Ambrose Forth

Sir Ambrose Forth (c.1545–1610) was an English-born civilian lawyer whose career was spent in Ireland, where he became the Irish Probate judge and later the first judge of the Irish Court of Admiralty. He has been praised as a diligent, conscientious and honest Crown official. At the same time, he devoted much effort to acquiring a large landed estate.

Early career He was born in London: little seems to be known about his parents. He was a younger brother of Robert Forth, a leading admiralty lawyer who often acted as Deputy to the English Admiralty judge, David Lewis, in the 1560s and 70s, and probably helped to further his brother's career. He also enjoyed the support of several of the leading English statesmen of the time, and visited London every year or two to consult them.

Irish Court of Admiralty

In 1575 the Lord High Admiral, Edward Clinton, 1st Earl of Lincoln, created a separate, though subordinate, Court of Admiralty in Ireland.

He clashed with the municipal corporations, many of whom insisted that they had a separate admiralty jurisdiction, and with the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Sir John Perrot, whom he evidently believed supported the corporations on the point; the clash over jurisdiction between the Court of Admiralty and the corporations rumbled on at intervals into the 1640s.

His greatest difficulty was the preference of litigants for the longer-established English Admiralty Court; Forth complained of the insistence of litigants on getting a hearing in England even where the subject matter of the case was purely Irish.

Notwithstanding these difficulties, it is to his credit that he did establish the Irish Admiralty court, and its subsidiary court in Munster, as permanent features of the Irish courts system. Forth was knighted in 1604, and died in 1610.

Ambrose and Anne Forth had at least four children, including: Sir Robert Forth MP, who sat in the Irish House of Commons for Kilbeggan 1639–49, and for Meath in the Parliament of 1661–6. He became a member of the Privy Council of Ireland in 1660, and was a close ally of James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormonde.