Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Booth, Robert (1626-1681)
BOOTH, Sir ROBERT (1626–1681), chief justice of the king‘s bench in Ireland, the son of Robert Booth of Salford, by his wife, a daughter of Oswald Moseley, esq., of Ancoats, Manchester, was baptised at the Collegiate Church, Manchester, on 2 July 1626. After the death of his father, his mother remarried the Rev. Thomas Case, a staunch parliamentarian, who directed Booth’s education. He attended Manchester grammar school, was entered at Gray's Inn on 18 Feb. 1641-2, and proceeded to St. John's College, Cambridge, as a fellow-commoner, on 20 Sept. 1644. At Cambridge Henry Newcome, the author of the well-known diary, was a fellow-student. Booth was called to the bar on 26 Nov. 1649, and practised in London. Some letters of his, dated February 1659-60, are among the Legh MSS. at Lyme Hall, and prove that he regarded the Restoration with equanimity. On 1 Dec. 1660 he was appointed, on the recommendation of the chancellor of Ireland, Sir Maurice Eustace, and on account of his learning and loyalty, third judge in the Irish court of common pleas. Booth was knighted on 15 May 1668, became chief justice of common pleas in Ireland in 1669, and chief justice of the king's bench in Ireland in 1679. He was buried at Salford on 2 March 1680–1. He married his first wife, a daughter of Spencer Potts, esq., about 1651. The death of a son Benjamin by this marriage, at the age of eleven, is referred to at length in ‘Mount Pisgah’ (1670), a work of Thomas Case, Booth’s stepfather. Booth's second wife was a daughter of Sir Henry Oxendon of Deane, near Wingham, Kent; she died on 27 Oct. 1669, leaving four daughters. Booth's will, dated 2 Aug. 1680, in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, proves him to have possessed several Irish estates.
[A detailed notice of Booth by J. E. Bailey, F.S.A., in Notes and Queries, 6th ser., ix. 130–2; see also Moseley Family Memoirs, p. 36; Gastrell's Notitia Cestriensis, ii. 94; Lascelles's Liber Hiberniæ; Newcome's Diary (Chatham Soc.), pp. 137, 305; Booker's Hist. of Blackley, p. 20; Manchester Foundations, ii. 85.]