Background
Fairclough was the eldest son of Samuel Fairclough (1594–1677).
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Richard Fairclough
Edit ProfileEducation
He graduated Master of Arts
Career
When Benjamin Whichcot was presented in 1643 to the college living of North Cadbury, Somersetshire, he engaged Fairclough to bear him company thither. They had scarcely arrived when Whichcot received a hasty recall to Cambridge, and Fairclough at his request stayed in his place. Soon afterwards the high sheriff of the county applied to Fairclough to deliver the assize sermon on an emergency.
He succeeded so well that the sheriff presented him to the rectory of Mells, near Frome, where he was greatly esteemed.
When the Acting of Uniformity passed, he was ejected. He died in London 4 July 1682, in his sixty-first year, and was buried in Bunhill Fields, where a monument was erected to his memory, as a ‘testimony of gratitude for many obligations,’ by Thomas Percival of the Middle Temple.
According to John Howe, who preached his funeral sermon, Fairclough was ‘a man of a clear, distinct understanding, of a very quick, discerning, and penetrating judgment, that would on a sudden … strike through knotty difficulties into the inward center of truth with such a felicity that things seem"d to offer themselves to him which are wont to cost others a troublesome search.’
vi. of Samuel Annesley"s The Morning Exercises, 1844, &c. Edmund Calamy also mentions "An Abridgment of some of his latter Sermons to his beloved people at Mells".
Achievements
Membership
As a member of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, of which house he was a fellowship
