Owen Ruffhead

Owen Ruffhead (1723 – 25 October 1769) was a miscellaneous writer, and the descendant of a Welsh family who were bakers to King George I of Great Britain.

The junior Owen Ruffhead was born in Piccadilly. When still a child his father bought him a lottery ticket, and, drawing a prize of £500, invested the money in his son's education. He entered the Middle Temple in 1742, was called to the bar in 1747, and he gradually obtained a good practice, less as a regular pleader than as a consultant and framer of bills for parliament. In the meantime he sought to form some political connections, and, with this end in view, he in 1757 started the Con-Test in support of the government against the gibes of a weekly paper called the Test, which was run by Arthur Murphy in the interests of Henry Fox (afterwards first Baron Holland) Both abounded in personalities, and the hope expressed by Samuel Johnson in the Literary Magazine, that neither would be long-lived, was happily fulfilled (see A Morning's Thoughts on Reading the Test and the Con-Test, 1757, octavo). From about 1760 he commenced editing, at the cost of great labour, The Statutes at Large from Magna Charta to 1763, which was issued in nine folio volumes, London, 1762–1765, and again in 1769. Ruffhead's collection maintained a position of authority, and was continued successively by Charles Runnington, Sir Thomas Edlyne Tomlins, John Raithby, Simons, and Sir George Kettilby Rickards. In 1760 Ruffhead addressed to William Pitt a letter of some eloquence upon the Reasons why the approaching Treaty of Peace should be debated in Parliament, and this was followed by pamphlets, including Considerations on the Present Dangerous Crisis (1763, quarto), and The Case of the late Election for the County of Middlesex considered (1764, quarto), in which he defended the conduct of the administration in relation to John Wilkes.

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