He was born at Cambridge in August 1576, the second of the ten sons of Roger Goad by his wife, Katharine, eldest daughter of Richard Hill, citizen of London.
In 1609 he was bursar of King's; in 1610 he succeeded his father in the family living of Milton, Cambridge, which he held together with his fellowship; in 1611 he was appointed dean of divinity, and very shortly afterwards he left Cambridge to reside at Lambeth as domestic chaplain to Archbishop George Abbot, his father's old pupil at Guildford Free School.
[2] He is supposed to have lost a chance of the preferments which were granted to his colleagues by King James, and his name was omitted, accidentally perhaps, in the acts of the synod.
He and his colleagues received the acknowledgments of the States-General, their travelling expenses home, and a gold medal apiece weighing three quarters of a pound in weight.
In 1623 he was engaged as assistant to Daniel Featley in disputations which were held with Jesuits: George Musket, John Percy alias Fisher, and others.
On 22 October 1633 he was made dean of Bocking, Essex, jointly with John Barkham and later that year was appointed an ecclesiastical commissioner for England and Wales.
He wrote two anti-Catholic populist tracts in 1623: on Robert Drury,[3] and as author or editor the Friers Chronicle, a collection of nasty sexual tales supposedly by an apostate Catholic.