Thomas Fairfax, Third Lord Fairfax of Cameron

English military leader

• Born: January 17, 1612
• Birthplace: Denton, Yorkshire, England
• Died: November 12, 1671
• Place of death: Nun Appleton, near Bilborough, Yorkshire, England

Fairfax commanded the Parliamentary army during the crucial phase of the English Civil War, ensuring the defeat of the Royalist forces of King Charles I.

Early Life

Thomas Fairfax, third Baron Fairfax, was born into a family that had won military distinction during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. His grandfather, Thomas, first Baron Fairfax, had as a young man served in the Low Countries under Sir Francis Vere, the greatest English commander of his day, as well as with the queen’s favorite, the earl of Essex. In 1607, Lord Fairfax saw to it that his eldest son, Ferdinando, married the daughter of Lord Sheffield. Thomas, third Baron Fairfax, was their son.

In 1620, as England was drawn into the Thirty Years’ War, Sir Horace Vere led a regiment of volunteers to aid the Protestant cause in Germany. Young Thomas’s uncles William and John served under Vere in the Low Countries. Later, his uncle Peregrine was killed at the Siege of La Rochelle (1627-1628). It was natural, then, for the junior Fairfax to spend some time as a soldier early in his life. Not only was military service a family tradition, but it was also a common means at the time for a young gentleman to complete his education.

After spending three years at St. John’s College, Cambridge (1626-1629), Fairfax himself traveled to the Low Countries, where he served as a volunteer under Vere at the Siege of Bois-le-Duc. The Dutch, aided by English volunteers and mercenaries, besieged this great fortress from May to September, 1629, when they finally compelled the Spanish to surrender it. Fairfax returned to England in 1632, hoping to secure permission to serve under the Swedish king, Gustavus II Adolphus , the principal champion of the Protestant cause. It seems that Fairfax did not pursue his purpose, however, perhaps having been dissuaded by his grandfather. In June, 1637, he married Ann Vere, the daughter of his old commander, presumably intending to settle down in Yorkshire, but he was to have anything but a quiet life in the next decade. A surviving portrait of Fairfax shows a handsome figure (dark enough to have been nicknamed Black Tom), clean-shaven, with hair worn to his shoulders.

Life’s Work

In 1639, Fairfax went to war again, this time in England, commanding a troop of dragoons in the First Bishops’ War between England and Scotland. King Charles I , in his attempt to impose religious uniformity and episcopacy on all of his kingdoms, provoked a rebellion in Presbyterian Scotland. The Scots defended themselves vigorously and forced the king to conclude a truce with them. In January, 1640, Fairfax was rewarded with a knighthood for his efforts in the Scots War. The Scots rebellion could not be quashed, however, and it provoked a political crisis in England that proved to be insoluble and led, in due course, first to a complete rupture between the king and Parliament and then to a civil war. Though at first the king was isolated politically, eventually, as he gave ground on some of the issues that divided the country, he was able to build the Royalist Party.

The Fairfaxes, father and son, were leaders on the Parliamentary side in Yorkshire. The moderation, even the ambiguity, of their position is suggested by the fact that only weeks before the outbreak of serious fighting, in September, 1642, the Fairfaxes were trying to negotiate a neutrality pact to keep Yorkshire out of the struggle. When the truce broke down, Lord Ferdinando took charge of the Parliamentary troops in Yorkshire with the younger Fairfax as his chief cavalry officer. For the remainder of 1642 and 1643, though both sides could claim their victories, the war was essentially a stalemate. A good part of Yorkshire was controlled for the king by the duke of Newcastle, but the Fairfaxes, though seriously outnumbered, prevented the Royalists from striking south against London. Much of the credit for this belongs to Sir Thomas, who distinguished himself in a series of bold skirmishes in 1643. That summer, however, Newcastle defeated the senior Fairfax in a major battle and besieged the Parliamentary forces in Hull, the nadir of Parliamentary fortunes in the north.

In the fall, joined by the troops of the Eastern Association under the earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell , the Fairfaxes recovered, winning a crucial victory at Winceby. The siege of Hull was broken, and the immediate danger ended. Taking the offensive, Parliament broke the stalemate by negotiating an alliance with the Scots. In the summer of 1644, the Scots marched down into Yorkshire. Joining with Fairfax, Manchester, and Cromwell, they fought a great and decisive battle against the duke of Newcastle and Prince Rupert, the king’s nephew, at Marston Moor, near York. Utterly defeated, Newcastle went into exile, and the back of the resistance to Parliament in the north was broken.

Fairfax was now seen to be one of the leading commanders on the Parliamentary side. In the winter of 1644-1645, Parliament agreed to create a national army, rather than a local one, based on the highly successful model of the Eastern Association’s force. The command of this New Model Army was given to Fairfax, with Cromwell as its chief cavalry officer. Fairfax accepted with some reluctance. In May, he began, under Parliamentary orders, to blockade the king’s capital at Oxford, but once allowed a free hand, in June, he and Cromwell promptly brought the king to battle at Naseby and won another great and decisive victory, sealing the Royalists’ fate.

In the succeeding weeks, Fairfax turned westward into the king’s last region of support, destroying Lord Goring’s army at Langport and storming Bristol, held by Prince Rupert. The war was then reduced to a series of sieges of isolated Royalist strongholds, which maintained their loyalty to the king to the bitter end.

Oxford fell in June, 1646. Though the fighting was over, the problems that had caused the Civil War—at bottom, an inability to define the limits of royal power—remained unresolved. King and Parliament were no closer to agreement than they had been in 1641, for the king, though militarily defeated, declined to yield, to surrender any of his traditional rights and powers.

In the spring of 1647, Parliament voted to disband much of the army, with Fairfax to continue as commander. The soldiers were still awaiting their pay and were reluctant to disband until they were satisfied. Once disarmed and dispersed, the urgency of their demands would diminish. The moderate majority in Parliament, for its part, feared the intervention of the army into politics. Fairfax, responsible for the army’s discipline, found himself in the middle, mediating between Parliament and his troops for the settlement of their grievances. Unlike Cromwell, he was far less comfortable as a politician than as a general.

In June, 1647, the virtual mutiny of the army against parliamentary control was formalized by the creation of an Army Council, made up of senior officers and elected representatives of each of the regiments, some of whom, especially the more junior officers, had been influenced by radical political ideas such as democracy, a revolutionary proposition. Against this usurpation of power (that of Parliament and his own), Fairfax struggled. In July, to his profound disapproval, the king was seized by radical army officers, but he could do little to restrain them or secure the king’s release.

In the latter half of 1647, Fairfax’s energies were spent largely in trying to maintain discipline in the army, prevent outright mutiny, and restrain the Army Council from any further direct intervention in politics. Late in the year, he had succeeded in restoring the army to a reasonable measure of discipline but had made little progress in mediating between Parliament and the more radical army officers. On the contrary, Cromwell and other senior officers pressed Fairfax to support them in purging Parliament of its most conservative members, who were preventing the army from imposing a hard settlement on the king.

The outbreak of the Second Civil War in the summer of 1648 deferred the issues. The Royalist attempt to resume the Civil War was encouraged by the fact that the victors in the first round were unable to agree on a new course. In purely military terms, however, the swift triumph of the Parliamentary forces showed that the outcome of the First Civil War was no accident. Fairfax succeeded in restoring discipline so successfully that the Royalist risings were quickly crushed everywhere. He personally commanded at the Siege of Colchester (1648) and had the Royalist commanders shot, abandoning his usual leniency to prove his determination to end the conflict.

With the military issues definitively settled, attention now returned to the insoluble political problems presented by a king who, perceiving that the victors remained profoundly divided, declined to surrender to their demands for changes in the “ancient constitution.” With the danger from the radicals (among whom were the Levellers , who favored social equality and religious toleration) behind them, Cromwell now believed that he could move against the conservatives in Parliament. Striking quickly, the army excluded those members in Pride’s Purge and, the Parliament thus altered, moved to try the obdurate king. Though the king was convicted, sentenced, and publicly executed in January, 1649, however, Cromwellian republicanism did not carry the nation with it.

Fairfax resisted participating in this sequence of events. He disowned responsibility for purging Parliament. Though appointed one of the king’s judges, he did not attend the trial. When it became clear that the king would be condemned, he used his influence, in vain, to defer the sentencing and execution.

After the dissolution of the monarchy, Fairfax continued to serve for a time as commander of the army and a member of the Council of State, the new executive body. In May, 1649, he suppressed a final Leveller mutiny in the army. Nevertheless, he was not genuinely committed to the Commonwealth . He resigned his commission in the summer of 1650 rather than invade Scotland, for he was wavering toward royalism. He retired to private life. Thereafter, throughout the 1650’s, he played little part in public life except to serve in the Parliament of 1654. The Cromwellians suspected him of plotting with the Royalists, though apparently they were incorrect. Suspicion was also aroused against Fairfax by the marriage of his daughter to a Royalist peer.

After Cromwell’s death, Fairfax maintained an uneasy middle-road position in the movement to restore the monarchy. Ultimately, however, his reservations were swept aside and Charles II came to the throne with relatively free hands. As a result of his moderate and ambiguous position in the Restoration, Fairfax was neither rewarded for making it possible nor punished for his part in the previous rebellion. He spoke out against the punishment of many who had done far less than he to oppose the king during the Civil War. Unmolested by the restored regime, he lived quietly in Yorkshire until his death in November, 1671.

Significance

The third Baron Fairfax’s religious commitments as a devout Presbyterian made his adherence to the Parliamentary cause inevitable. His military experience, dashing courage, fierce energies, and utter devotion to victory made him a striking success in the field. Early in the war, though consistently outnumbered, he won a string of local victories that were substantially the product of his personal bravery and determined leadership. He contributed as much in the complex and decisive triumphs at Marston Moor and Naseby, where the outcome of the Civil War was essentially decided. Fairfax’s great gifts were military ones, headed by a valor that commanded respect. He was not so well suited, however, for the baffling politics of a revolutionary era when, for the first time, ordinary men, who had loyally followed their social superiors to make war on a king whom both believed to be acting unlawfully, demanded after their victory that the future be different and that those who had risked their lives to defeat the king should be consulted about how the country was to be governed.

Like Cromwell and the other grandees of the army, Fairfax was no modern democrat. The justice he sought for his men was merely that they should be treated fairly and allowed to worship freely. Like moderate men on both sides, he hoped to alter the existing political arrangements as little as possible, to see to it only that the king lived within the bounds of the ancient constitution as understood and defined by Parliament and that he secured its consent to any substantial change. He had no wish to see English society changed in a “levelling” (democratic) fashion. To secure political stability and preserve the social order, he accepted, as Cromwell did not in the end, the need for a king and the ancient constitution.

Having negotiated his own way through the shoals of the Restoration to safety, however, Fairfax disapproved of its terms. The vindication of his views may be seen in the terms upon which, a generation later, the monarchy had to be reestablished, bound this time by a constitution, a constitution that could only take hold after a second, if bloodless, revolution in 1688.

Bibliography

Bell, Robert, ed. Memorials of the Civil War. 2 vols. London: Bentley, 1849. Completes the work begun by scholar George Johnson of compiling the Fairfax correspondence.

Cromwell, Oliver. The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Edited by Wilbur Cortez Abbot. 4 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937-1947. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1970. The standard edition, together with a full biography, of the dominant figure of the age.

Firth, Charles H. Cromwell’s Army. London: Methuen, 1921. Reprint. Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1992. An examination of pro-Cromwell military organization and institutions by one of the great scholars of the period.

Gardiner, Samuel R. History of the Great Civil War. 4 vols. New York: Longmans, Green, 1893. Reprint. London: Windrush Press, 1987. Still the definitive narrative account by the greatest scholar of the period, though much corrected in detail by subsequent scholarship.

Hooper, A. J. The Readiness of the People: The Formation and Emergence of the Army of the Fairfaxes, 1642-1643. York, North Yorkshire, England: Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, University of York, 1997. A history of the Fairfaxes’ military campaign in Yorkshire.

Johnson, George W., ed. The Fairfax Correspondence. London: Bentley, 1848. Selections from the correspondence and papers of the Fairfax family in the early seventeenth century until the outbreak of war. Continued by scholar Robert Bell.

Wilson, John. Fairfax: A Life of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, Captain-General of All the Parliament’s Forces in the English Civil War, Creator and Commander of the New Model Army. London: J. Murray, 1985. A useful biography of Fairfax.

Young, Peter, and A. H. Burne. The Great Civil War. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1959. A concise military history. A revised edition of this work, written by Young with Richard Holmes, was published in 1974.