GOODRICK, William (d. 1666), of Tickenham Court, Tickenham, Som.

Goodrick belonged to a junior branch of the Yorkshire gentry family the Goodrickes of Ribston and was a cousin of the Lincoln’s Inn barrister Francis Goodricke*.22Infra, ‘Francis Goodricke’; Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. i. 54. He may have been the ‘William Goodrick esq’ who was listed in the mid-1630s as a captain in the East Riding militia regiment of Sir John Hotham* – although as he would have been no more than 22 or 23 years old at the time (his parents having married in late 1612), this was more probably his father, William Goodricke senior, whose main residence was at Skidby, near Hull.23Add. 28082, f. 80v; C.H. Townshend, ‘Bellingham sketch’, New Eng. Hist. and Gen. Reg. xxxvi. 385. In mid-September 1640, either Goodrick or his father signed the Yorkshire gentry’s third petition to the king in as many months, in which the petitioners again pleaded poverty in the face of royal demands to mobilize the county’s militia against the invading Scots and requested that Charles summon a new Parliament.24Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland Ms vol. 1608-1700, N38 Car. I. It was Goodricke senior who signed a petition from the Yorkshire gentry to the Lords in February 1642, asking the peers to work more closely with the Commons for the relief of Ireland’s Protestants.25PA, Main Pprs. 15 Feb. 1642, f. 55; LJ iv. 587a.

With the outbreak of civil war in the summer of 1642, Goodrick raised a troop of dragoons for Parliament; and by May 1643, he was garrisoning Wressle Castle, about six miles east of Selby.26SP28/189, pt. 3, unfol.; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 465; Jones, ‘War in north’, 385. Like his father, who was a captain and then a major in the Hull garrison, Goodrick was under the command of Hotham.27SP28/138, pt. 4, f. 50. When Hotham attempted to defect to the king in June 1643, his friend and fellow turncoat Sir Hugh Cholmeley* wrote to Goodrick at Wressle, informing him of Hotham’s flight and capture and urging him to seize the castle for the king. Cholmeley claimed that Goodrick’s father had been imprisoned for his loyalty to Hotham and warned Goodrick that he too would be made a prisoner unless he secured Wressle against the parliamentarians. Goodrick, however, was not fooled by this invitation to treachery masquerading as friendly advice. In reply, he denounced Cholmeley’s betrayal of Scarborough to the king and insisted that, for his part, he would remain loyal to Parliament: ‘I am confident a good cause and a good conscience is the chiefest security – both which, if your advice (or device) were prosecuted, I should be deprived of’.28Two Letters (1643), 3-8 (E.60.4); J.D. Legard, The Legards of Anlaby and Ganton, 44.

Goodrick’s loyalty was rewarded shortly afterwards when he was commissioned as a captain in the troop of horse belonging to the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*), the commander of Parliament’s northern army, who replaced Hotham as governor of Hull (Goodrick’s father, having given assurances of his allegiance to Parliament, was appointed major to Fairfax’s regiment of foot). In the spring of 1644, Goodrick was promoted to major in the regiment of horse commanded by Sir William Constable*, replacing Hugh Bethell*, who had been made a colonel.29Jones, ‘War in north’, 384-5. As a major, Goodrick commanded one of two regiments of Yorkshire horse that crossed the Pennines in February 1645 to assist Sir William Brereton* in the leaguer at Chester. Brereton attempted to use the Yorkshire regiments to blockade Chester from the Welsh side, but failing to provide them with sufficient pay, they proved to be more of a liability than an asset. Early in May, Goodrick wrote to Brereton, making it plain that without some more satisfactory arrangement over pay, his regiment intended to return to Yorkshire. Brereton, unable to supply his own men, still less those of Yorkshire, had no choice but to let them depart.30Brereton Letter Bks. i. 177-8, 339, 408-9, 415, 416, 517-21.

Following the reduction of Constable’s regiment in the summer of 1645, Goodrick appears to have joined either Bethell’s regiment of horse or, more probably, that of John Lambert*. He attended almost every recorded meeting of the Northern Brigade’s council of war between September 1647 and December 1648 and supported its declaration in favour of the army’s Remonstrance of mid-November calling for justice against the king.31York Minster Lib. BB53, pp. 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 12, 16, 18, 32, 35. Goodrick, who was certainly an officer in Lambert’s regiment by May 1650, was part of the force that Cromwell led into Scotland in the summer of that year.32E121/5/5/32; Letters from Roundhead Officers to Captain Adam Baynes ed. J.Y. Akerman, 14, 30.

During the late 1640s and early 1650s, Goodrick and his father, now a lieutenant-colonel, corresponded on a regular basis with the Northern Brigade’s financial agent in London, Captain Adam Baynes*, concerning the purchase of crown lands by debentures for arrears of army pay.33Add. 21417, ff. 124, 139, 271, 294; Add. 21420, ff. 7, 54, 189, 190, 213; Add. 21421, f. 190; Add. 21427, f. 71; Letters from Roundhead Officers ed. Akerman, 14, 53. Both Goodricke senior and Goodrick junior were involved, with Baynes, in purchasing the manor and palace of Richmond, Surrey, in April 1651, on behalf of a group of northern officers and their men – including the Goodricks themselves, who put up £8,190 of the £13,562 purchase price. Francis Goodricke appears to have assisted Baynes in handling the London end of this transaction. The manor was subsequently sold off – most of it to Sir Gregory Norton* – although not before Goodrick had stripped the lead from its roof.34C54/3574/22; Add. 21420, ff. 189, 213; Add. 21426, ff. 126, 128; I. Gentles, ‘The Debentures Market and Military Purchases of Crown Lands, 1649-60’ (London Univ. PhD thesis, 1969), 287; C.A. Goodricke, Ribston, 59.

After the battle of Worcester in September 1651, Goodrick appears to have left the army, securing admission to the Middle Temple in October. In January 1652, the council of officers at Whitehall appointed him to a committee – that included Baynes, Thomas Pride* and Charles Worsley* – to attend the council of state’s committee for Scottish and Irish affairs concerning the arrears of the forces in Scotland.35CJ vii. 90b-91a. He was described as a resident of the Temple in March, when he purchased (possibly with money borrowed earlier that month) the fee farm rents of the manor and vicarage of Hunsingore, which had been forfeited to the state by his royalist cousin Sir John Goodricke†.36C54/3655/8; LC4/203, f. 183v. It is likely that Goodrick acquired these rents to hold in trust for Sir John. Following his marriage to Eleanor Poyntz in the spring of 1652, he left London to settle on his wife’s estate at Tickenham, Somerset.37CCC, 2101-2; Goodricke, Hist. of Goodricke Fam. 51. However, he stayed at Tickenham for only a brief period, for by November 1653 he had resumed his duties as a major in Lambert’s regiment of horse.38CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 278. He accompanied the regiment to Scotland in 1654 and was involved the following year in suppressing an abortive royalist insurrection in Nottinghamshire.39Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 256, 258.

Although Goodrick was on friendly terms with Lambert and Baynes, he did not share their republican sympathies, and during the later 1650s he emerged as a firm supporter of a monarchical settlement. When Parliament offered the crown to Cromwell early in 1657, Goodrick – in contrast to a majority of army officers – sided with the ‘kinglings’. In May 1657, Colonel Robert Lilburne* wrote to his fellow republican Luke Robinson* in Yorkshire, urging him not to trust Goodrick

for I hear he’s much a new royalist and [it] is supposed will make his observations upon the soldiery in the north by trying their tempers. There is something more than ordinary in his coming down [into Yorkshire] at this time, and I desire you to ... give notice privately to the officers and soldiers to beware of him.40TSP vi. 292.

Following Lambert’s dismissal by Cromwell in July 1657, his regiment of horse was given to Cromwell’s son-in-law Thomas Belasyse*, 2nd Viscount Fauconberg. Goodrick retained his command under Fauconberg, and in September 1658 he joined his colonel and many other officers in a loyal address to Protector Richard Cromwell*, requesting that he maintain the army under men of ‘honest, godly principles’, with liberty of conscience to ‘all persons that profess godliness that are not of turbulent spirits as to the peace of these nations’. The officers pledged to stand by Richard against ‘all that shall oppose you ... or make it their design to change or alter the present government established in a single person and two Houses of Parliament, according to the Humble Petition and Advice [the constitutional settlement that had replaced Lambert’s Instrument of Government in 1657]’.41Bodl. Rawl. A 61; Mercurius Politicus no. 434 (16-23 Sept. 1658), 844-7; G. Davies, Restoration of Charles II, 8-10.

It was almost certainly on Fauconberg’s interest that Goodrick was returned for Thirsk in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659. Fauconberg, unlike the Goodricks, enjoyed a powerful proprietorial interest in the Thirsk area.42Supra, ‘Thirsk’. Goodrick received only one appointment in this Parliament – to a committee set up on 5 February 1659 for supplying the northern counties with a godly ministry.43CJ vii. 600b. He made no recorded contribution to debate, although he evidently attended the House on a regular basis, and would later claim that only he and Samuel Disbrowe* – a prominent member of the Cromwellian administration in Scotland – had refused to condemn Protector Oliver Cromwell’s* imprisonment of his leading radical opponents as ‘illegal and unjust’, arguing that such a verdict ‘might [bring into] question all commands of soldiers’. On the day after the army’s dissolution of Parliament on 22 April, Goodrick left London, and by early May he was in Edinburgh, carrying a letter from Fauconberg to General George Monck*, pleading for his support against the army in England. Goodrick insisted that the republican interest in the House had never commanded more than 40 voices and that Lambert’s faction was intent on removing officers ‘that are not of some gathered church’ and on replacing Monck as commander in Scotland with Robert Lilburne. The general, however, declared that he and most of his officers ‘are for returning the old [Long] Parliament and to keep things in peace’.44Clarke Pprs. v. 290-2; Letters from Roundhead Officers ed. Akerman, 139. Not surprisingly, Lambert, on being restored to the command of his horse regiment in May 1659, had Goodrick removed as major.45Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 259-60. Goodrick had returned to England by July, when he received money from the Yorkshire excise farmers for arrears owing to Fauconberg’s regiment.46CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 577.

Following his defeat of Lambert during the winter of 1659-60, Monck transferred command of his regiment to Colonel Bethell, prompting Goodrick to resume his military career. Late in January 1660, a correspondent of Baynes, writing from York, identified Goodrick with those officers who were ‘affected to the secluded Members [the MPs purged in 1648] or a free Parliament’ and reported that he had been consulting with Fauconberg and intended to go down to London ‘to secure his major’s place. I wish the Parliament do not take in too many that will but act coldly for their interest’.47Add. 21425, f. 201. Goodrick had been restored as major by April at the latest, when he joined Bethell and other senior army officers in an address to Monck, pledging their obedience to him and to the forthcoming Convention.48The Remonstrance and Address of the Armies...to the Lord General Monck (1660, E.1021.1). In December, Goodrick was granted a royal pardon.49SO3/13, unfol.

In 1662, following his (second) marriage to a daughter of Thomas Steward of Stuntney, near Ely, Goodrick took up residence in the parish of Holy Trinity, Ely, where a branch of the Goodrick family had been living since Tudor times and where Goodricke had purchased houses and lands in 1653.50C54/3751/12; Goodricke, Hist. of Goodricke Fam. 51, app. ii, 28. He had probably become acquainted with the Steward family through his cousin Savile Goodricke, whom Thomas Steward had appointed a trustee of his estate in 1648.51C54/4283/28. Although he was evidently not trusted by the Restoration regime, having been omitted from all local commissions by 1661, Goodrick backed an attempt that year to prosecute Captain John Hodgson, a former officer of Lambert’s and noted republican.52Autobiog. of Capt. John Hodgson ed. J. H. Turner, 55.

Goodrick died in the summer of 1666 and was buried at Holy Trinity, Ely, on 26 July.53Goodricke, Hist. of Goodricke Fam. 51. In his will, having died without sons, he assigned part of his estate to his ‘well-beloved friends’ Sir Francis Goodricke, Walter Hawksworth of Yorkshire and Walter Bethell of Monmouthshire (with whom Goodrick had served in the army) to hold in trust and make provision for the education of his nephew John, whom he made his heir. He charged his estate with legacies of £1,400. There is no mention in his will of any property in Yorkshire.54PROB11/322, ff. 277v-278v; E121/5/5/32. None of Goodrick’s descendents sat in Parliament, although his cousins Francis and Sir John Goodricke both sat for Yorkshire constituencies in the Cavalier Parliament.55HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Francis Goodricke’, ‘Sir John Goodricke’.