Dudley Ryder (judge)
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Sir Dudley Ryder (1691 - 25 May, 1756) was a British politician, judge and diarist.
He studied at the nonconformist Hackney Academy and the University of Edinburgh and the Leiden University. He was appointed to the Middle Temple in 1713 and called to the Bar in 1719. Ryder was an MP from 1733 to 1754. 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 on May 2, 1754 he 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.
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".[1]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Horace Walpole, Memoirs of King George II: Volume I (Yale, 1985), p. 83.
[edit] Books
- William Matthews (ed.), The Diary of Dudley Ryder 1715-1716 (London, 1939).
| Legal offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by William Lee |
Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench 1754–1756 |
Succeeded by William Murray |
