Richard Ryves

Sir Richard Ryves (1643–1693) was a seventeenth-century Irish judge who served for several years as Recorder of Dublin, and subsequently as a Baron of the Exchequer.

[1] He was born in Dublin, eldest son of Charles Ryves, examiner of the Court of Chancery (Ireland), who died in 1675, and his wife Jane Ogden.

[1] He lived first at St. Michael's Lane, then at Little Green, adjacent to Capel Street, where his colleague Sir Standish Hartstonge, 1st Baronet was a neighbour.

Ryves, who claimed to be the most senior King's counsel, expected to be appointed to the office and was bitterly disappointed to be passed over in favour of a rather obscure barrister called William Beckett.

This office was a very recent innovation, which had been created especially for Sir John Lyndon, who had been similarly disappointed in his hopes of becoming either Second Serjeant or a High Court judge.

As a Whig and a Protestant, Ryves was inevitably out of favour with the Roman Catholic King James II and was removed from his office of Serjeant in 1687.

John Stearne, founder of the Irish College of Physicians, who married Richard's sister Dorothy