Richard Martin (Recorder of London)

Richard Martin
Richard Martin, 1620, by Simon de Passe.
Born	1570 (1570)
Died	1618 (1619) (aged 48)
Occupation	English politician

Richard Martin (1570–1618) was an English lawyer, orator, and supporter of the Virginia Company who was appointed Recorder of the City of London at the recommendation of James I of England in 1618 but died shortly thereafter.

Martin studied at Oxford University and was admitted to the Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court providing legal training in Elizabethan London, on 7 November 1587. He was a member of a group of intellectual men, poets, and playwrights including John Donne and Ben Jonson who met the first Friday of every month at the Mermaid Tavern in Bread Street. Martin was "universally well regarded for his warmth of nature, personal beauty, and graceful speech", and was elected "prince of Love" to preside over the Christmas grand revels of the Middle Temple in the winter of 1597/98. Michelle O'Callaghan points out that those elected to oversee the grand revels had to be skilled in "singing, dancing, and music", and well-versed in "rhetoric, law and other scholastic exercises travestied" in the revels. The poet John Davies dedicated his 1596 collection "Orchestra, or a Poeme of Dauncing" to Martin, but they fell out soon after, and Davies was disbarred and briefly thrown in the Tower of London in February 1598 "for thrashing his friend, another roysterer of the day, Mr. Richard Martin, in the Middle Temple Hall" with a cudgel. (Davies publicly apologized to Martin in 1601 and was readmitted to the English Bar. He went on to have a brilliant legal career.)

Martin defended Jonson and his controversial 1602 play "The Poetaster" to the Lord Chief Justice Sir John Popham. Later, Jonson acknowledged Martin in the dedication of the 1616 folio edition of "The Poetaster" "for whose innocence as for the author's you were once a noble and kindly undertaker to the greatest justice [Popham] of this kingdom."