Abstract
This first-rate volume of essays, edited by Andrew Hopper (Fairfax’s biographer) and Philip Major, deals with the still somewhat neglected figure of Thomas 3rd Lord Fairfax. He is of course, a military figure continually overwhelmed in the historical stakes by the titan that is his contemporary: Oliver Cromwell. The latter, with his religious vision, hasty temper, military skills, pithy quotes, king killing, and Machiavellian political nous, that eventually made him head of state as Lord Protector, wins hands down for complexity, deliberate obscurity, and sheer bloody-mindedness, as well as for his ability to raise the hackles of both contemporaries and historians who try to guess his motives. Thomas Fairfax was hardly any of these things, being instead a much more typical, personally amiable, and moderately minded Englishman and professional soldier, who was, like many of his contemporaries, caught up in the civil wars that ravaged the Three Kingdoms. Perhaps in the end though, the public’s lack of awareness of Fairfax, which this book does a great deal to rectify, is really Fairfax’s own fault. For it was he, not Oliver who walked off stage in 1650 by refusing to lead the republic’s army north on campaign against the Scots in that same year. It was also he who did little or nothing to prevent the regicide going ahead in 1649, except to absent himself from the trial’s proceedings. More sense than to be there perhaps, as Fairfax’s wife is apocryphally supposed to have said. Cromwell didn’t walk off, however. He acted, and thus it is Cromwell who is remembered in the public imagination, for good or ill. So Fairfax is all too often seen as one of history’s ‘might have beens’, but the volume here sets out to correct this image and it certainly provides plenty of food for thought.
We see Fairfax mainly in the first part of the book as a military commander. The army he led is often erroneously (at least until 1650) called Cromwell’s army or mainly the New Model army, but very rarely is it labelled Fairfax’s army, though it certainly was his command. To single out two of the essays here to a potential reader is actually invidious in such a very useful collection, but Robert Bancroft’s essay is notable for concentrating not on Fairfax’s battles with this force, but on the many sieges he undertook. It is a thoughtful and well-written piece of military history. Equally important is the essay by Mandy de Belin on the landscape of Naseby and this greatly aids in our understanding of this famous, but still surprisingly controversial battle, as it delves into the fine detail of the battle’s history and puts it back into its real topography. Fairfax in the public imagination is also examined here by two stimulating essays by Ian Atherton and Andrew Hopper.
But there is, as the second part of the book successfully shows, more to Fairfax than mere military fame and the contributors here give a more fully rounded portrait of a complex man. These particular essays are wide-ranging and deal with the many different facets of Fairfax’s career: his cultural life, religion, the poetics of his image, and his own poetry. His relationships and even his breeding of horses, all emerge from these essays and make this an interesting contribution to Thomas Fairfax’s renewed importance.