RYDER, Hon. Granville Dudley (1799-1879), of 44 Grosvenor Street, Mdx.

Ryder, who was described as being ‘clever, but deaf and very pompous’, was an active committee member of the Evangelical Reformation Society. Add. 52017, f. 20; J. Wolffe, Protestant Crusade in Britain, 43-44. His support for Catholic emancipation meant that the corporation of Tiverton, where his father was the patron, were unwilling to elect him in the place of his anti-Catholic uncle in 1827, and it was not until the general election of 1830, after the issue had been settled, that their objection was removed and they returned him unopposed with his brother Lord Sandon. Devon RO, Harrowby-Tiverton mss (xerox copy), xvi. 141; xvii. 43. The duke of Wellington’s ministry listed him as a member of the ‘Huskisson party’. In November, Sandon wrote that his brother was ‘perhaps ... rather more of a reformer than I am, but more anxious ... that the carrying of the question should not be the destruction of the ministry’. Though he was listed as voting against the government in the crucial civil list division, 15 Nov. 1830, according to Sandon he had voted the other way, ‘agreeing in the views of the majority, yet thinking it a question of confidence, and that economy was just the one point on which they deserved it’. Harrowby mss, Sandon to Harrowby, 12, 18 Nov. 1830. In contrast to Sandon, a member of Lord Grey’s ministry, Ryder divided against the second reading of their reform bill, 22 Mar., and for Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment, 19 Apr. 1831. At the ensuing general election he was returned for Tiverton with the Evangelical Spencer Perceval, despite local manifestations of opposition, and reported to his father that ‘we have great reason to be thankful for our escape, seeing that, in many places, the unpopular candidates have been very ill used’. He also expressed ‘very great’ satisfaction at Sandon’s decision to resign from the government. Ibid. G. Ryder to Harrowby, 6 May; Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 5 May 1831.

He divided against the second reading of the reintroduced reform bill, 6 July, for use of the 1831 census to determine the disfranchisement schedules, 19 July, and for preservation of the voting rights of non-resident freemen, 30 Aug., and against the bill’s passage, 21 Sept. 1831. He voted for the motion censuring the conduct of the Irish administration during the Dublin election, 23 Aug. He seconded Perceval’s motion to abolish the Maynooth grant, 26 Sept., arguing that it was ‘a complete anomaly in our parliamentary bounty’ and that the college had failed to produce a ‘liberal, tolerant, enlightened and loyal’ priesthood. He wished to see ‘the ascendancy of Protestant religious principles ... over the hearts and minds and lives of all my countrymen’, but not in a vindictive spirit. He presented a petition from Westham and Hailsham complaining that Protestant office-holders in Ireland were being compelled to participate in Catholic church services, 12 Oct., when he also presented a Hemel Hempstead petition for suppression of the Indian pilgrim tax. He divided against the second reading of the revised reform bill, 17 Dec. 1831, and the enfranchisement of Tower Hamlets, 28 Feb., seconded the motion to add Ramsgate to Sandwich, 14 Mar., and voted against the third reading, 22 Mar., and the second reading of the Irish bill, 25 May 1832. He presented a Hemel Hempstead petition in favour of the factories regulation bill, 20 Mar. He divided against Baring’s bill to exclude insolvent debtors from Parliament, 6 June. He voted for a permanent provision for the Irish poor by a tax on absentees, 19 June, and against the grant for Irish education, 23 July. He presented several petitions for better observation of the Sabbath, 28 June, 3, 16 July, when he condemned the ‘pernicious and appalling’ effects of the Sale of Beer Act on rural districts, where ‘drunkenness, gambling and debauchery’ were rife. He maintained that he was ‘no enemy to the general principles of free trade’, but said they were not applicable in all cases and hoped the reformed Parliament would prohibit the consumption of beer on the premises and establish a ‘more efficient system of police’. He voted against ministers on the Russian-Dutch loan, 12 July 1832.

Ryder did not stand again at Tiverton, which had been opened by the Reform Act, but he was returned for Hertfordshire as a Conservative in 1841. He voted against repeal of the corn laws in 1846, before retiring the following year. Dod’s Parl. Companion (1847), 237. He had inherited landed property at Westbrook Hay, near Hemel Hempstead, from his uncle in 1832, and was the residuary legatee of the personal estate, which was sworn under £140,000. PROB 11/1808/720; IR26/1302/684. He received £2,000 on his father’s death in 1847. PROB 11/2071/218; IR26/1805/155. He died in November 1879 and left Westbrook Hay to his eldest son, Dudley Ryder (1830-1911). His other surviving son, Granville Ryder (1833-1901), was Conservative Member for Salisbury, 1869-80.