in-ordinary to the king, and appointed dean of Windsor (and Wolverhampton), being installed on 3 Sept. 1660. He became scribe of the order of the Garter in the following January, and was shortly afterwards presented to the rectories of Haseley, Oxon., and Acton, in Middlesex. As administrator of the charity of the poor knights of Windsor, he had great difficulty in dealing with the many and conflicting appeals of decayed royalists.
In January 1662, upon the occasion of a great alarm caused by the prevalence of midsummer weather in midwinter, Ryves preached before the House of Commons at St. Margaret's, on Joshua vii. 12, showing how the neglect of exacting justice on offenders (by which he insinuated such of the old king's murderers as were yet reprieved and in the Tower) was a main cause of God's punishing a land' (Evelyn, Diary, 15 Jan.; cf. Pepys, i. 313). Being non-resident at Acton, he put in a drunken curate, whom he directed to persecute Richard Baxter. Baxter was drawing crowded audiences to his sermons in defiance of the conventicle act, by an unpopular application of which, in 1668, he was at length convicted and confined for six months. Baxter rightly attributed his mishap to the absentee rector, who had grown hard and sour; even Sir Matthew Hale had no good word for him. Ryves died at Windsor on 13 July 1677, and was buried in the south aisle of St. George's Chapel, where he is commemorated by a long mural inscription in Latin. By his wife, Kate, daughter of Sir Richard Waldram, knt., of Charley, Leicestershire, he had several children. A son married Judith Tyler in 1668, and his son Bruno entered Merchant Taylors' School in 1709; a kinsman, Jerome Ryves (d. 1705), was installed dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, in March 1699.
Besides three separate sermons, Ryves was the author of 'Mercurius Rusticus; or the Countries Complaint of the Barbarous Outrages committed by the Sectaries of this late flourishing Kingdom.' Nineteen numbers (in opposition to which George Wither started a parliamentary 'Mercurius Rusticus') appeared from August 1642, and the whole were republished, 1646, 1647, and 1685, with a finely engraved frontispiece, in compartments. The assaults upon Sir John Lucas's house, Wardour Castle, and other mansions are narrated, while a second part commences to deal with the violation of the cathedrals. From the fact of its being frequently bound up with 'Mercurius Rusticus,' with the common title of 'Angliae Ruina,' the 'Querela Cantabrigiensis ' of John Barwick [q. v.] has been erroneously attributed to Ryves (Wood, Athenae, iii. 1111). Ryves assisted Walton in the business of the London tithes, and contributed to his polyglot bible (Todd, Memoirs of Walton, i. 4, 306). A number of his letters are among the Ashmole MSS. in the Bodleian Library (see Bloxam, Magd. Coll. Reg. ii. 58). Both Ryves's Christian name and surname were variously spelt by his contemporaries, Brune, Bruen, Brian, Bruno, and Reeves, Rives, Ryve, Reeve, and Ryves.
An engraved portrait of the dean, from an original miniature in oil, was published in 1810; a second was engraved by Earlom (Evans, Cat. of Engraved Portraits, p. 302).
[Foster's Alumni Oxon. 1500-1714; Wood's Athenae Oxon. ed. Bliss, iii. 1110; Bloxam's Magdalen Coll. Registers, ii. 51-8; Hutchins's Dorset, i. 228 and iv. 96 (pedigree); Le Neve's Fasti Eccles. Anglicanae; Newcourt's Repertorium, 1708, i. 423; Lysons's Environs of London, ii. 12; Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy, 1714, ii. 12; Lloyd's Memoirs, pp. 5, 6; Grey's Examples of Neal's Puritans, iii. App. p. 13; Baxter's Addit. Notes on Sir M. Hale, 1682, p. 25; Baxter et l'Angleterre religieuse de son temps, 1840, p. 249; Pote's Windsor, p. 365; Fox-Bourne's Hist. of Newspapers, i. 13; Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1661-2, passim; Chalmers's Biogr. Dict.; Lowndes's Bibl. Man. (Bohn); Brit. Mus. Cat.]
RYVES, ELIZABETH (1750–1797), author, descended from an old Irish family connected with that of Bruno Ryves [q. v.], was born in Ireland in 1750. She owned some property, but, being cheated out of it, fell into poverty, and went to London to earn a living by her pen. She wrote political articles for newspapers, verses, plays, and learned French in order to make translations; she turned into English Rousseau's ‘Social Contract,’ Raynal's ‘Letter to the National Assembly,’ and Delacroix's ‘Review of the Constitutions of the Principal States of Europe,’ 1792; she attempted Froissart, but gave it up as too difficult. For some time she is doubtfully said to have conducted the historical department of the ‘Annual Register’ (cf. Gent. Mag. 1795 ii. 540, 734, 1797 i. 522; and Baker, Biogr. Dramat. i. 619).
Her dramatic efforts, ‘The Prude,’ a comic opera in three acts (cf. ib. ii. 185), and ‘The Debt of Honour,’ were accepted by a theatrical manager, but were never acted; she received 100l. as compensation. She wrote one novel, ‘The Hermit of Snowden,’ said to be an account of her own life, and seven small volumes of poems. She died in poverty in April 1797 in Store Street, London. Isaac
