Ryder, Dudley – Died just before his title was conferred

Dudley Ryder (1691-1756)

DUDLEY Ryder should have been the 1st Baron Harrowby.

The son of a draper, 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 and was called to the Bar in 1719. Ryder was an MP from 1733 to 1754.

He married the daughter of Nathaniel Newnham, in 1933, after whom his son was named.

He was also made a Solicitor General by Sir Robert Walpole in 1733, and in 1737, he was appointed as an Attorney General.

At the creation of the Foundling Hospital in London in 1739 he was one of the founding governors. In 1740, he was knighted and in 1754 was made a Privy Councillor and Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, a post he held until his death.

A patent creating him a peer was signed by the King but on the day he was due to kiss hands he was taken ill and therefore it was not passed due to his subsequent death. His son became Nathaniel Ryder, 1st Baron Harrowby.

He died at his home, Harrowby Hall, and has an impressive monument in St Wulfram’s Church.

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”.