Early Life
Thomas Fairfax was born at Denton Hall, near Ilkley, Yorkshire, on 17 January 1612, the eldest son of Ferdinando, Lord Fairfax. He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, and Gray's Inn (1626–28), then volunteered to join Sir Horace Vere's expedition to fight for the Protestant cause in the Netherlands. In 1639 he commanded a troop of Yorkshire dragoons which marched with King Charles I against the Scots in the First Bishops' War which ended with the Pacification of Berwick before any fighting took place. In the Second Bishops' War the following year the English army was routed at the battle of Newburn. Fairfax fled with the rest of the defeated army but was nevertheless knighted for his services in January 1641.
Read more about this topic: Anne Fairfax
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man’s skin,—seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)