If you go to https://maven.minecraftforge.net in a browser (ignore the auth prompt, you don't need it for this) and check the certs are they all valid?
Certs is one of those things that is shared I think, so to reset it you might have to uninstall every JDK and JRE until you don't have Java, then install the JDKs (JDKs have JREs in them, no need to get separate ones)
1.7 is no longer supported on this forum.
Please update to a modern version of Minecraft to receive support.
No, we don't care that you don't want to move on and find new mods.
The maven is not meant to be accessed manually.
Only the human-readable portions require auth, the part that serves the files is perfectly accessible without auth.
I'm afraid we have no idea what causes this and without a way to reliably reproduce it there's nothing we can do other than recommend using Mojang's own launcher
The Forge maven has moved from https://files.minecraftforge.net/maven to https://maven.minecraftforge.net, you'll need to update your build.gradle to reflect this and possibly run gradlew --refresh-dependencies to tell Gradle to get the updated ForgeGradle