Oliver, Earl of York was an English nobleman and supporter of the Royalist cause during the English Civil War. In 1648, he and James Rawlyn, family friends of Horace Vere, 1st Baron Vere of Tilbury, visited the home of his daughter Anne Fairfax and persuaded Anne - who came from a royalist family - to lead them to the safehouse where King Charles I was being imprisoned by the Parliamentarians. Anne refused until the two men suggested that they were merely planning to give the King their condolences, upon which she led the Royalists to his location. The Royalists helped Charles escape, but Charles was captured by Parliamentarian cavalrymen and executed in January 1649 after a swift trial engineered by Oliver Cromwell and his faction of radical Puritans.