Born in Chelsea into an upper class family and educated at Oxford, he first moved to Spain in 1830, where he travelled extensively and collected notes and drawings.

Ford was born at 129 Sloane Street, Chelsea on 21 April 1796, the elder son of Richard Ford (1758–1806), MP 1789–1791, Chief Magistrate at Bow Street and knighted 1801 and his wife Marianne (1767–1849), daughter of Benjamin Booth, East India Company Director and collector of the landscape paintings of Richard Wilson (1713/4–1782).

[1] A lifelong Tory, in spite of joining the Whig Brooks's Club, he was a great admirer of the Duke of Wellington.

He travelled on the Continent at the close of the Napoleonic Wars visiting France, Germany, Austria and Italy between 1815 and the late 1820s, latterly with his first wife, Harriet Capel, whom he married in 1824.

His real interest lay in the fine arts where he collected old master prints, particularly those of Parmigianino and Andrea Meldolla (Schiavone).

There he wrote about the rivalry between Marie Guy-Stéphan and Maria Brambilla, specialist in Donizetti and first dancer of La Scala.

[2] In Seville he bought Spanish paintings and drawings mainly from the British Vice-Consul, Julian Benjamin Williams, who was also a dealer.

When back in England, he befriended the Scottish artist, David Roberts, who was in Spain 1832–1833, but apparently Ford never met him while they were both there.

He continued to procure such items after his return home, notably at the Heber (1834–1836), W. B. Chorley (1846) and Riego (1847) sales, which helped to augment his knowledge of those areas he did not visit.

He also relied on friends such as Henry Unwin Addington, the British minister in Madrid 1829–1833 and Pascual de Gayangos, an arabist, to provide him with more recent publications.

Ford's wife Harriet was constantly in poor health and after their return to England in 1833 the couple lived separately.

As a result in late 1840 Murray submitted the manuscript of George Borrow's account of the Gypsies of Spain, The Zincali, to Ford, who recommended publication.

A first draft took until the end of 1843 to complete and was partially printed in 1844, but was finally abandoned in early 1845, because of its hostility to perceived inadequacies of Spanish government, the cult of Mariolatry (worship of the Virgin Mary), and Spanish military incompetence together with French misconduct and depredations during the Peninsular War in which Marshal Soult, who happened to be the French Head of Government at the time, was categorised as the 'plundermaster general'.

The only child of Richard and Eliza was Margaret 'Meta' Ford, who was born in October 1840, married Oswald John Frederick Crawfurd, and died in 1899.

Ford made an educational trip to Germany and Austria after leaving Trinity College in the summer of 1817, arriving in Vienna on 12 October 1817.