Goodwin’s background is obscure; his father probably came from Bristol, and was perhaps muster master of Shropshire in 1621. A casual comment by Lady Brilliana Harley suggests that Goodwin was a relation, though perhaps only by marriage. It is also possible that he was the man who proceeded from a BA at Cambridge in 1611 to an MA at Oxford four years later.
Goodwin’s parliamentary activity is difficult to reconstruct because of the existence of one or more namesakes in every session bar 1625, when he left no trace on the surviving records of debates. However, his known interests make it likely that he was the man nominated to committees for Lord Dutton’s jointure bill (7 May 1628) and the bill to inhibit the purchase of judicial office (23 Apr. 1628), while in the following session he was presumably one of the two Goodwins named to a committee appointed to investigate an allegation of malpractice in the duchy of Lancaster court (7, 20 Feb. 1629). His only undoubted contribution to debate was a lengthy speech opposing the bill to remove the Marcher shires from the jurisdiction of the Council at Ludlow on 19 May 1628:
In Westminster a man be gone thrice to the West Indies before their [sic] suits be determined: nay, a man may grow old and his suits but young. The tenth part of expenses in any courts here shall end a suit there [at Ludlow]. The benefit hereof will come but to some particular men who happily have practice at Westminster.
In a House packed with metropolitan lawyers this carefully prepared speech was unlikely to make any headway, and Goodwin’s opposition to the body of the bill meant that he was the only speaker not named to the committee, although he was entitled to attend as a burgess for a Marcher shire.
Goodwin’s career benefited from the untimely demise of the 1st Lord Brooke (Sir Fulke Greville*) in October 1628; the latter had held the sinecure post of secretary of the Marches, worth £2,000 a year, but his servants at Ludlow had been notorious for corrupt practices, as Goodwin was only too happy to retail to Brooke’s successor, Sir Adam Newton. Having handled the paperwork for Newton’s appointment both at London and Ludlow, he was installed as deputy secretary, in which capacity he continued to serve until the Civil War.
A member of the Ludlow corporation from 1634, Goodwin represented the borough again in the Short and Long Parliaments, but had returned home by the summer of 1643 and was deprived of his seat on 5 Feb. 1644 for attending the rival Parliament summoned to Oxford by the king. He subsequently obtained a position as secretary to Prince Rupert, whom he was said to have served at the second siege of Bristol in 1645, and was almost certainly the ‘Ralph Goodwin esq.’ who surrendered at Worcester in July 1646. Despite the best efforts of sequestration officials, his claim to have passed the war quietly at Ludlow earned him a derisory composition fine of £412.