Dudley Ryder (judge)

Ryder was the second son of Richard Ryder, a draper of Hackney, Middlesex, and his second wife Elizabeth Marshall, daughter of William Marshall of Lincoln's Inn. He studied at a dissenting academy in Hackney and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and Leiden University in The Netherlands. He went to the Middle Temple in 1713 (where he kept a diary from 1715–16, in which he minutely recorded “whatever occurs to me in the day worth observing”). In 1719, he was called to the Bar. He married Anne Newnham, daughter of Nathaniel Newnham of Streatham, Surrey in November 1733.[1]

Ryder was returned as Member of Parliament for St Germans at a by election on 1 March 1733. He was also made Solicitor General by Sir Robert Walpole in 1733. At the 1734 British general election, he switched to Tiverton where he was returned unopposed as MP. He was appointed as Attorney General in 1737. At the creation of the Foundling Hospital in London in 1739 he was one of the founding governors. In 1740, he was knighted. [2] He topped the poll in a contest at the 1741 British general election and was returned unopposed again in 1747. On 2 May 1754 he was made a Privy Councillor and Chief Justice of the King's Bench, a post he held until his death. He did not stand for parliament at the 1754 general election. The King refused his application for a peerage until he had served in office for two years. A patent creating him a peer was signed by the King on 24 May 1756, but Ryder died the following day and was in no position to kiss hands to take it up.[1]

Horace Walpole thought Ryder "a man of singular goodness and integrity; of the highest reputation in his profession, of the lowest in the House, where he wearied the audience by the multiplicity of his arguments; resembling the physician who ordered a medicine to be composed of all the simples in a meadow, as there must be some of them at least that would be proper".[3]

Ryder died leaving one son Nathaniel who became the first Baron Harrowby.

• William Matthews (ed.), The Diary of Dudley Ryder 1715-1716 (London, 1939).
• Brenner, Maurice, ‘Discourse and Reality: the many worlds of Dudley Ryder, 1715-1716’ (Ipswich, 2012)

• "Ryder, Dudley (1691-1756)" . Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.