 He was the third of ten children of Colonel Thomas Moody, Knight of the Order of Military Merit, a scion of a prominent British imperialist family, and Martha Clement (1784 - 1868), who was the daughter of Richard Clement (1754 - 1829), a Dutch landowner of land in Barbados, after whom Richard Clement Moody was named, and through whom he was related to the cricketer Reynold Clement.Richard Clement Moody's siblings included Major Thomas Moody (1809 - 1839); Reverend James Leith Moody (1816 -1896), Chaplain to Royal Navy in China and to the British Army in the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Malta, and Crimea; Colonel Hampden Clement Blamire Moody CB (1821 - 1869), Commander of the Royal Engineers in China during the Second Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion; and Shute Barrington Moody (b.1818), an expert on sugar cultivation.