Background
Thomas Fairfax was born at Leeds Castle, County Kent, the eldest son and namesake of his predecessor in the peerage. His mother, Catherine, was the heiress of that Lord Culpeper who was sometime governor-general of Virginia under a patent of Charles II; and he was himself in physique and character a Culpeper, a true representative of the ancient Kentish family which had actively participated in the colonization of Virginia for four generations before Fairfax himself came to play a part on the American scene.
Education
In January 1709/10, Fairfax succeeded to his peerage and began a three-year residence at Oriel College, Oxford (Shadwell, Registrant Orielense, II, 25).
So far as the evidence goes, his university career was uneventful; even the pleasant tradition of his contribution of a paper to The Spectator at this time must be abandoned.
Career
After the death of his mother in 1719, he secured a commission in the Horse Guards Blue (Dalton, George I’s Army, II, 196) and commenced courtier also; holding for a time the post of Treasurer of the Household under the Lord Chamberlain (Calendar Treasury Papers, 1720-28, p. 78). His ambition apparently was to arrange a marriage which might have untangled the complications in which an inherited litigation had involved his Fairfax estates in Yorkshire; but failing in that he abandoned a career, and with a quixotic gesture withdrew from the great world to Leeds Castle, there to practise hound-breeding and foxhunting, as an anodyne to disappointment. In such seclusion he lived until 1733, when he was roused by a formidable political attack upon the Northern Neck proprietary, launched at the moment when the western movement of the colonial frontier was beginning to give significance to an hitherto unremunerative property right. This vast wilderness manor, ultimately adjudged to include all the territory between the rivers Potomac and Rappahannock and so to make up an area of more than five million acres, had been created in 1649 by Charles II as an intended refuge for a little band of Cavaliers who had forfeited their English estates by support of his father. One of the patentees was Fairfax’s greatgrandfather Culpeper, whose son, the Virginia governor, later acquired by purchase the shares of the other original proprietors. Culpeper’s resident representatives had, however, succeeded in generating such local jealousy and resentment in Virginia that several efforts were made by the colony to persuade the Crown to resume the grant; but Culpeper maintained his claims so stoutly that after his death Virginia’s effort was to confine the proprietary boundaries to the straitest limits (H. R. Mcllwaine, editor, Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 172740, p. 92). To protect his inheritance from the last such attack, Fairfax first went out to Virginia in May 173S, and there remained until September 1737. His diplomacy was successful for he negotiated a treaty with the Assembly (Hening, Statutes at Large, IV, 1814, p. 514) and arranged for such a survey of the territory in dispute as might narrow the issues for consideration by the Privy Council. It was not, however, until 1745 that his cause was finally determined; but then, at long last, Fairfax’s extreme claims were justified (Acts Privy Council, Colonial, III, 385 ff. ; Hening, VI, 1819, p. 198). Fairfax had never modified his purpose of retirement from the world, and he now decided to live out his life on his American estate. He emigrated definitely in 1747; and, after a sojourn on the Potomac for several years, during which he met and held out a friendly hand to the young George Washington, he established (in 1752) his final residence in the Shenandoah Valley, at a hunting lodge to which he gave the name of a Culpeper manor in Kent, —“Greenway Court. ” There he took up the traditional English duty of local magistracy. He was commissioned a justice of the peace in all the counties of the Northern Neck and, at Gov. Dinwiddie’s request, assumed (in 1754) the active duty of county lieutenant, as commandant of the frontier militia. He died at “Greenway Court, ” December 9, 1781, in his eighty-ninth year, and was buried under the altar of the Frederick parish church. His relics now rest in a crypt beneath the local Christ Church, Winchester. There survives a pleasant portrait of Fairfax, painted before he left England in 1747.
Views
Looking back at him across the gulf of the American Revolution, there has been an effort to see in Fairfax the arch Tory, the personification of what came to be the locally hated English government. There is no justification for this in anything he himself did or said, and it is significant that throughout the Revolution the Assembly treated him with marked consideration. The only resident peer in America, he was accorded all the privileges of a Virginia citizen and was never molested, even by the mob. This could only be because it was recognized that his political sentiments were practically inoffensive to the Revolution. Indeed, Fairfax had never been a Tory. On the contrary, he had grown up in the principles of the revolution of 1688, in which his father actively participated.
Fairfax lived in the utmost simplicity. His personal hearing was what would now be called democratic, though he never had the remotest appreciation of what that term has come to mean. The color of the picture painted in Burke’s Peerage, of his “baronial hospitality, ” is mere mythology. There was many a contemporary tide-water planter who would have been ashamed of the rude plenty of his table, bereft of luxuries; at which, indeed, his younger brother sneered in 1768. He had no such cellar of Madeira wine as was in his time to be found in most, even moderately well-to-do, Virginia plantation houses. He had, indeed, sent him out every year new clothes of the latest fashion, but, unlike George Washington, he did not wear them. His plate was like his library, sufficient for decent comfort but inadequate for show; such as are used to-day in East Africa by Englishmen, who, like Fairfax, have sought in the open a surcease of the pains engendered by civilization.
