Cardell Goodman

Cardell Goodman (also Cardonell) (1649?–1699) was an English actor and adventurer, now known as a Jacobite conspirator.

He was son of a clergyman of the same name at one time in Shaftesbury, Dorset, and on 18 March 1651 removed from the benefice of Freshwater, Isle of Wight, by order of the council of state. The son went to St. John's College, Cambridge, and proceeded B.A. in 1670. According to his own account, as related by Colley Cibber, he was expelled from the university as one of the hot-heads who cut and defaced a picture of the Duke of Monmouth, then chancellor of the university.

Goodman was then in London, and became one of the pages of the back-staircase to Charles II, but after five years' service he was dismissed for negligence. He inherited £2,000 on his father's death, but squandered it.

Goodman then attached himself to the king's company at Drury Lane Theatre, and made a stage appearance as Polysperchon in the Rival Queens, or Alexander the Great, 1677. Here, according to Cibber, he made his reputation, and he is mentioned by John Downes as taking the parts of Alexas in John Dryden's All for Love, Pharnaces in Mithridates, king of Pontus, by Nathaniel Lee, acted in 1678, and Valentinian in the tragedy of Valentinian, adapted by the Earl of Rochester from Beaumont and Fletcher's play, and performed at Drury Lane in 1685.

The characters in which he won major success were Julius Cæsar and Alexander the Great. Cibber mentions praise he gave Goodman when he was playing the part of the chaplain in Thomas Otway's Orphan. In 1682, when a fusion took place between the duke's and the king's company, he supported Michael Mohun in opposing the united actors, although he joined them about three years later.

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