Leaders of the People: Studies in Democratic History

by Joseph Clayton

Falkland and the royalist members turned for the moment from Charles at his unexpected attack on the House, the cavaliers of Whitehall, menaced by the trained bands from Southwark and the city, fled, and Charles, standing alone, left London.

War was now imminent. Pym and Hampden at once prepared for the struggle.

Pym secured the arsenals of Portsmouth and Hull for the parliament, but his efforts to obtain the control of the militia in the counties were frustrated for a time by the king’s natural refusal to consent to the Militia Bill, which would have placed troops under the orders of country gentlemen of the parliamentary party.

Both king and parliament had to break through all constitutional precedent. The king levied troops by a royal commission, and Pym got an ordinance of both Houses of Parliament passed appointing the lords-lieutenant to command the militia, and thereby published the supremacy of parliament over the crown. In April the king appeared at Hull to obtain arms, and was refused admission to the town by Sir John Hotham, the governor. Parliament expressed its approval of Hotham’s act, the royalists gathered round Charles at York, and the final proposals of parliament for ending absolute monarchy were rejected by the king in June with the words, “If I granted your demands I should be no more than the mere phantom of a king.”[112]

With this refusal all negotiations were broken off. Essex was appointed commander of the parliamentary army, and in August Charles raised the royal standard at Nottingham, and war was begun.

Hampden threw himself vigorously into the campaign. From his native county of Buckingham, the county which made him its representative in parliament in 1640, he raised a regiment of infantry. “His neighbours eagerly enlisted under his command. His men were known by their green uniform, and by their standard, which bore on one side the watchword of the parliament, ‘God with us,’ and on the other the device of Hampden, ‘Vestigia nulla retrorsum.’” In the first stages of the war, before any decisive blow had been struck, Hampden was busy passing and repassing between the army and the parliament. Clarendon praises his courage and ability on the field.

A skirmish at Chalgrove, on June 18th, 1643, between bodies of horse commanded by Rupert and by Hampden, ended in victory for the royalists. Hampden was seen riding off the field, “before the action was done, which he never used to do, and with his head hanging down, and resting his hands upon the neck of his horse.” He was mortally wounded, for two carbine balls were lodged in his shoulder, and reached Thame only to die six days later.

The death of Hampden—at the age of 49—came at a dark hour in the early fortunes of the parliamentary army, and deepened the gloom. “The loss of Colonel Hampden goeth near the heart of every man that loves the good of his king and country, and makes some conceive little content to be at the army now that he is gone.” But Pym remained, and Cromwell and Vane, and many another resolute House of Commons man.

Pym’s health was already broken when Hampden fell, but he lived to accomplish the alliance of the English Puritans and the Scotch army, and, as the price of this alliance, the abolition of episcopacy and the adoption of Presbyterianism in the Church of England. The Solemn League and Covenant was accepted by parliament, and imposed on the nation in September. Henceforth the parliamentary army was pledged to extirpate “Popery, prelacy, superstition, schism and profaneness”; to bring “the Churches of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion”; to “preserve the rights and privileges of the parliament and the liberties of the kingdom; and to unite the two kingdoms in a firm peace and union to all posterity.”

The taking of the covenant—a political necessity—was John Pym’s last work. He was ten years older than Hampden, and his character was ruggeder and sterner and without the charm of the younger man. But Pym’s was the greater genius in politics, and his scheme of constitutional government was to be fulfilled in England at a later season.