Hampden, JOHN, English statesman and patriot, was the eldest son of William Hampden of Hampden, in Buckingham, by Elizabeth, second daughter of Sir Henry Cromwell of Hinchinbrooke, Huntingdonshire, and aunt of Oliver Cromwell. He was born, it is believed, in London, in 1594. He received his early education at the grammar-school of Thame, and proceeded in 1609 to Magdalen College, Oxford. Four years later he became a student of the Inner Temple, London. But his father's death, when he was only three years of age, had left him the master of a considerable estate, and he does not appear to have practised as a barrister. In 1619 he married Elizabeth Symeon, a lady to whom he was much attached; 'on a sudden,' according to Clarendon, 'from a life of great pleasure and license, he retired to extraordinary sobriety and strictness, to a more reserved and melancholy society.' But, although he became in all essentials a Puritan, he never ceased to be a polished country gentleman. In January 1621 he entered parliament as member for the borough of Grampound, a seat which he subsequently exchanged for Wendover, and at once entered the ranks of the parliamentary opposition, of which the recognised leaders were Pym, Eliot, Oliver St John, and Coke. Although he was no orator—it is believed that in the first five parliaments in which he sat he never opened his mouth—his judgment, veracity, and high character secured for him a leading position in the ranks of his party. In 1626 he helped to prepare the charges against Buckingham; the following year, having refused to pay the proportion of the general loan which Charles attempted to raise on his own authority, he was confined in the Gatehouse and subsequently in Hampshire, to be released on Charles finding it necessary to summon a new parliament. His leading political associates were Pym, whom he regarded as his leader in the House of Commons, and Sir John Eliot, who was his personal friend, and after the interests of whose children he looked at the time that their father was in prison. When Charles dissolved parliament in 1629, Hampden retired to his seat in Buckinghamshire, and gave himself up to the pleasures and duties of a rural life, although he neglected neither his friends, his country, nor his favourite political studies. In 1634 his wife, who had borne him nine children, died. The same year Charles resorted to the impost of ship-money, as an evidence of the right which he claimed to tax the country in any way he chose, and although he confined its incidence at first to London and the maritime towns, in 1636 he extended it to inland places. Hampden refused to pay his share of the impost, and in 1637 he was prosecuted before the Court of Exchequer for non-payment. Seven of the twelve judges sided against him, but, as Mr S. R. Gardiner has said, 'the connection between the rights of property and the parliamentary system was firmly established.' The prosecution also made Hampden the most popular man not only in the ranks of the parliamentary opposition but in England—a position which he never lost, although he still played a secondary part to Pym in the House of Commons. He was a member both of the Short Parliament, which opposed Charles and Strafford in connection with the war with Scotland, and of the much more memorable Long Parliament, for which he was returned by the electors both of Wendover and of Buckinghamshire, although he elected to sit for the county. He had indeed not a little to do with giving this remarkable body its character, as before the election took place he rode from county to county exhorting the electors to give their votes to men worthy of their confidence.
Hampden at once took a foremost place in the new House. 'The eyes of all men were fixed upon him,' says Clarendon, 'as their patrie pater, and the pilot that must steer the vessel through the tempests and rocks which threatened it.' He took part in almost all the leading transactions of the Long Parliament, especially in the action which ended in the death of Strafford, although he seems to have been of opinion that proceeding by bill was unnecessary, and that the better course would have been to obtain judgment on the impeachment. Had the abortive negotiations between Charles and the leaders of the opposition come to anything, it is understood that the post of tutor to the Prince of Wales would have been offered to Hampden. Still he had never any faith in the king, and when, through the formation of a party of constitutional royalists in the Commons itself with Lord
Falkland at its head, it seemed not impossible that Charles would be able to crush the liberties of his country, Hampden, like his relative Cromwell, meditated self-exile to New England, not for the first time in the course of his public life. In the debate on the address to the king, known as the Grand Remonstrance, it was the calmness of Hampden which prevented the two parties in the House from fighting on its floor. He was one of the five members, Charles's attempt to seize whom, when engaged in the discharge of their parliamentary duties on January 4, 1642, precipitated the Civil War.
When hostilities broke out, Hampden subscribed £2000 to the public service, took a colonel's commission in the parliamentary army, and raised a regiment of infantry in his own county of Buckingham. He attended to his military as to his parliamentary duties with energy and promptitude, and on various occasions, as at the battle of Edgehill and the assault and capture of Reading, he exhibited both personal bravery and generalship. He was, however, placed under Essex, and although he protested against his chief's hesitation, he was powerless to avert its consequences. He heartily approved of, and to a certain extent anticipated, the suggestions made by Cromwell which ultimately resulted in the conversion of the parliamentary forces, under the designation of the 'new model,' into an invincible army. On the 18th June 1643, while endeavouring, on Chalgrove Field, near Thame, to check a marauding force under the command of Prince Rupert, he was struck in the shoulder by two balls. He was able to reach Thame, and there he lingered till the 24th. Hampden has left behind him the reputation of being the most moderate, tactical, urbane, and single-minded of the leaders of the Long Parliament, while inferior to none in resolution or sincerity. He showed before his death such capacity both as a statesman and a soldier as to justify Macaulay in predicting that if he had lived he would have been the Washington of England.
The standard biography of Hampden is Lord Nugent's Memorials of Hampden (1831). Among the numerous works in which he forms a prominent figure are Clarendon's History of the Rebellion (1702-4); S. R. Gardiner's History of England and History of the Great Civil War (1883-89); and John Forster's Arrest of the Five Members (1860) and Sir John Eliot (2d ed. 1871). See also CHILTERN HILLS; and for reasons for rejecting the commonly accepted account of his death, see two letters by C. H. Firth in the Academy, November 2-9, 1889.