A junior branch of the Gilling family, the Fairfaxes settled at Steeton, near York, and Sir William Fairfax acquired Denton by marriage in the early sixteenth century.
Despite being his father’s sole male heir, Fairfax led a surprisingly eventful youth. In 1583 he set out for Scotland with the 2nd earl of Essex, but he and the rest of the party were obliged to turn back at Berwick. Two years later, however, Fairfax was able to complete the journey, bringing James VI horses from the earl of Leicester (Sir Robert Dudley†). The English ambassador in Scotland, Sir Edward Wotton†, assured Leicester that Fairfax ‘did not omit the doing of any good office whereby he might imprint in the king’s mind a good opinion of your Lordship’.
Fairfax returned to England in 1597. After raising recruits for service in Ireland, he was employed in the ordnance department at Berwick, where Ralph, 3rd Lord Eure†, warden of the Middle March, recommended him for appointment as deputy warden. In 1599 he was appointed a member of the Council in the North by lord president Burghley (Thomas Cecil†), who in the following year helped him settle a dispute with his half-brother Edward over their father’s will.
Many years after the event, Fairfax recalled being unable to serve under Essex in Ireland because of ‘an incident which I could not avoid, which concerned me and mine’. This undoubtedly referred to a protracted family quarrel over the Steeton estate, which his uncles Gabriel and Henry Fairfax had partitioned between themselves in 1568. Henry Fairfax’s son sold the manor of Owston Grange to Gabriel Fairfax’s son William, but Henry subsequently attempted to recover it by exploiting a loophole in his deed of assignation. On his death this claim passed to his widow Dorothy, who made Fairfax a trustee of her interest when she remarried in August 1600. Her new husband, Richard Beverley, began a fresh suit against Gabriel Fairfax’s son William, but was thwarted, largely as a result of the opposition of Edmund, 3rd Baron Sheffield, whose daughter had married William’s son Philip. In September 1602 Sheffield accused Fairfax of circulating a letter demanding an apology for his partisan conduct, whereupon Fairfax denied that he was behind the letter. This was probably truthful, but Fairfax undoubtedly hoped to use the quarrel to further his own claims to the estate.
Fairfax’s experience of the Scottish Court put him in a promising position at James’s accession. He later recounted that ‘after I had proclaimed His Majesty, I went into Scotland with six of my nearest kindred to swear loyalty to His Highness’, a demonstration of initiative rewarded with a place in the privy chamber. According to Burghley, Fairfax subsequently resolved to live at Court. His absence from Yorkshire, as well as Sheffield’s appointment as lord president, doubtless explain why Fairfax did not stand for Parliament in the spring of 1604.
While at Court, Fairfax kept a close eye on the affairs of his Steeton cousins. After William Fairfax died in July 1603, the wardship of his son, Philip, was obtained by Sheffield, who pressed Richard Beverley to surrender his wife’s remaining interest in the Steeton estate in return for an annuity. However, Fairfax, as a trustee of Dorothy Beverley’s estate, initially refused to consent to this agreement, claiming that it would prejudice the reversion of the Steeton lands, which were to come to him when the 1557 lease expired in 1614. Eventually though, Fairfax waived his objections, thereby allowing Beverley to assign his interest to Philip Fairfax. It seems that Sheffield secured Fairfax’s co-operation on the understanding that when Philip, who was heavily indebted, began to sell off his lands, Fairfax would be offered first refusal. Thus in April 1608 Fairfax was able to purchase Bilborough manor from Philip. The newfound accord between Fairfax and Sheffield was cemented in the following autumn, when Sheffield married one of his daughters to Fairfax’s heir, Sir Ferdinando*.
Even after his son’s marriage, Fairfax remained dissatisfied with the agreement over the Steeton estate, complaining to the 7th earl of Shrewsbury (Gilbert Talbot†) that ‘I have finished all my suits with a poor composition’. He took the precaution of choosing Shrewsbury and Burghley (now 1st earl of Exeter) as trustees for the marriage settlement, in the hope that they ‘would not be overruled’ by Sheffield ‘or any other’. Meanwhile, Sheffield lost patience with Philip Fairfax, now knighted, who had burdened his estate with a large number of leases. In March 1612 Sheffield apologized to Fairfax for the ‘evil course’ adopted by his son-in-law, and informed him that Sir Philip would sell Steeton if he could make good his title. He added that, if this were to happen, ‘I rather wish it to you than to any other (being the seat of your ancestors)’. In the following month, Fairfax bought the manors of Toulston and Newton Kyme from his cousin for £500, a price which reflected the level of debt with which the estate was charged, and Sir Philip later sold him the manor of Bolton Percy. The encumbrances on the Steeton inheritance took many years to clear: as late as 1625, Fairfax was fighting Beverley’s heir over arrears of the annuity the latter had been promised in 1607.
While the recovery of the Steeton estate was Fairfax’s main concern during the first half of James’s reign, his military experience left him with a lasting interest in foreign affairs. He maintained a regular correspondence with old comrades in arms such as Sir John Ogle, governor of Utrecht, in whose care he placed his son William, and Sir Horatio Vere, into whose regiment his son was later commissioned.
Although all of Fairfax’s children were fully grown, those of his eldest son Sir Ferdinando had lived at Denton since the death of their mother in 1619. Sir Ferdinando’s frequent absences at Westminster made domestic life difficult for Fairfax, particularly after his wife’s death, and in 1621 he chided his son for his reluctance to remarry: ‘consider what a father you have that is contented to want a nurse for myself, and to undergo the care of housekeeping, that I may be a nurse to your children’. This admonition went unheeded, however, and Fairfax was forced to adapt to the burdens of a second parenthood. Indeed, he even considered a fresh marriage for himself in 1626, which upset Sir Ferdinando, who feared that further siblings would diminish his own inheritance.
The cost of a confessional war came home to Fairfax in the autumn of 1621, when his sons William and John were killed in the defence of Frankenthal. News also arrived of the death of another son in the Levant, and it eventually emerged that a fourth, who had gone to France in the summer of 1621 as a member of Viscount Doncaster’s embassy, had been robbed and killed while attempting to smuggle a message into the Huguenot stronghold of Montauban. Over the next few years Ogle, then in London, sent Fairfax a series of gloomy assessments of foreign affairs. In April 1623, with Prince Charles in Madrid, and the conclusion of the Spanish Match apparently inevitable, Ogle sarcastically noted that ‘some are of so little faith as they will not believe that the marriage etc.; God send us our Prince well home again’.
In the spring of 1625, Fairfax joined William Mallory* in standing against Sir John Savile* for the knighthood of the shire, possibly because he disapproved of the anti-war stance Savile had adopted in Parliament in 1624. He was outraged when Savile’s chaplain accused Mallory of Catholic sympathies, but when the latter resigned he quickly paired with Wentworth. On the day of the election the opposing parties were so evenly matched that the sheriff, Sir Richard Cholmley*, was forced to undertake a poll. This was abandoned when Savile disrupted the proceedings, whereupon Cholmley returned his allies Wentworth and Fairfax, to whom he was related through the Belasyse family. Savile petitioned against Cholmley’s decision, and the committee for privileges spent much of the first two weeks of the session debating the issue. According to (Sir) John Eliot*, Wentworth assumed sole responsibility for defending their case, ‘his colleague in that service [Fairfax] being but passive in the work, and so involved with him as what was accidental to the one was necessarily contingent to the other’. Savile proved more than a match for his opponents, however, and the election was overturned on 5 July.
Aside from his involvement in the election dispute, Fairfax left little trace on the Commons’ proceedings. However, on 30 June he apparently seconded Sir Robert Phelips’ proposal to give just two subsidies. This was a derisory sum with which to set out the fleet, and while Phelips, an opponent of the war, had an obvious motive to make such a motion, Fairfax’s support is more difficult to explain. He may have been dismayed by the disintegration of Mansfeld’s English army, paid for by the 1624 subsidies, or concerned about the likely impact of further taxation on an economy already disrupted by war and the plague. Fairfax did not speak again, but his papers contain a petition asking him to promote a bill to curb the practice whereby Yorkshire freeholders were fined for failing to appear at the assizes, ‘the officers and bailiffs well knowing that the pleading of such a cause will cost them [the freeholders] more than the fine’. This was presumably the bill ‘for ease of freeholders in the county of York’ which received a single reading on 25 June. Fairfax left no trace on the Oxford sitting, being readmitted to the Commons only four days before the dissolution.
While Wentworth’s appointment as sheriff prevented him from standing against Savile in 1626, Fairfax stood aside in favour of his son-in-law, Sir William Constable, 1st bt.*, who was paired with Wentworth’s neighbour Sir Francis Wortley*. The rival factions apparently reached an agreement on the morning of the election whereby Savile and Constable were returned unopposed. However, only weeks later Savile revived the dispute over the 1625 election by filing a Star Chamber bill against his erstwhile opponents. Fairfax dismissed the charges as ‘stinking lies’, but confessed ‘I sit upon thorns till this bill be answered’; the case lingered on file until 1629.
The Benevolence was quickly superseded by the Forced Loan. Fairfax served as a commissioner for the West Riding, and reported Wentworth, among others, for refusing to pay. His assistance in collecting the Loan was undoubtedly secured by the offer of a Scottish barony, probably made at the suggestion of Savile, now a privy councillor and a leading supporter of the duke of Buckingham, who was worried that Fairfax would join Wentworth and Constable in refusing to pay the Loan, and thereby provoke a general revolt among the Yorkshire gentry. Although Fairfax may have been troubled by his defection, he clearly coveted a peerage to match the elevation of his nephew Sir Thomas Belasyse* to an English barony. Moreover, the honour also served to elevate him above Sir Thomas Fairfax II*, head of the senior branch of the family.
In December 1628 Wentworth succeeded Scrope as lord president. Fairfax offered him his congratulations, and asked to ‘be commanded some service by your Lordship wherein I may express my humble affection in more than paper’. Wentworth asked Fairfax to deputize for him at York as vice-president in the following month, an honour he was obliged to decline because of ill health. The two men remained on amicable terms throughout the 1630s, despite Wentworth’s quarrel with Henry Belasyse, who allegedly snubbed Wentworth at a Council meeting at York by turning his back to talk to Fairfax. In 1630, Fairfax unsuccessfully lobbied Wentworth to revive the office of master of the Ordnance at Berwick for his son Sir Ferdinando. The post could pay for itself, he claimed, if charges were imposed upon the North Sea herring boats for safe haven, and provisions were sold to the fishermen.
Fairfax’s health gradually deteriorated during the 1630s: forced to cancel a militia muster because of an attack of the stone, he asked Wentworth ‘to appoint another in my place, who may better do the service, though none hath more desire to’. This request was perhaps not to be taken too seriously, but he eventually resigned from the lieutenancy in 1633. Although he remained a militia colonel until his death, it was Sir Ferdinando who led his regiment against the Scots in 1639.
Fairfax died on 1 May 1640. His will, drafted five years earlier, was relatively perfunctory, his lands having long since been entailed on his eldest son and grandson, and his other children provided with generous portions.