The son of a draper, Ryder 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 (where he kept a diary from 1715-16) and was called to the Bar in 1719. Ryder was an Member of Parliament (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 2 May 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".

His son was Nathaniel Ryder, 1st Baron Harrowby.