Thomas Fairfax

Sir Thomas Fairfax commanded the New Model Army that won the English Civil War, and then refused to have anything to do with killing the king. His troops called him Black Tom for his colouring. He learned soldiering under Horace Vere in the Netherlands, and in the war's early years fought a hard campaign in Yorkshire, where he was beaten at Adwalton Moor and won at Nantwich and Winceby. He led the parliamentary horse on the right at Marston Moor in 1644. When Parliament rebuilt its forces as a single professional army in 1645 it made Fairfax commander-in-chief at thirty-two, with Cromwell as his general of horse, and the pair destroyed the royalist field army at Naseby that June. He took Bristol, ended the war in the west, and accepted the surrender of Oxford. He was a soldier rather than a politician and increasingly uncomfortable with what the army was becoming. He was named to the court that tried Charles I in 1649 and attended once; when his name was called at the second sitting his wife shouted from the gallery that he had more wit than to be there, and he never returned. He resigned in 1650 rather than invade Scotland. He later helped bring about the Restoration and rode to the Hague to escort Charles II home. He was a serious scholar and collector who saved the Bodleian Library from plunder when his army took Oxford, and left it his manuscripts. His daughter married the Duke of Buckingham. Cromwell succeeded him as commander when he resigned, which was the practical beginning of the Protectorate.

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