The Centre for English Local History

10 July 2012

 Conference Report by Dr Philip Major and Dr Andrew Hopper

The conference speakers at Naseby on 1 July 2012 with Edward Fairfax, son of the current baron Fairfax of Cameron, and Martin Marix Evans of the Naseby Battlefield Project.

This conference, held on his 400th ‘birthday’, investigated the impact of Thomas, 3rd Lord Fairfax (1612–1671) upon his time and contemporaries. It combined the approaches of historians and literary scholars to examine afresh his multiple roles as a general, politician, landowner, husband and literary figure. His memory, image and reputation in art, literature, media and film were assessed in an exciting weekend conference which included an afternoon tour of Naseby on the second day, expertly conducted by members of the Naseby Battlefield Project. Some 45 delegates attended the conference, from all parts of the country, and two of the speakers flew over from North America especially for the event. The conference was co-organised by Dr Andrew Hopper (University of Leicester), Fairfax’s modern biographer, and Dr Philip Major (Birkbeck, University of London).

Dr Hopper opened proceedings by warmly welcoming delegates and speakers. Among our audience, he pointed out, was Edward Fairfax, son of Nicholas, the current baron Fairfax of Cameron. He also thanked our generous sponsors – Bateman’s Breweries and the Society of Renaissance Studies. We were delighted to distribute membership information about the SRS at the conference and to link the conference web page with the excellent SRS website.  

Dr Major gave the first paper, entitled ‘ “Oh how I love these solitudes”: Thomas Fairfax and the Poetics of Retirement’. This paper focused on a range of writing produced by Fairfax upon his (ostensible) retirement from public life in 1650, and suggested that it often betrays a sense of dislocation as well as fashionable literary taste. Fairfax was not claimed to be a ‘lost’ 17th-century poet, but nevertheless his writing, Dr Major argued, commands our respect and is worthy of closer scrutiny. Particular pieces discussed included ‘Upon the New-built House at Appleton’, ‘The Solitude’, and ‘The Thoughts of Eternity’. In all of these, Fairfax’s celebrated modesty and sense of honour find literary voice in the beliefs he earnestly espouses as a member of the godly elect.

In the next paper, Dr John Callow, from The Marx Library, Clerkenwell, gave a talk entitled ‘In So Shifting a Scene; Thomas Fairfax as the Lord of Man, 1652–1660’. As Dr Callow argued, recent scholarly attention has enlarged our vision to embrace the British and Irish, as opposed to the solely English, dimension to the civil wars. Within the maelstrom of those conflicts, and conflicting searches for identity, the Isle of Man –with its separate legal and constitutional structure, own Gaelic language and popular culture –occupied a unique position. Far more than “a little Molehill moated about” by a great sea, as William Blundell styled it in 1656, the island’s sense of autonomy had been strengthened by its role as a Royalist stronghold, under the Earl of Derby, between 1643 and 1651. The island’s seizure by Commonwealth forces, in November 1651, was facilitated to a large extent by the final defeat of the Earl of Derby, during the Worcester campaign – which saw the surrender en masse of his Manx infantry at the Battle of Wigan Lane – and by the rising of the native Manx on the Isle itself. So effective was the rebellion that its acknowledged leader, William Christian – Illiam Dhone, ‘brown haired William’ in Gaelic – was able to secure favourable terms from the invasion force and to safeguard his employment at the heart of island’s administration, under Lord Fairfax, for the majority of the decade. The undertaking to revoke Derby’s attacks on traditional land tenure and to respect Manx ‘liberties’ committed the Commonwealth, on the one hand, to an essentially pragmatic and conservative policy towards the island; but also, on the other, provided a formidable popular base for Fairfax’s subsequent rule.

The total collapse of the Royalist party on the island and the articles of surrender, primarily dictated by the indigenous elites, precluded direct rule from Whitehall while permitting Fairfax – as the new ‘Lord of Man’ – to assume the prerogatives and sweeping powers previously wielded by the Earls of Derby; and to parachute his own team of administrators into positions newly vacated by English Royalists.As Dr Callow explained, the most prominent of Fairfax’s appointees was his kinsman, James Chaloner (1603–1660) who was charged by Sir Thomas with auditing the governmental structures and discovering what was actually meant by the ‘existing’, customary ‘lands and liberties’ of the islanders. His resulting brief, written in 1652–3, and published with a dedication to Lord Fairfax in 1656, as A Short Treatise on the Isle of Man, provides the seminal account of Manx culture and governance during the mid seventeenth century.

In the end, the alliances of the 1650s, we learnt, fractured due to Chaloner’s attempt to extend his own powers by removing the native Christians from office; and collapsed due to entirely external factors, namely the split in the army between supporters of the rival generals Monck and Lambert. It was Lambert’s partisans who seized Chaloner prisoner, in November – December 1659, and effectively dissolved Fairfax’s rule. Though Chaloner would subsequently be released, by order of the English Parliament, Fairfax’s equivocal position regarding the island and his own lordship permitted the restoration of the house of Derby to parallel that of the king. Indeed, the unwillingness or inability of Fairfax to protect his own partisans on the isle saw Chaloner caught-up in the brutal settling of scores undertaken by the new Earl of Derby, Charles Stanley, between 1660 and 1662. This said, Fairfax’s eight-year rule as absentee landlord had consolidated the notion of Manx ‘separateness’ from the other British Isles, helped to codify its distinctive Norse – Gaelic legal machinery on Man and prevented the dissolution of the legislature, the House of Keys. Moreover, Chaloner’s Treatise brought an awareness of a distinctive Manx culture to an English public that knew little, or nothing, of this important strategic outpost in the middle of the Irish Sea and together with his keen antiquarian interest in the island’s pre-history contributed to the forging of a sense of nation that continues to this day.

After morning coffee, and returning to a literary theme, delegates next heard from a PhD student, Rory Tanner (University of Ottawa), on ‘An Appleton Psalter: the Shared Devotions of Thomas Fairfax and Andrew Marvell’. In this paper, Mr Tanner argued that the poetry of Thomas Fairfax has largely followed the destiny set by its author, being ‘designed’, as he claims, ‘for private use and then to oblivion’. Left to like obscurity – if not quite to ‘oblivion’ – is the association between the poet Fairfax and the poet Andrew Marvell, at least if Marvell’s ‘bafflingly private’ verses (as John Wallace describes) ‘Upon Appleton House’ offer any indication. Centred on Fairfax’s translation of the Psalms, this paper identified characteristics in the work that grant greater access to the intimacies of Nun Appleton in the 1650s.

Collation of several early modern Psalters reveals the distinct patterns of variation in Fairfax’s own practices of translation and composition. Here, it was suggested, Fairfax’s rendering of biblical verse reflects many of his preoccupations during retirement, from the pleasant pursuits of natural philosophy to the uneasy realities of Cromwellian politics that loomed beyond the rural retreat at Nun Appleton. Such anxiety finds full expression in Fairfax’s Psalter, as the retired general’s assessment of public political life is performed and in some ways also permitted by his expansive translation project. Consideration also of the poetry written by Marvell during his employment in the Fairfax household connects the respective devotion of Appleton’s two poets, whether that owed to patronage and to religious belief, or to contemplation and composition. In these terms, the writings of Marvell and Fairfax frame between them both a shared privacy and a shared lyric imagination. Those associations, Mr Tanner argued, significantly support broader literary-critical interest in Fairfax’s poetry, and, more generally, in early-modern metrical psalmody.

After lunch, Professor Jacqueline Eales (Canterbury Christ Church University) shone a bright torch on Thomas’s wife, Anne Vere, in a paper entitled ‘Anne and Thomas Fairfax, and the Vere “Connection”’. On 20 June 1637 Fairfax married the nineteen-year-old Anne. The marriage drew him into the ambit of the ‘fighting Veres’, famed for their military efforts in defence of the international Protestant cause. Anne’s father was the renowned general Sir Horace Vere, who had fought in the Dutch wars against Spain. He was appointed governor of the garrison town of Brill in 1610 and of Utrecht in 1618. Between 1620 and 1622 he commanded the English volunteer force in the Palatinate and later commanded an English brigade in the Prince of Orange’s army. Vere’s status as a national hero had earned him burial in Westminster Abbey in 1635. Marriage to Anne Vere also brought Thomas into contact with the puritan women of the Vere family. Anne’s mother was Mary Vere, who along with her husband was a staunch patron of puritan ministers both in the Netherlands and in England. Mary Vere died at the age of 90 in 1671 having been honoured amongst puritans as ‘an ancient mother in our Israel’. Anne’s cousin was the redoubtable Brilliana Harley, who helped to orchestrate the parliamentarian response to the outbreak of the civil war in Herefordshire.

As Professor Eales showed, Anne Fairfax herself was criticised by both royalists and parliamentarians for having too much influence over her husband. Clarendon records the famous story that when the absent Thomas’s name was called out in Westminster Hall, as one of the commissioners at the trial of Charles I, it was Anne who answered for him from the gallery by shouting out that ‘he had more wit than to be there’. While Lucy Hutchinson believed that Anne favoured the Presbyterian cause and poisoned Thomas’s mind against his independent chaplains. The paper carefully considered the degree of influence Anne wielded over Thomas’s religious and political views,and whether the ‘Vere Connection’ enhanced or tarnished Thomas Fairfax’s reputation as a godly, parliamentarian leader.

Next, Keith McDonald, a third-year PhD student at the University of Leicester, gave a paper on ‘ “The Genius of the house”: Andrew Marvell’s Private Lord Fairfax.’ As Mr McDonald argued, Andrew Marvell has – surprisingly – featured little in biographies of Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax despite his exclusive position as an important witness to both men at pivotal points in their lives. In the summer of 1650, Fairfax was probably the highest-profile of the ‘architects’ said to be running in fear in Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’. Both the Ode, presumably written near the time of Fairfax’s resignation, and the general himself, enact the seventeenth-century definition of ‘crisis’, a situation poised between death and recovery. While Barbara Donagan’s study of casuistry and private conscience in the English Civil War has considered how English men and women legitimated taking action in support of their allegiance, Fairfax’s crisis of conscience, Keith argued, was deepened by his inability to legitimise his own inaction. The cynical Ode questions whether retirement could still be a virtue. Yet, just a few months later, Marvell had joined Fairfax at Nun Appleton as a tutor to his daughter. This paper claimed that Fairfax’s private family life presents the first opportunity for Marvell to reassess and revaluate a troubled attitude towards privacy and withdrawal. Marvell’s vision of the private Fairfax develops not only through family and the turmoil of private conscience – vital though these are to the picture of privacy in the early 1650s – but also through alternative constructions of the individual and the self, inspired by the philosophy of Montaigne and informed by the social and intellectual development of private boundaries. Key to Marvell’s portrayal of the private general is the construction and reflection of the self through private property and its (often vitrified) representations across all three poems addressed to Fairfax.

Afternoon tea was followed by Professor Richard Nash, from Indiana University, presenting a paper on ‘Fairfax as a Horse Breeder’, which in great detail traced the lineages of famous racehorses from the 17th century onwards, interleaved with close scrutiny of Fairfax’s little-known treatise on horse breeding, the original of which is held at York Minster Library. Professor Nash argued that the lineage of today’s racing thoroughbreds could be traced back through a Restoration racehorse named ‘Spanker’ back to Fairfax’s stud at Nun Appleton.

In the final paper of day one, Dr Andrew Hopper took delegates for an entertaining gallop through Fairfax’s posthumous popular reputation. He addressed representations of Fairfax in literature, novels and film from the Victorian period to the present. His paper included salient film clips from ‘Winstanley’ and ‘To Kill a King’. Insight was gained into the motivations of Fairfax’s earlier biographers, and into the sometimes fanciful legends that grew up around Fairfax, particularly in the Yorkshire area. He argued that the most thought-provoking and deeply historicized portrayals of Fairfax had emerged from the British Left in the 1960s and 1970s in the shape of David Caute’s novel, Comrade Jacob, and Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s feature film, Winstanley.

In the evening, a good number of speakers and delegates enjoyed a convivial meal together at a local Indian restaurant, where conversation on Fairfax and his times flowed as freely as the wine.

On day two, appropriately enough with the visit to Naseby to follow, papers had a more military focus. Robert Barcroft, a first-year PhD student at Keele University, gave a paper on ‘Sir Thomas Fairfax and siege warfare during the English civil wars’. As Robert argued, military histories of the English Civil Wars have tended to concentrate on the set-piece battles to the exclusion of garrison and siege warfare, and the same can be said when historians have turned their attentions to Sir Thomas Fairfax’s role as a general. Where and when exactly Fairfax was on the battlefields of Marston Moor and Naseby has been endlessly debated in subsequent accounts and biographies, but this ignores the fact that Fairfax took part in just as many sieges as he did relatively large field actions; sieges that arguably were just as important to the course and outcome of the wars as the battles. This paper sought to redress this imbalance, through an examination of how Fairfax conducted siege warfarein the years 1642–48, and showed why he was generally successful at such undertakings. This success is especially remarkable given the erratic nature of sieges in civil-war England as commanders sought to quickly implement developments in siege technology that had taken centuries to evolve on the continent, as well as Fairfax’s strong personal preferencefor seeking military solutions through decisive battles and stormings, rather than through a prolonged period of investment of a particular fortified strongpoint. Although there was a lack of innovation in the New Model Army at the time of its creation, through Fairfax’s leadership and his restructuring of the army allowing for more efficient artillery andstricter discipline, the siege-making capacity of his forces became increasingly proficient. With these changes brought about by Fairfax, the Parliamentarian army went from essentially blundering its way through sieges as was seen with the unnecessary casualties at York in 1644, to the construction of the most sophisticated set of siege works ever completedin England only four years later at Colchester, completely circumvallating the town and quickly starving it into submission.

In the penultimate paper of the conference, Dr Ian Atherton (Keele University) spoke on ‘Remembering (and Forgetting) Fairfax’s Battlefields’. As Dr Atherton said, the ways in which the personal reputation of Sir Thomas Fairfax has been recalled, and the man himself praised or vilified, have recently been analysed by Dr Hopper, but the processes by which the scenes of his triumphs (or defeats) have been remembered, or forgotten, have received much less attention. The monuments which currently grace Marston Moor and Naseby (and a host of other civil-war sites) are nineteenth-century or later, and commemorate Cromwell rather than Fairfax. One of the few historians to have considered how Marston Moor and other civil-war battle sites have been remembered, Maija Jansson, simply contended that in the seventeenth century the ‘time was not right for the idea of memorializing’ battlefields. By contrast, Ian’s paper situated Fairfax’s battles and sieges within long-term trends of commemoration of battlefields from the late Middle Ages to the modern era. It has recently been suggested that the Reformation ended medieval traditions of battlefield memorialization which rested in the creation of battlefield chantries and the preservation of the memory of the fallen. In their place, Protestants shifted the focus from the dead to the survivors, from dead souls to wounded bodies, and from the soil of battlefields to ink and print as the sites of commemoration. Then, in the eighteenth century, battlefields were ‘rediscovered’ by antiquaries and once more celebrated, though in Providential terms that concentrated on survivors of conflict rather than the fallen. Focussing on the dead was a fashion that only re-emerged in the nineteenth century. These trends were investigated by Dr Atherton through the case studies of a number of battles and sieges connected to Fairfax, including Nantwich, Marston Moor, Naseby, and the relief of Taunton, to consider the life histories of Fairfax’s battles.   

The final paper of the conference, after morning coffee, was designed to maximise delegates’ enjoyment of the afternoon visit to Naseby. This paper was given by Dr Mandy de Belin, from the University of Leicester, and was entitled ‘Naseby: landscape of a battlefield’. Dr de Belin showed that recent accounts of the battle have put the landscape at the centre of their interpretations. The topology, and the contemporary use of the land, have been rightly given prominence in considering how the two armies deployed, how they engaged, and how the defeated Royalists retreated. The theatre in which the battle was played out was shaped by the landscape history of Naseby, and the surrounding parishes. Understanding the forces driving the development of this area, and its condition in 1645, are vital to an appreciation of the battle, and of Fairfax’s achievement in winning this most significant of victories. Maybe not so obvious is the importance of the afterlife of the area. To enable a viewer of the battlefield to strip away its current furniture of hedgerows, coverts and copses, it is necessary to understand the development of the landscape over the intervening centuries. This paper gave an account of the landscape context, both leading up to the battle, and its subsequent trajectory. Naseby is situated in ‘High Northamptonshire’: a region of cold, intractable clay soils. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a full two-thirds of the village open fields were put down to grass. This reflected a development common to this area over the preceding two centuries: a conversion of medieval open fields to pasture and an associated desertion of villages and replacement of human inhabitants with sheep. The process gathered pace with the coming of parliamentary enclosure, and cattle rearing came to dominate. In the twentieth century the tide turned again, as agricultural imperatives changed and mechanisation made clay soils more amenable to improvement. Arable farming expanded once more. These are the developments that shaped the landscape of Naseby, and of the surrounding parishes, both before the battle and in the intervening centuries.

After lunch, goodbyes were said by some, while a sizable number of delegates, including Edward Fairfax, stayed on for the coach trip to Naseby, where we were warmly welcomed by members of the Naseby Battlefield Project and given an introductory talk at the village hall by Martin Marix Evans, followed by a fascinating battlefield tour conducted by Martin Marix Evans and Ian Dexter. The tour encompassed the Obelisk, the platforms at Rupert’s viewpoint and Fairfax’s viewpoint, the battlefield memorial and Moot Hill. There was also a demonstration of musket fire by a modern-day member of the New Model Army. A sumptuous afternoon tea was enjoyed by delegates back at Naseby village hall, after which Dr Hopper presented the Battlefield Project with a donation from the University of Leicester that confirms Dr Mandy de Belin and himself as ‘Friends’ of the Project in its future fundraising efforts to establish a visitor’s centre adjacent to the battlefield.  

All in all, this was a highly successful conference which achieved its main aim of focusing renewed attention on a pivotal figure in this country’s early modern history. We look forward to exploring further the idea of editing a volume of essays on Thomas Fairfax arising from the papers presented. Finally, this report would not be complete without mention being made of the sterling work done behind the scenes by graduate students Mary Jane Pamphilon and Robert Mee in organising teas, coffees and lunches, and generally helping to ensure the conference ran as smoothly as it did. The conference organisers are also grateful to Lucy Byrne and Danielle Jackson, both of the University of Leicester for their efficient administration of the event.   

A further report on the conference made by Keith McDonald, one of the speakers, can be read here.

Further photographs of the event are available through the courtesy of Andrew Wager, a delegate and a current student in the Centre for English Local History.