese who had graduated at Scottish universities, and were suspected by the privy council of active sympathy with the Scottish rebellion (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1639, pp. 266–7, 319). On 18 Jan. 1639–40 the king sent him a peremptory order to return to Gloucester from Windsor, where he preferred to live. But worse difficulties were in store. In May 1640 Goodman with the other bishops was requested to sign adhesion to the new canons, which upheld passive obedience and the divine right of kings, while sternly denouncing Romish practices. Goodman privately informed Laud that he should withhold his signature at all hazards. He argued that convocation had no right to sit, now that parliament was dissolved. Laud plainly told him that his refusal could only be ascribed to his being a papist, Socinian, or sectary, and charged him with popish predilections. But Goodman was obstinate in his resistance when convocation met (29 May), and the two houses passed upon him a decree of deprivation a beneficio et officio (, p. 446;, Works, iii. 236; Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1640, pp. 233–4). Laud at once informed the king of the situation, and orders were sent down for Goodman's committal to the Gatehouse. He petitioned for a fair trial (31 May), and begged Vane to restore his papers which had been seized, and which he declared were chiefly literary notes made in early life (2 June). He gave a bond of 10,000l. not to leave the kingdom. On 10 July he made his submission, signed the canons, was released from prison, and was restored to his see. On 28 Aug. he wrote to Laud expressing a desire to resign his bishopric as soon as his debts were paid and live on ‘his commendam.’

Goodman's equivocal position was very prejudicial to the cause of his fellow-churchmen. In February 1640–1, when the condition of the church was under debate in parliament, Falkland ascribed the disrepute into which it had fallen to the dishonesty of men like Goodman, ‘who found a way to reconcile the opinions of Rome to the preferments of England, and to be so absolutely, directly, and cordially papists, that it is all that 1,500l. a year can do to keep them from confessing it.’ On the other hand, the enemies of Laud found an additional weapon to employ against him and his brother-bishops in the severe treatment to which Goodman had been subjected in convocation. The canons which Goodman had resisted were naturally obnoxious to the parliament. A proposal was made in 1641 to bring ‘within a præmunire’ all who had voted for Goodman's suspension, and the ninth additional article in Laud's impeachment (1644) charged him with having advised Goodman's imprisonment, and with having forced him to sign the obnoxious canons. But Goodman did not escape the persecution to which his order was exposed. In August 1641 it was resolved by the House of Commons to impeach him along with Laud and the other bishops who had signed the canons. In December Goodman and eleven other bishops signed the letter sent to the king, in which they complained of intimidation while making their way to the House of Lords, and protested against the transaction of business in their absence.