( n ) Charles Gregory Fairfax , 9th and last Viscount Fairfax of Emly . ( ?-1772 ) . the last Lord Fairfax was almost certainly educated at Lambspring . his life was full of domestic anxieties and tragedies . as a young man , before 1719 , he had been living in poverty abroad , vainly trying to get employment . the period from 1720 to 1722 , of succession to the estate , was marred by the sudden death of his first wife and his father &apos;s troubles . 1722 to 1736 was perhaps the happiest part of his life . his second marriage , to all appearances , originally a mariage de convenance , turned out well and happily . he desperately wanted male heirs and now he had three sons and three daughters living . the family &apos;s fortunes seemed assured and he took to rebuilding Gilling Castle . but all this collapsed like a house of cards between 1736 and 1741 . two smallpox epidemics carried off his sons , his wife also died and financial troubles returned in a far more menacing form . from 1742 to 1760 he was occupied in trying to save the estates and to marry off his two surviving daughters - one of whom died in 1753 . the last twelve years of his life were financially more easy , but he was now burdened with the care of his neurasthenic daughter Anne , his sole heiress , with his own poor health , and with the certainty that the family would come to an end and the estate and his daughter become , at his death , the prey of a host of impecunious and quarrelsome poor relations . up to the later 1750&apos;s he lived most of the year in London . at first he moved restlessly from lodging-house to lodging-house . then he settled as a paying guest in the houses of his Bredall and Pigott relations . finally , when his sister Alethea Pigott had left London for Brussels he leased a house in Kensington from Gerard Anne Edwards Esq . to furnish the house , furniture was shipped from Gilling by Hull . Gilling servants were sent down in a batch by coach - including even a boy , who was put to school in London at Fairfax &apos;s expense . in the spring and summer the family went north to Gilling . occasionally they took the waters at Harrogate or Knaresborough . but Fairfax , perhaps because of its unpleasant early associations for him , avoided Bath . when his ailing wife and daughter Elizabeth went there in 1740 , they went alone . the Fairfaxes had frequented York for centuries . in the middle ages and the sixteenth century they had a regular town house - probably on the Ouse Bridge . in the seventeenth century the Denton family had a large town house in Micklegate , but the Gilling family had sold all its York property and relied on lodgings or leased houses . in the 1750&apos;s Fairfax leased a house in Petergate . after 1760 he devoted himself to the care of Anne , built her a fine new house in Castlegate and ceased to winter in London . he was always a townee . the traditional way of life of the Yorkshire catholic gentry was defended strongly by Francis Cholmeley in 1722 and maintained even more strongly by Stephen Tempest of Broughton in his printed letter to his son of 1720 . for them a landowner must strike a happy mean between a country and a town life , with the balance inclining heavily towards the former . he must avoid becoming a mere rustic , a farmer of his own lands . there is every reason why he should have a home farm , but otherwise he should live by rents . on the other hand he should not haunt London and its expenses . a house in York for the winter season and an occasional visit to town are quite enough . but this sober idea can never have satisfied the wealthier catholic gentry . there were always catholic rustics , like Edward Haggerston of Ellingham , with his vilely spelt and illiterate letters and his constant preoccupation with farm and hunt topics . but even they had often been educated abroad . education at Douai , Dieulouard , Lambspring or St Omer in itself might rarely implant intellectual ambitions . but the wealthier catholics had always rounded off school with a grand tour , and now finishing schools were appearing - at St Edmund &apos;s , Paris , and in the academies in France and northern Italy . there young men acquired liberal tastes in art and architecture , natural philosophy and mechanics , literature and politics . they returned to England with little desire to immerse themselves totally in estate management . there were degrees of absorption in the polite arts . thus Cuthbert Constable seems to have lived at home . but he was passionately interested in the rebuilding of his house and especially in the problems of mechanics involved , for instance , in laying on a piped water supply . then there was Sir Marmaduke Constable of Everingham , who became so absorbed in the life of polite society abroad that a visit abroad for his health &apos;s sake was prolonged into half a lifetime &apos;s voluntary exile abroad in France and Italy . yet , by post , he still controlled in minute detail his estate and kept abreast of local gossip fortnightly . then a further extreme was Sir Edward Gascoigne of Parlington who lived for years in a house alongside the convent at Cambray with his wife and family , devoting himself to reading - physics , chemistry , mechanics , philosophy , political theory - leaving the oversight of the Parlington and Saxton estates to his agent and Lord Irwin . Lord Fairfax was of this generation and type - with some differences . the lists of books he bought , though moderately long , reveal little of the intense intellectual curiosity of Sir Edward Gascoigne , his brother-in-law . Fairfax was interested in current affairs , politics and history , though it is likely that the five huge volumes of Chambers &apos; encyclopaedia of the arts and sciences which his chaplain , Fr Anselm Bolton later brought away from Gilling had belonged to his patron . Fairfax could write and read French easily and bought a small number of current French works of literature , mostly memoirs , but including Rousseau . he never showed any desire to revisit the continent . it is likely that his second wife visited Paris once , but , if she did so , he did not accompany her . nor did he go to France with his daughter Anne in 1768 . he was passionately interested in building , in interior decoration , furniture and landscape gardening . but there is no evidence that he was the master-mind in the design of his building projects . again , he was not entirely without interest in estate and agricultural matters . he took Edward Pigott to a village feast and spoke to the farmers of grain prices . he dined with Sterne to discuss turnpike matters . he was a patron of Hambleton and York races . but the family papers of his time seem to be empty of references to hunting and shooting and agricultural improvement . the latter meant to him merely the raising of rents . in London Fairfax moved mainly in catholic circles . his closest friends were a catholic merchant , Thomas Mannock , Mr Metcalfe , a catholic surgeon in Bromley Street , and the Bellasis family . he rode out to Whitton to visit the Pigotts and dined with the Petres , and Stapyltons , Dormers , Barnewells and Dillons , Lady Westmoreland , Sir Edward Smythe , the Hornyholds . his non-catholic acquaintances in town do not seem to have been very numerous . all were relations of Yorkshire neighbours . the accounts of Lady Fairfax &apos;s visit to Bath show that she also moved in catholic circles - Mr Errington , Doctor Bostock , Doctor Jerningham , Mr Odonory , Lord Molyneux , Bishop York , the Misses Langdale , Mrs Pitt ( a Bellasis , the Earl of Chatham &apos;s catholic aunt ) . her protestant friends were few - the Mildmays and Mrs Worsley . life in York brought them into contact with all Yorkshire society at race meetings , town houses and the assembly rooms ( to the building of which Fairfax was a generous subscriber ) . the Fairfaxes of Denton had sold up in England by the 1750&apos;s and departed to Virginia , but Fairfax family solidarity still meant something . American Fairfaxes still visited Lord Fairfax in York and the Fairfaxes of Steeton ( now of Newton Kyme ) occasionally wrote or left cards . from York or Gilling the family made rounds of visits . the more extensive rounds covered the Vavasours at Hazelwood , Lord Irwin at Temple Newsam , the Lawsons at Brough . immediately round Gilling there was a thick concentration of catholic neighbours and relations , the Bellasises at Newbrough , the Widdringtons at Nunnington , the Cholmeleys at Brandsby , and , to the early 1750&apos;s , the Crathornes of Ness . around them lay protestant neighbours , the Duncombes at Helmsley , Mrs Thompson at Oswaldkirk Hall , the Carlisles at Castle Howard , where one dined on occasion . visitors to Gilling were much less frequent than in the two previous centuries and came usually for several weeks at a time - Lady Fairfax &apos;s Weld cousins from Lulworth , Sir Edward Gascoigne and his family from France , the Langdales from Houghton , Thomas Clifton of Lytham come to court Miss Fairfax , shoals of poor nephews and nieces , and the catholic family lawyer from London , Mr Wilmot , who faced the coaches up the North Road with such trepidation that he much preferred not to come unless the business were very urgent . Lord Fairfax took a keen outsider &apos;s interest in politics . he took five or six newspapers , bought the current debates of the Commons and all the latest political squibs and pamphlets . a typical bill from Ward &amp; Chandler , newsagents , for 1743 runs - during the seven years war Fairfax bought large cloth-backed maps of all the principal theatres of war . his own political views can only be guessed . in 1745 the family had a strong Jacobite reputation in the county . in September 1745 Fairfax was bound in &amp;pound;100 to appear before the North Riding Justices at Hovingham to take the oath of allegiance . he appeared and refused the oath . on September 15th the Archbishop of York , Herring , wrote to the Secretary of state , Lord Hardwicke - Lord Falconbridge dined with me yesterday &amp;hellip; . he offered a sort of security for the honour and innocence of his relation and neighbour , Lord Fairfax of Gilling and intimated to lodge a deposition with me . I told him that was a matter of some nicety but whatever I saw in favour of Lord Fairfax , notwithstanding my good opinion of him , must rest upon his authority . in the last week of September rumours suddenly spread in York that Fairfax was about to rise in arms . the Rector of Gilling , Nicholas Gouge wrote to Lord Irwin , the Lord Lieutenant , on October 1st - yesterday Lord Fairfax sent down his coachman ( who is a protestant ) to me with compliments , and to acquaint me that one of our town ( his lordship &apos;s tenant too , a most bigotted Papist ) had given out that there was a private room within Gilling Castle where 40 men might be conceal&apos;d and nobody cou&apos;d find them out and his lordship desir&apos;d the person might be brought before me and punish&apos;d as the law directs : and further his lordship desir&apos;d that I would send the Constable &amp;hellip; to search his castle whether there was any such room or not &amp;hellip; ( the searchers went there and ) saw the place at the end of the ale cellar &amp;hellip; not two yards square ... . the Lord &apos;s coachman assured me that of late there had been no company excepting Mr Cholmondly and his wife . the Rector concluded that the alarmist had spread the tale to gain credit for himself . he confined himself to telling the two best protestants in the man &apos;s family that the matter had been reported to the authorities , and he himself published a refutation of the rumour in the York papers . but another search party had been to Gilling , from York . Archbishop Herring wrote to Irwin on October 2nd - I believe Mr Frankland and myself took the thing too high , but the recorder was frightened and the fright caught the city . Lord Fairfax found out the reason of the alarm , and , I am assured , was pleased with the opportunity of justifying himself . he treated Mr Dunbar ( who went with the search warrant ) at dinner and drank King George &apos;s health . to Hardwicke Herring wrote that he was now convinced that Fairfax was the King &apos;s friend . 