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their rural sequestration on the banks of the Rivers Wharfe and Ouse at Nun Appleton House, the former Lord General’s country seat at the confluence of the two rivers, enjoyed many reflections and discussions on these great issues of state.
    Thomas Fairfax had been born on 17 January 1612 at Denton in Yorkshire. From the outset of the Civil War he was a prominent supporter of Parliament in Yorkshire but even when he accepted the appointment as Commander-in-Chief he was, according to his later reflections, diffident about doing so. ‘I was so far from desiring it,’ he wrote, ‘that had not so great an authority [the House of Commons] commanded obedience, being then unseparated from the royal interest, besides the persuasions of nearest friends, not to decline so free and general a call, I should have hid myself among the staff to have avoided so great a charge.’ 5 He went on to perform courageously – sometimes recklessly – as a military commander, in spite of frequent ill health. During the siege of Colchester in the summer of 1648, Milton – a far less equivocal and subtle praiser of politicians than Marvell, as his sonnet on Cromwell demonstrates – wrote a sonnet in praise of the Lord General which opened: ‘Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings/Filling each mouth with envy, or with praise,/And all her jealous monarchs with amaze’, and which celebrated the ‘firm unshaken virtue’ of Fairfax. 6
    But it was the trial and execution of the King that started the process of withdrawal of Fairfax from the Cromwellian cause. When he was appointed one of the King’s judges in 1649, and his name was read out as such, his wife is said to have protested that her husband would never sit as a judge. In the account by Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, in his History of the Rebellion, she called out in the court that her husband ‘had more wit than to be there’ and a few moments later when the impeachment of the King was read out, making use as it did of the expression ‘all the good people of England’, she cried out again, ‘No, nor the hundreth part of them’ before being bundled out of court. 7 Though some historians are sceptical, her husband later claimed that he had not wanted the King to die: ‘My afflicted and troubled mind for it and my earnest endeavours to prevent it will sufficiently testify my dislike and abhorrence of the fact,’ he insisted in the Short Memorials. But Clarendon, a hostile witness of course, observed that Fairfax ‘out of the stupidity of his soul’ was throughout ‘overwitted by Cromwell, and made a property to bring that to pass which could very hardly have been otherwise effected’. The Lord General’s misgivings about the Parliamentary Army and its domination by the so-called Agitators (whom he dubbed ‘the Forerunners of Confusion and Anarchy’) came to a head the year after he had put down a mutiny of Levellers at Burford in the spring of 1649. In the summer of 1650 the council of state wanted to attack Scotland as a pre-emptive strike but Fairfax refused to condone an attack except in defence. ‘Human probabilities’, he said in his letter of resignation, ‘are not sufficient grounds to make war upon a neighbour nation, especially our brethren of Scotland, to whom we are engaged in a solemn league and covenant.’ Parliament pleaded with him but he was adamant. Only in his late thirties, Fairfax thus retired to Nun Appleton where he lived for the rest of the Commonwealth and during the Protectorate (though he was MP for the West Riding in the 1654 Parliament).
    His love of literature and learning was legendary. John Aubrey, in his brief life of Fairfax, describes the Lord General’s action in setting a guard around the Bodleian Library in Oxford when the city was invaded by the Parliamentary forces in 1646: ‘He was a lover of Learning, and had