A “Lasting Moniment” to Loneliness: Involuntary Retirement and Survival through the Psalm Translations of Sir Thomas Fairfax

This chapter engages historically and emotionally with the psalm translations of Sir Thomas Fairfax (1612–1671). Key to Parliamentarian military victories, and regarded by some as a future ruler, in 1650 Fairfax was also manifestly at odds with the policies of the newly created Commonwealth. With little other option, he resigned from his position as Lord General and retired to his Yorkshire estates. In political, geographical, and social separation from his former Parliamentarian colleagues during this time, Fairfax would have faced the recognised phenomena of professional loneliness and grief that are associated with involuntary retirement. This is also the period in which Fairfax began to seek a new kind of employment in intensive translation activities. Drawing on my own experience of transcribing and coding Fairfax's Psalter following my redundancy in 2020, and on existing studies of loneliness in retirement, I argue that Fairfax’s translation activities were therapeutic as well as intellectual and spiritual. Unpacking the emotional language of Fairfax's psalm translations, this chapter demonstrates that Fairfax frames the physiological responses of distress as destructive, and the melancholic response to being alone (in particular, feeling abandoned by God) as sin. This chapter concludes with a reflection on the ongoing cuts to staffing across the humanities in the UK Higher Education sector, advocating for further scholarly engagement with redundancy and retirement within the academic community.