His first cousin, Mary Ryther (daughter of the Lord Mayor of London) and her husband Sir Thomas Lake were the great-grandparents of the Duchess of Chandos.
In 1597, following the death of Bishop Richard Meredith and in accordance with Her Majesty's wishes, he was appointed Dean of St. Patrick's, a position he later exchanged for that of Archdeacon of Meath in 1608.
Between 1599 and 1614 Ryder continued a public controversy with Henry Fitzsimon, an Irish Jesuit, on the subject of the relationship between contemporary Protestantism and the Christianity of the early Church.
Although Fitzsimon ran the risk of being prosecuted, and potentially sentenced to death, for heresy or treason, he was "merely bundled out of the country", suggesting, it has been said, that, "Dublin would appear to have been a safer place to voice dissent than London, Paris, or Rome" (Brian Jackson, in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer, eds, British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], p. 103).
Besides his famous English-Latin Dictionary (1589) and Account of the Spanish Armada in Ireland, Ryder was the author of two further publications: A Friendly Caveat to Irish Catholiques Concerning Christ's Corporall Presence etc.
Their only son, Thomas Ryder, was Secretary to the British Legation at Paris and the father of Henry Rider (d.1695) of Wyanstown, County Dublin who also became the Bishop of Killaloe.