CHAPTER VII.

CROMWELL'S CONTEMPORARIES: JOHN HAMPDEN.

AM

MONG the great names, shining with a very conspicuous lustre during this period of civil conflict, perhaps no name has commanded since a more universal interest, and even homage, than that of Cromwell's cousin, John Hampden. He was the representative of an ancient and highly honourable county family in Buckinghamshire; for centuries they had taken their name from their habitation, Great Hampden, in that county. William Hampden married the aunt of the Protector, Cromwell; he was the father of the patriot. The history of this Elizabeth Cromwell was a singular one: her husband died in the year 1597, she continued a widow until her death, sixty-seven years after, and she was buried in Great Hampden Church, 1664-5, having lived to the great age of ninety. It is surely affecting to think of the singular revolutions through which this lady passed; her years extended through the reigns of six sovereigns. She saw the great line of the Tudors expire, with her royal namesake Elizabeth; she saw the British sceptre united with that of the Scottish beneath James I.; she saw the trembling sceptre in

the hand of Charles I., and beheld it wrested by the people from that weak and impolitic hand; she saw those men who had overawed the king, and conducted him to the scaffold, compelled to bow before, and see their sovereignty shivered to pieces in the presence of, her mighty nephew as he ascended the Protector's throne; she saw his power bequeathed to his incapable son, her great-nephew, Richard; and she beheld him driven into private life by the men of "the Rump" of the Long Parliament, whom her illustrious nephew had packed about their business; she saw those very men who had been so ignominiously deposed, those self-restored republicans, revive the monarchy by the restoration of Charles II. to the throne, so inaugurating the most disgraceful and shameful reign which desecrates the annals of our country's history.

What an affecting succession of national vicissitudes! She had two sons: Richard was the youngest, he survived his brother, dying in 1659. He appears to have been of the same patriotic faith and practice, but probably a comparatively weak man; he was one of the Council of Richard Cromwell. The Hampden was John. This youth received the natural training of an English gentleman of those days at a school. in Thame. In 1609 he entered as a commoner at Magdalen College, Oxford, where certainly his attainments must have obtained for him some reputation; for it is a remarkable fact that he was chosen by Laud apparently, then master of St. John's, to write.

the gratulations of Qxford upon the marriage of the Elector Palatine with the Princess Elizabeth, the marriage which gave birth to Prince Rupert, who led the troops at Chalgrove Field, on which Hampden was slain! Hampden married in 1619, and his marriage seems to have been singularly happy; but he did not retain his wife long. He first represented the old borough of Grampound, in the eighteenth year of the reign of King James I.; then he represented Wendover, in the two Parliaments in the first and third years of the reign of Charles I.; but in the fifteenth and sixteenth years of the same reign he sat for the county of Buckinghamshire. His family

was so eminent,-it traced itself in unbroken line from the earliest Saxon times, and derived even its name and possessions from Edward the Confessor,-that it is not singular that his mother was very desirous that he should increase the family dignity by attaining to that to which it would have been easy to attain, the peerage. This was before the great troubles set in. Hampden seems to have had no ambition of this kind, and saw clearly that the sphere in which he could most effectively serve his country was the House of Commons; and, in his rank as a country gentleman, he was perhaps equal in the several particulars of wealth, lineage, and intelligence to any commoner there. To the impressions of the present writer the character of Hampden seems to shine out with singular clearness, but many writers have affected to charge him with the indulgence of am

>itious rather than patriotic motives in the great truggle. This arises from the fact of the deep secretiveness of his character, a characteristic in which he was perhaps the equal of his mighty cousin, and, indeed, had he been preserved to the close of the war, the course of events after might have been different. He had far more practical sagacity, a far profounder knowledge of what the nation needed, than either Sir Harry Vane, Algernon Sidney, or Bradshaw. He was not an extreme man; he was probably, no more than Cromwell, a dreaming, theoretical republican. He desired to save the kingdom from the doom of intolerant and arbitrary government in Church and State; and as an upright member of Parliament, he threw himself at once into the struggle. He may be almost spoken of as certainly one of the very first who stood forward, with resolution and courage, as the champion of liberty, defying the sovereign in law, and denying his right to levy ship-money. He stood in the pathway of exorbitant power; he refused to pay a tax-trifling to him-because it was levied by the king without the consent of Parliament. He appealed to the laws, and he brought the question to a trial.

The Long Parliament has been called the fatal Parliament. It protected itself at once against dissolution by resolving that it would only be dissolved by its own act; for it had been abundantly proved that "with Charles no Parliament could be safe, much less useful to the country, that did not begin

by taking the whole power of Government into its own hands." To this Parliament Hampden's was a double return, for Wendover and for his own county of Buckinghamshire. He elected to sit for the latter; and it soon became very clear that this Parliament represented the indignation of a whole people thoroughly determined to redress long existing and grievous wrongs. We have sufficiently referred to this in preceding pages. Hampden was not a fierce or fiery spirit; indeed, both Hampden himself, and the men by whom he was surrounded, were characters not very easily read. Charles was as unequal to a conflict with them as a child. They had to deal with a man, the son of one who esteemed himself to be a specially adroit master in dissimulation, and who had certainly left to his son, as a legacy, his lessons and experiences in king-craft. We have seen that with Charles it was impossible to be clear or true; dissimulation was the weapon by which he had sought to circumvent the tactics of the great leaders. They were compelled to use the same weapons, and they vanquished him. Hume, speaking of Hampden and Sir Harry Vane, and including, of course, Cromwell, says, "Their discourse was polluted with mysterious jargon, and full of the lowest and most vulgar hypocrisy." The hypocrisy which Hume charges on Hampden and his fellow-workers, amounts to no more than that they were men thoroughly determined not to be

1 Lord Nugent's "Life of John Hampden."