FAIRFAX, Sir Ferdinando (1584-1648), of Denton and Nun Appleton, Yorks.

Fairfax belonged to one of northern England’s oldest families. Descended from Saxon stock, the Fairfaxes were seated at Towcester in Northumberland by the time of the Conquest – moving southwards thereafter in order to avoid the depredations of the Scots. By the early thirteenth century, they had settled in Yorkshire, where they established themselves as one of the county’s wealthiest and most influential families.55Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. pp. xiii, xv-xvi. The Fairfaxes of Denton were a collateral branch of the family and had joined the county’s gentry elite only following the marriage of Fairfax’s great-grandfather early in the sixteenth century, by which they had acquired an extensive estate around York, Knaresborough and in Wharfedale, including the manor of Denton near Ilkley.56Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. ii. 187; Vis. Yorks. ed. Foster, 96-7; C.R. Markham, Great Lord Fairfax (1870), 2-4. Considerable lustre was added to the family’s reputation by Fairfax’s father, Sir Thomas Fairfax†, who sat for Lincoln in 1586, Aldborough in 1589 and for Yorkshire in 1601 and 1625. His career also included a stint as vice-president of the council of the north under Lord Sheffield, Ferdinando’s father-in-law. It was Sir Thomas who purchased the family’s peerage – the Scottish baronage of Cameron – in 1627.57Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. pp. xxii, lxx-lxxi; HP Commons 1604-29.

In 1602, at the age of 18, Fairfax was sent into the Low Countries by Sir Thomas in order to gain military experience against the Spanish.58HMC Hatfield, xii. 320. Two of Sir Thomas’s sons died fighting in the Thirty Years’ War, and he seems to have had unrealistically high expectations of Sir Ferdinando’s martial zeal and abilities. Disappointed in his hopes, the notoriously cantakerous and domineering Sir Thomas dismissed his eldest son as a ‘tolerable country justice’ but a ‘mere coward at fighting’.59Markham, Great Lord Fairfax, 12. Fairfax’s long and active career on the West Riding bench, which had commenced by 1611 at the latest, more than bears out the former assessment, while his ‘oustanding’ military leadership during the civil war completely refutes the latter.60W. Riding QS Recs. ed. Lister, 1, 313; J. Binns, Yorks. in the Civil Wars (Preston, 1996), 55; A.J. Hopper, ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007), 153; Jones, ‘War in North’, 7, 17-18 and passim. His particular passion, however, was not soldiering but erudition. He was an avid collector of theological and other scholarly works, and in 1644 he donated over 400 books to York Minster library – many of them acquired from the collections of his friend Archbishop Tobie Matthew, Archbishop Richard Neile, Sir John Hotham* and William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele.61Hopper, ‘Black Tom’, 12, 133, 153; A. Cambers, ‘Print, Manuscript and Godly Cultures in the North of England, c.1600-1650’ (York Univ. DPhil. thesis, 2003), 247-59.

Fairfax’s return for Boroughbridge in 1614 probably owed much to the influence of his father-in-law, Lord Sheffield, as president of the council of the north. Nevertheless, Sheffield’s resignation in 1619 had no adverse impact upon his son-in-law’s electoral fortunes, for Fairfax would be returned for the borough to every succeeding Parliament for the next two decades or more.62HP Commons 1604-29. The precise nature of his interest at Boroughbridge is not clear, for the town lay at some remove from the Fairfaxes’ principal seat at Denton, in the Wharfe Valley, and there is no evidence that they owned any property or were resident in the immediate vicinity.63Markham, Great Lord Fairfax, 8. Fairfax’s correspondence during the Parliaments of 1626-7 and 1628-9 suggests that he was broadly aligned at Westminster with critics of the royal favourite, George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, and of his handling of the war with Spain. In private, he also expressed concern at royal financial demands and mismanagement and at the favour and protection being shown to Arminian clerics, ‘to an insensible subversion of the religion now established’.64Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 25-6, 28-9, 31-2, 155-6; HP Commons 1604-29.

At county level, Fairfax and his father were allies of their kinsman by marriage Sir Thomas Wentworth† (the future earl of Strafford) in his bitter electoral struggle with Sir John Savile†, a client of Buckingham.65Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, pp. lix-lx, 7-10, 227, 237-8; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir Ferdinando Fairfax’; ‘Sir Thomas Fairfax I’. This alliance may have been strained in 1627, when Wentworth emerged as Yorkshire’s most prominent opponent of the Forced Loan, while both Fairfax and his father served as loan commissioners – probably as part of the price for Sir Thomas’s peerage.66SP16/44/4, f. 7; Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str. P12/4; APC 1626-7, pp. 243-4; CSP Dom. 1627-8, p. 194; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir Thomas Fairfax I’. Nevertheless, the following year, Fairfax was instrumental in arranging an electoral partnership between his close friend and cousin Henry Belasyse* and Wentworth for the county seats; while Lord Fairfax was among the first in Yorkshire to congratulate Wentworth on his appointment as president of the council of the north late in 1628.67Supra, ‘Henry Belasyse’; Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str. P12/46; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 462; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir Ferdinando Fairfax’.

Fairfax has been described as one of the leaders of the West Riding godly by the 1630s, a man whose ‘puritanism is beyond doubt’. That he was a firm Calvinist and a model of ‘sobriety and temperance’, well-connected among Yorkshire’s godly gentry and a patron of ‘faithful ministers of the gospel’ is clear.68Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 155-6; 334-6; Marchant, Puritans, 58, 263-4; Hopper, ‘Black Tom’, 154-5; Cambers, ‘Print, Manuscript and Godly Cultures’, 243-4, 301. But there is reason to question whether his forwardness in the cause of further reformation in religion matched that of more zealous puritans. He very probably shared the disquiet at the Laudian ‘new ceremonies’ of his clerical ally in the West Riding, Robert Moore. However, like Moore, his reverence for ‘lawful authority’ and the peace of the church meant that he was apparently content to practise a ‘wise and discreet tolerating’ of ‘needless ceremonies...till the time of reformation’.69Marchant, Puritans, 213-14; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 334-6. In a letter to his brother Charles, written in 1619, Fairfax had urged him to

forbear the study of controversies in religion … neither can those aspersions which are laid on our church and government by divers late writers so much blemish it as themselves, and even among them we may see as many errors. Zeal and earnestness in religion is most absolutely necessary, singularity and separation dangerous.70Belvoir, Mss 1660-1700, vol. 1, f. 44.

The puritan divine Richard Baxter named Fairfax among the parliamentarian generals who had been ‘conformable to episcopacy and parochial worship’ and ‘zealous for the liturgy’, and Fairfax himself admitted, in March 1641, that he wished to retain the Book of Common Prayer.71R. Baxter, Penitent Confession (1691), 30; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 180. During the 1630s, he had been among the more diligent of the West Riding commissioners for collecting contributions towards the re-edification of St Paul’s Cathedral – a project cherished by the king and Archbishop William Laud but denounced by the puritan physician John Bastwick as ‘making a seat for a priest’s arse’.72LMA, CLC/313/I/B/004/MS25474/001, p. 44; CLC/313/I/B/004/MS25474/003, p. 40; CSP Dom. 1635, p. 568; K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), 322-6. It is also worth noting that Fairfax’s domestic and army chaplains during the 1640s were, to a man, ‘orthodox’ divines – unlike several of the ministers favoured by Sir Thomas Fairfax.73Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Fairfax’; SC6/CHASI/1190, unfol. (entry 22 Apr. 1644); CJ iii. 107b, 130b, 649a; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. pp. xciii; ii. 426; Calamy Revised, 540. The clergyman who was closest to Fairfax, certainly by 1648, and who probably served as his private chaplain during the 1640s was the rector of the Fairfax living of Newton Kyme, Thomas Clapham, who would conform in 1662.74PROB11/209, ff. 204v-205v; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. lxxxix-xciv; H. Speight, Lower Wharfedale (Wakefield, 1969), 368.

Although Lord Fairfax was to remain on friendly terms with Wentworth throughout the 1630s, the relationship between Sir Ferdinando and the lord president became strained at several points during Charles I’s personal rule. Within two years of Wentworth’s appointment, Henry Belasyse and his father, Lord Fauconberg, had emerged as the leading opponents of his authority, and although the Fairfaxes were not directly involved in this quarrel, they remained on intimate terms with the Belasyses to the extent that on one occasion Sir Ferdinando accompanied his cousin Henry when the latter was summoned to appear before Wentworth at York.75Supra, ‘Henry Belasyse’; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 164-5, 231, 239-41, 255, 278; Cliffe, Yorks. 299. In 1632, Wentworth felt moved to administer a mild reprimand to Fairfax for failing to acquaint the council about a case before the West Riding bench; Fairfax agreed that it would have been desirable to inform the council, but he took issue with what he clearly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment by the council upon the jurisdiction of the magistracy.76Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 246; Cliffe, Yorks. 299. Relations between the two men hit another rocky patch late in 1638, prompting Fairfax to ask the vice-president of the council, Sir Edward Osborne*, to act as his intercessor with Wentworth. Writing to Wentworth in Ireland, Osborne described Fairfax as a gentleman ‘I have ever found my friend and one that upon all occasions since I had the honour to serve his Majesty under your lordship hath shown all due respect and observance both to my place and authority ... He [Fairfax] professes before God his innocency of giving ... any offence to your lordship...’. Fairfax suspected that Wentworth had never forgiven him for accompanying Henry Belasyse on his summons before the lord president at York, even though, as he explained to Osborne, ‘it was but the same that other kinsmen of his [Belasyse] did, who together with himself came at that time, being desired and sent for, to be bound for him’ in case Wentworth had required sureties for Belasyse’s good behaviour. Osborne asked Wentworth to inform Fairfax either of the nature of his offence so that he could defend himself or what he must do to win back Wentworth’s favour. ‘I beseech you’, Osborne concluded, ‘be pleased to remember that both his father and he have always been ready to express their best respects and services to your lordship until these distastes happened’.77Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P18/157. But Wentworth claimed that he was no less puzzled as to why Fairfax was now ‘somewhat cold’ towards him, and he hoped to reassure him that ‘there is nothing in [i.e. to] his contrary written in my heart’.78Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P10/a273-8.

The growing threat of war against the Scottish Covenanters may have brought about a partial rapprochement between Fairfax and Wentworth. With Wentworth’s approval, Osborne commissioned Fairfax a militia colonel and deputy lieutenant for the West Riding in the spring of 1639, and Wentworth may have helped to secure a captaincy under the king’s general of horse, Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland, for Fairfax’s eldest son Thomas Fairfax*, the future commander of the New Model army.79Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Fairfax’; Bodl., Fairfax 31, f. 134; Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P10a/273-8, 324-5. Despite his dislike of Arminianism and his patronage of puritan ministers in the West Riding, Sir Ferdinando seems to have had few qualms about fighting his fellow godly Protestants. Writing to his father in April, he adopted a hostile tone towards the Covenanters, relating how they had sullied the Scottish crown and sceptre ‘with their impure hands’.80Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 352. Lord Fairfax himself, possibly recalling his family’s ancient grievance against the Scots, referred to them simply as ‘the common enemy’.81Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 357. Fairfax’s was one of the Yorkshire militia regiments that were selected for inclusion in the king’s army during the first bishops’ war, and he diligently obeyed royal commands to march to the border, despite receiving no pay for his men before leading them northwards.82Add. 64918, f. 109; Notts. RO, DD/SR/212/35/2; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 362-7, 369, 370-3; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 909, 926; Cliffe, Yorks. 314. Besides improving the Fairfaxes’ relations with Wentworth, the war may also have strengthened their ancestral ties with the Percys, earls of Northumberland. The future parliamentarian grandee Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland professed great respect for Fairfax, while the latter defended Northumberland’s use of knight service to raise troops in 1639, insisting that ‘the earl does not challenge it as a due but as a favour from his friends’. During the 1640s, the earl would account Fairfax among his closest allies in the north.83Sotheby’s sale, London 14 Dec. 1993, Fairfax colln. lot 47: Sir F. Fairfax to Lord Fairfax, 17 May 1639: Alnwick, P.I.3(n): Northumberland to Sir John Melton*, 25 Feb. 1640; P.I.3p: Hugh Potter* to Northumberland, 15, 26 Dec. 1644, 3, 27, 31 Jan. 1645; P.I.3(q): same to same, 21 June 1645, 17 Jan. 1646; Leeds Castle, Civil war corresp. C1/31; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 10, 280, 359, 361.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Fairfax was returned once again for Boroughbridge.84Supra, ‘Boroughbridge’. Less than a fortnight later, the king ordered Osborne to mobilise six Yorkshire’s militia regiments, including Fairfax’s, for deployment against the Scots, but the order was quickly countermanded (although not before at least one of the regiments had marched as far as Durham).85Supra, ‘Henry Cholmley’; Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland ms vol. 1608-1700, N33 Car. I: king to Osborne, 4 Apr. 1640. By 22 April, Fairfax was lodging in London, yet he apparently took no part in this Parliament’s proceedings, receiving no committee appointments and making no recorded contribution to debate.86Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. 403. The privy council’s imprisonment of Henry Belasyse in May for speaking in the Commons against military charges must have dismayed Fairfax, and during the summer of 1640, with Yorkshire suffering under the impact of the second bishops’ war, he played a leading role in presenting the county’s grievances to the king.87Supra, ‘Henry Belasyse’. Late in July 1640, Fairfax’s signature, as 2nd Baron Fairfax of Cameron (his father having died in May), and those of his friends Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, and Henry Belasyse headed a petition to Charles from the county’s ‘disaffected’ gentry, denouncing enforced billeting as contrary to the Petition of Right. When it was presented at the council board, Wentworth (by now the earl of Strafford) exclaimed that ‘for them at such a time as this is, thus to complain when an invasion is threatened by the Scots, it seemed to be a mutinous petition’.88SP16/461/38, f. 58; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1214-15; D. Scott, ‘Hannibal at our gates’, HR lxx. 274-6. On 24 August, Fairfax signed the county’s second petition to the king, in which the petitioners insisted that the trained bands could not be mobilised for service against the Scots without two weeks pay in advance.89Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1231; Scott, ‘Hannibal at our gates’, 283. On 12 September, he signed the county’s third such petition, in which, after complaining about Ship Money, illegal billeting and various other ills, the petitioners reiterated the demand made by a group of dissident English peers, late in August, that Charles should summon a Parliament.90Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland Ms vol. 1608-1700, N38 Car. I. Fairfax’s role in the petitioning campaign can probably be explained by his concern to relieve the county of the heavy burden of military charges; there is no firm evidence that he collaborated with Henry Darley* and the dissident peers, who may have encouraged, and certainly exploited, the petitions in order to weaken the king’s army in the north and to encourage a Covenanter invasion.91Scott, ‘Hannibal at our gates’, 269-93. He certainly did not favour the kind of thoroughgoing religious reforms demanded by the Covenanters and their more godly English allies.

Having established himself during the summer of 1640 as one of Yorkshire’s leading ‘patriots’, Fairfax decided to stand for the county with Henry Belasyse in the elections to the Long Parliament. Their rival for one of the county seats was Strafford’s estranged nephew Sir William Savile*, who would be imprisoned by the Commons in 1641 for having informed against Belasyse and Sir John Hotham to the privy council after the dissolution of the Short Parliament.92Infra, ‘Sir William Savile’. The fact that all three candidates had been involved in the Yorkshire petitioning campaign – and that both Belasyse and Savile would side with the king in the civil war – suggests that the contest was primarily a factional struggle for the honour of representing the county, rather than an overtly political contest between the supporters and opponents of the personal rule. In the event, it was Fairfax and Belasyse who prevailed on polling day – Savile’s betrayal of Belasyse and Hotham having apparently compromised him in the eyes of all but Strafford’s staunchest adherents.93Supra, ‘Yorkshire’.

Although Fairfax was more active at Westminster between November 1640 and the spring of 1642 than he had been in any previous Parliament, his record was not as impressive as it might have been for a Member with his parliamentary experience and representing the kingdom’s largest county. He was named to approximately 55 committees between November 1640 and the outbreak of the civil war in 1642 (far fewer than his son-in-law, Sir Thomas Widdrington, for example) – only one of which he seems to have chaired – was employed as a messenger to the Lords on five occasions during that period and appointed a manager of just one conference.94CJ ii. 175b, 178a, 179a, 180b, 431a, 522a, 540b; LJ iv. 225b, 583a, 710b; v. 14b. Sir Edward Hyde* evidently regarded Sir Hugh Cholmeley, Sir John Hotham and Sir Philip Stapilton as more active and influential figures among the ‘northern gentlemen’ in the House than Fairfax, and this assessment is supported by the Commons Journal and parliamentary diaries of the period.95Clarendon, Hist. i. 250, 263, 309, 315, 421. Moreover, it is clear that Fairfax did not collaborate regularly with the parliamentary leadership as did Stapilton and, to a lesser extent, Hotham.

A few days after the Long Parliament had assembled in November 1640, Fairfax and Belasyse presented a petition from Yorkshire against Ship Money, military charges and other grievances, and Fairfax’s correspondence during 1640-1 reveals that he approved of reformist legislation by the Houses, notably the Triennial Act.96CJ ii. 22b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 21; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 41, 202. Yet his tally of committee appointments relating to the reform of the secular ‘abuses’ of the personal rule was far from impressive.97CJ ii. 44a, 44b, 45b, 60a, 75a, 82a, 101a, 197b. Similarly, although he showed little sympathy for Strafford or his ‘creatures’ – he was a teller in July 1641 against releasing Sir William Savile from the Tower – and was named to three committees relating to the earl’s prosecution, he was not in the vanguard of the parliamentary assault on Strafford – as were the Cholmleys and Hothams – and took no part in his trial.98CJ ii. 39b, 79b, 98a, 180b; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 41, 81-2, 104-5.

Suppressing Laudian church innovations and popery accounted for a number of Fairfax’s early appointments in the Long Parliament and his (rare) interventions in debate on the floor of the House. On 23 November, he accused the Laudian dean of Peterborough, Dr John Cosin, of attempting to persuade a minister’s son to convert to Catholicism.99Procs. LP i. 252, 256. During late 1640 and early 1641, he was named to committees for investigating the new Canons, examining Laud’s involvement in the ‘great design of the subversion ... of religion’, promoting ‘the true worship of God’ and to counter the threat from popish recusants.100CJ ii. 52a, 84b, 113b. In August, he was appointed a commissioner for disarming recusants in the West Riding.101CJ ii. 267b; LJ iv. 385a. He seems to have shared the enthusiasm of his neighbour and Yorkshire man-of-business, the godly squire Thomas Stockdale*, for harsh measures against ‘the popish party’ and also, by the summer of 1642, his willingness to ‘animate the people … for just and religious ends’.102Infra, ‘Thomas Stockdale’; Hopper, ‘Black Tom’, 21-2, 135, 155. Nevertheless, it is clear that Fairfax’s support for the extirpation of Laudianism and popery did not extend to wholesale reform of the government and liturgy of the church.103Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 180. His response to the root and branch petition of late 1640 is especially revealing, for he proposed that it should ‘follow [the] book of [new] Canons’ – that is, be formally condemned by the House.104Northcote Note Bk. 51; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 181-2. His views on church reform probably corresponded closely with those of Stockdale, who criticised the ‘negative party’ at Westminster for insisting on the removal of bishops rather than allowing Parliament to re-establish episcopacy with ‘convenient limitations’.105Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 208.

But if his parliamentary appointments are any guide, Fairfax’s priority at Westminster was the relief of Yorkshire and the northern counties, where the quartering of the English and Scottish armies since the end of the second bishops’ war was causing considerable hardship. This issue certainly bulked large in his correspondence with Stockdale and explains his willingness to pledge £1,000 towards securing a City loan in November 1640 and his eagerness in February and March 1641 to hasten measures for raising money and the supply of the troops in the north.106Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 100-4, 105-6, 110-12, 113-15, 203-4, 207-8, 210-14, 215-16, 218-20, 376, 382, 393-4; Procs. LP i. 229, 232, 235; ii. 409, 497, 614. Between January and August 1641, he was appointed to a series of committees and to one conference management team and served twice as a messenger to the Lords on business relating to the pay and management of the armies.107CJ ii. 66a, 85b, 152a, 172b, 175b, 178a, 179a, 180b, 188b, 196a, 258a; LJ iv. 225b. He headed and reported from the delegation (comprising himself, Hotham, Belasyse and Stapilton) to the lord general, the earl of Essex, on 18 June to present him with the votes of the House for the disbandment of five regiments.108CJ ii. 179a, 180b. On 1 July, he presented a bill to the Commons for securing the billet money due to the northern counties.109Procs. LP v. 442. In August, he went northwards himself to assist in disbanding the king’s army.110CJ ii. 237a, 265a. On 9 December, he presented a petition to the House from the West Riding for the speedy payment of billet money – a cause he continued to champion well into 1642.111D’Ewes (C), 256; PJ ii. 252. Like a number of other Yorkshire MPs, he seems to have sympathised with the pay-starved English officers in the north, and on one occasion he defended some of their number against charges of complicity in the army plots.112Procs. LP v. 27.

Fairfax was only peripherally involved in Parliament’s efforts to justify itself and its proceedings to the king. On 28 June 1641, he was named to a committee concerning the Ten Propositions, and he and Belasyse were named to a 12-man committee on 30 November to present the Grand Remonstrance to the king, although it is not clear whether they were among the committeemen who attended the king at Hampton Court on 1 December.113CJ ii. 190b, 327a, 330a; D’Ewes (C), 219-20. Fairfax’s next appointment was not until 17 January 1642, when he was named to a committee for putting the kingdom into a posture of defence following the king’s attempted arrest of the Five Members and his subsequent flight from London.114CJ ii. 383b.

During the first half of 1642, Fairfax played a leading role in the Commons’ efforts to secure Hull, and Yorkshire as a whole, against the king’s party and in representing the views of the county’s ‘well-affected’ to Parliament. He and Belasyse repeatedly drew the House’s attention to the threat they believed the papists posed to Yorkshire’s security, and Fairfax was named to several committees and served three times as a messenger to the Lords concerning initiatives for gaining control of the county’s arms and militia.115Supra, ‘Henry Belasyse’; CJ ii. 383b, 407b, 431a, 433a, 497a, 522a, 540b, 550b; PJ i. 240, 246, 375-6, 389; PJ ii. 152, 213, 215, 216; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 347-8, 362-4, 367-73, 378. On 2 May, he was appointed with Edward Howard, 1st Baron Howard of Escrick*, Stapilton, Sir Hugh Cholmeley and Sir Henry Cholmley* as parliamentary commissioners to attend the king at York.116CJ ii. 553a; PJ ii. 265. They were instructed to deliver Parliament’s declaration to the king vindicating Hotham’s proceedings at Hull and were given power to raise the county’s trained bands against any force threatening the peace of the county.117CJ ii. 559b-560a; LJ v. 47a. According to Sir Hugh Cholmeley, however, John Pym ‘plainly enjoined’ the committee members to ‘draw the trained bands together and to oppose the king in all things ... for the Parliament’s service’.118Cholmley Mems. ed. J. Binns (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. cliii), 103. The king was clearly suspicious of their mission, and after they had delivered Parliament’s declaration to him on 10 May he ordered them to return to Westminster. When they politely insisted that their instructions were to remain at York, he advised them not to make any party for themselves or to hinder his service in the county on pain of imprisonment. He also warned the Yorkshire freeholders against them, ‘not knowing what doctrine of disobedience they may preach to you under colour of obeying the Parliament’.119LJ v. 61; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 615, 616. The committee remained at York for most of May and June and sent several letters to Parliament relating the king’s proceedings and their own efforts to prevent him seizing the county’s military resources.120Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 620-1; PJ ii. 386; PJ iii. 86; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 322-3, 330. It was Fairfax and his colleagues who presented Charles with the Nineteen Propositions.121CJ ii. 599a; LJ v. 97b. The king reacted to Fairfax’s involvement in these proceedings by having him removed as a militia colonel and ejecting him from the West Riding bench.122Some Speciall Passages from London…and Other Parts no. 1 (24 May-2 June 1642), unpag.; Some Speciall Passages from Westminster, London, Yorke and Other Parts no. 6 (28 June-5 July 1642), unpag.

Fairfax remained in the north after June 1642, and on 29 August he led the nascent Yorkshire parliamentarian faction in a ‘protestation and declaration’ to the Commons against the issuing of the commission of array at the county’s summer assizes.123Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 649; Hopper, ‘Black Tom’, 25-6. Parliament’s highest-ranking supporter in Yorkshire (Belasyse having joined the king by August), he was widely regarded as the leader of the ‘well-affected’ party in the West Riding. Nevertheless, the king and many Yorkshire royalists doubted whether Lord Fairfax and Sir Thomas were ‘transported with over-vehement inclinations to the Parliament’ – further evidence, perhaps, of the family’s moderation in religion – and left them unmolested.124Clarendon, Hist. ii. 287, 460. In the short term, this proved a shrewd calculation, for Fairfax may have accepted nomination by the West Riding parliamentarians on 19 September as general of Parliament’s forces throughout Yorkshire (which Parliament quickly ratified) partly in the hope that it would better enable him to enforce a neutrality pact with his principal friends in the royalist camp, Henry Belasyse and the earl of Cumberland. As part of this design, Fairfax and his leading supporters convened at Otley, a few miles from Denton, and wrote to Sir John Hotham at Hull ‘to make no more incursions [into the West Riding] with his horse’.125Add. 18777, f. 14; Add. 75354, ff. 5-6; LJ v. 373b-374a; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. xlviii-xlix, lxvii-lxviii, 242-3, 279; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 21, 25.

Signed at Rothwell, near Leeds, on 29 September 1642, the Yorkshire ‘treaty of neutrality’ was an abortive attempt by parliamentarian and royalist leaders in the West Riding to preserve the county in peace while the conflict between king and Parliament was settled in the south by what it was widely anticipated would be a single, decisive battle.126A. Woolrych, ‘Yorkshire’s treaty of neutrality’, History Today, vi. 696-704. The treaty was immediately condemned by Parliament, however, and was rendered a dead letter in Yorkshire by the aggressive tactics of Sir John Hotham and his son Captain John Hotham*.127Infra, ‘John Hotham II’; CJ ii. 794. Fairfax himself swiftly repudiated the treaty and, having been commissioned by the earl of Essex as commander-in-chief north of the Trent, attempted to unite Yorkshire’s parliamentarians behind a military campaign to resist the southwards advance of the earl of Newcastle’s royalist army. But the Hothams and their kinsman Sir Hugh Cholmeley resented their subordination to Fairfax as a slight upon their honour and military reputations and a challenge to their power in the East and North Riding, and they flouted or ignored his authority.128Supra, ‘Sir Hugh Cholmeley’; infra, ‘John Hotham’; SP28/3A, f. 195; LJ v. 494b, 527b; CJ ii. 893a, 923b, 926b; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 26, 36, 37-8, 39; A.J. Hopper, “The Readiness of the People”: the Formation and Emergence of the Army of the Fairfaxes, 1642-3 (Borthwick Ppr. xcii), 5-7.

Although Fairfax’s printed statements were emblazoned with the motto ‘Viva el rey y muerra el mal govierno’ (long live the king and death to bad government), his decision to abandon negotiations for the sword may have been rooted, more specifically, in fear of popery.129I. Gentles, ‘The iconography of revolution’, in Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution ed. I. Gentles, J. Morrill, B. Worden (Cambridge, 1998), 109. Both Hyde and the Hothams believed that the Fairfaxes were guided by ‘two or three of inferior quality’ and in particular by Stockdale, who was obsessed with the threat to lives and religion posed by northern popery, especially after the Irish rebellion.130Infra, ‘Thomas Stockdale’; HMC Portland, i. 84; Certaine Letters Sent from Sir John Hotham (1643), 9; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 287; Hopper, “The Readiness of the People”, 7-9. Certainly Fairfax, in his official pronouncements during the winter of 1642-3, made much of the fact that Newcastle’s army contained a significant number of papists – information that was eagerly seized upon by Pym and his allies in their efforts to overcome opposition at Westminster to a military alliance with the Scots.131Harl. 164, ff. 264, 264v, 270v, 273v; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 29; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 125-6, 133, 138, 139-40.

Fairfax’s evident conviction, prior to his victories in 1644, that he was fighting a losing battle against Newcastle’s popish legions led to a temporary softening in his attitude towards Scottish intervention and church discipline, and in May 1643 he wrote to the Commons, urging the importance of swift assistance from the Scots if the situation in the north was to be saved.132Harl. 164, f. 385. Taking note of this remarkable shift in the thinking of Fairfax and other leading Scotophobes in the north, the royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus advised its readers early in 1644 that ‘this year we must wonder at nothing, since the great earl himself [Northumberland] calls the Scots into Northumberland and the very Lord Fairfax invites them into Yorkshire’.133Mercurius Aulicus no. 12 (17-23 Mar. 1644), 892 (E.40.32). After Marston Moor in July, Fairfax joined the earl of Manchester and the Scottish commander-in-chief, General Leven, in urging Parliament, ‘in pursuance of our Solemn Covenant’, to ‘take the building of the House of God and settlement of church government into their chiefest thoughts’.134CSP Dom. 1644, p. 359. Fairfax was careful to rebuild his own authority in Yorkshire after the battle, employing his agent William White* to procure new commissions of peace for the East, North and West Ridings in which he was named custos rotulorum for all three.135Belvoir, PZ.1, f. 48. On 20 September, in a highly public display of unity with Parliament-men at Westminster, Fairfax and other leading northern parliamentarians took the Covenant at York.136J. Shaw, Brittains Remembrancer (1644), frontispiece; Cambers, ‘Print, Manuscript and Godly Cultures’, 275-6. Yet just a few months later, in November, he and Sir Thomas Fairfax, along with the future Independents Sir Matthew Boynton*, Sir William Constable* and Francis Pierrepont*, wrote to the Committee of Both Kingdoms*, denouncing the Scots as a military liability. They accused Leven’s forces of imposing an ‘intolerable burden’ upon Yorkshire, ‘which tends to the destruction of this our army [Fairfax’s northern army], in the increase whereof consists the liveliest hopes of our future advantages’.137CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 104-5.

Fairfax moved even closer to the emerging anti-Scottish, Independent faction at Westminster following the appointment of Sir Thomas Fairfax as commander-in-chief of the New Model army early in 1645. The selection of Sir Thomas seems to have owed much to the Fairfaxes’s long-standing friendship with two leading proponents of new-modelling Parliament’s armies – namely, Lord Wharton and the earl of Northumberland.138Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Fairfax’; Sloane 1519, f. 16; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 142; I. Gentles, New Model Army (Oxford, 1992), 11. But although Fairfax was aligned with the Independents politically, his position on liberty of conscience for the godly may actually have been closer to that of the Scots. It was probably on his authority as governor of York that the anti-trinitarian scholar Paul Best was imprisoned in Yorkshire early in 1645 for what the county’s ‘orthodox’ divines deemed ‘horrid blasphemies’.139Add. 18780, f. 33; ‘Paul Best’, Oxford DNB.

The passage of the Self-Denying Ordinance in the spring of 1645 obliged Fairfax to resign his command, although he was to remain a key figure in the management of northern affairs, and on 10 May he was appointed to a committee for directing the forces of the newly-formed Northern Association.140CJ iv. 138b. Later that month, Fairfax and several other members of this committee wrote a series of letters to General Leven, pleading with him to march his forces south in defence of the midlands and the Eastern Association.141CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 523, 531, 532, 536-7, 542, 546-7, 551. Leven effectively ignored these requests, and the result was the royalist sacking of Leicester. Fairfax resumed his seat in the Commons on 4 July, after a speech from the Speaker thanking him for his ‘great and faithful services’.142CJ iv. 195a. The Commons recognised his place in the pantheon of parliamentary war heroes by resolving in December to include a clause in what would become the Newcastle peace propositions, requiring the king to create him an English baron and earl.143CJ iv. 360b. Early in 1646, the Commons charged one of its committees with finding lands worth £10,000 that could be settled upon him, and in August the House ordered the Committee for Compounding* to pay him £7,380 for his army arrears.144CJ iv. 435a, 639.

Between his return to the House in July 1645 and December 1647, Fairfax was named to 20 committees – the majority of them relating to four areas of parliamentary business: northern affairs, the settling of a godly preaching ministry, the maintenance of the New Model army, and Parliament’s dealings with the Scots.145CJ iv. 199a, 211b, 238b, 248b, 267b, 269b, 273a, 281a, 298b, 299a, 313a, 317a, 481b, 512a, 603a, 625b, 675a, 682b; v. 119b, 359a. His first appointment after resuming his seat was his addition, on 7 July, to the Committee for Plundered Ministers*; on 18 July he was added to the committee for settling godly ministers in the northern counties.146CJ iv. 199a, 211b. Several of his committee appointments suggest that he favoured the cause of terminating the Scots’ involvement in English affairs. On 20 March, for example, he was included on the so-called ‘northern committee’, chaired by Stockdale, for framing a declaration relating the crimes and ‘oppressions’ of the Scottish forces in the north.147CJ iv. 317a, 481b. Moreover, it appears that every one of his correspondents between late 1644 and 1647 – but especially his kinsmen Constable, James Chaloner*, John Rushworth*, Sir Thomas Widdrington and the Erastian Presbyterian divine Edward Bowles – wrote in terms that assumed considerable sympathy on his part with the Independents and the army in their struggle with the political Presbyterians and the Scots.148Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 124-5, 132-3, 142-3, 155-6, 157-9, 159-61, 162-4, 165-7, 168-9, 182-4, 190-1, 268, 337-8, 340-84.

Illness may well have prevented Fairfax taking a more active role at Westminster during the mid-1640s – thus on 6 April 1646 he was given leave to go to Bath ‘for recovery of his health’.149CJ iv. 501a. But such influence as he enjoyed was mainly exercised indirectly, through his impressive personal following in the Commons, which was augmented considerably as a result of the ‘recruiter’ elections.150Hopper, ‘Black Tom’, 58-9. Between 1640 and Pride’s Purge, Fairfax and his eldest son could claim a large part of the credit for the election of at least seven Members – Sir Thomas Mauleverer for Boroughbridge, Sir William Constable (Lord Fairfax’s brother-in-law) for Knaresborough, William White (principal agent for the northern army) and Henry Arthington (Lord Fairfax’s son-in-law) for Pontefract, Sir John Bourchier for Ripon, Sir William Lister for East Retford, and James Chaloner (Lord Fairfax’s nephew by marriage) for Aldborough.151Supra, ‘Henry Arthington’; ‘Sir John Bourchier’; ‘James Chaloner’; ‘Sir William Constable’; infra, ‘Sir William Lister’; ‘Sir Thomas Mauleverer’; ‘William White’. Fairfax’s son-in-law, Sir Thomas Widdrington, exerted considerable influence in his own right as chairman of the standing committees on northern affairs in the Long Parliament – the Northern Committee* and the Commons’ Northern Association Committee* (the latter a stronghold of the Fairfax interest).152Supra, ‘Northern Committee’; infra, ‘Sir Thomas Widdrington’. Stockdale was returned for Knaresborough in 1645, adding to the already large pool of Fairfax’s friends and former army colleagues in the Commons, which by 1646 also included the Yorkshire MPs John Alured, Francis Lascelles, James Nelthorpe, Peregrine Pelham and John Wastell.153Supra, ‘John Alured’; infra, ‘Francis Lascelles’; ‘James Nelthorpe’; ‘Peregrine Pelham’; ‘Thomas Stockdale’; ‘John Wastell’. Ties of obligation and possibly friendship may also have also existed between Fairfax and the three senior parliamentarian officers he had commissioned while commanding the northern army – Sir William Brereton* of Cheshire, Colonel John Hutchinson* of Nottinghamshire, and the leading Cumberland parliamentarian Sir Wilfrid Lawson*.154Supra, ‘Sir William Brereton; infra, ‘John Hutchinson’; ‘Sir Wilfrid Lawson’.

Fairfax was absent from the Commons for most of 1647 and does not appear to have attended the House in 1648 before his death on 13 March of an infection caused by a gangrenous foot.155CJ v. 155a, 330a, 338b, 377a; Cambers, ‘Print, Manuscript and Godly Cultures’, 287. He was buried at Bolton Percy church two days later (15 Mar.), Edward Bowles preaching his funeral sermon.156Add. 51054, ff. 50v-58; Bodl. Fairfax 30, f. 26; A Perfect Narrative of the Late Proceedings of the Parliament of Scotland (1648), 2-4 (E.433.13); Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1032; Cambers, ‘Print, Manuscript and Godly Cultures’, 293-301. In his will, in which he asked to be buried ‘without much pomp or ceremony’, he assigned several properties that he had recently purchased in Yorkshire to Sir Thomas Widdrington and Henry Arthington to hold in trust for his wife and to raise a marriage portion of £2,000 for their daughter. He also left bequests of about £400. His legatees included Thomas Clapham, to whom he left £100, and Sir William Constable.157PROB11/209, ff. 204v-205v; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, i. lxxxix-xciv. His personal estate was valued at about £1,050.158Yorks. Probate Inventories, 1542–1689 ed. P.C.D. Brears (Yorks. Arch Soc. rec. ser. cxxxiv), 93-4. His eldest son Thomas, 3rd Baron Fairfax sat for the West Riding in 1654 and for Yorkshire in 1659 and 1660.159Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Fairfax’.