When the Civil War began, Hampden was appointed a member of the committee for safety, levied a regiment of Buckinghamshire men for the parliamentary cause, and in his capacity of deputy-lieutenant carried out the parliamentary militia ordinance in the county. In the earlier operations of the war he bore himself gallantly and well. He took no actual part in the battle of Edgehill. His troops in the rear, however, arrested Rupert’s charge at Kineton, and he urged Essex to renew the attack here, and also after the disaster at Brentford. In 1643 he was present at the siege and capture of Reading. But it is not on his skill as a regimental officer that Hampden’s fame rests. In war as in peace his distinction lay in his power of disentangling the essential part from the non-essential. In the previous constitutional struggle he had seen that the one thing necessary was to establish the supremacy of the House of Commons. In the military struggle which followed he saw, as Cromwell saw afterwards, that the one thing necessary was to beat the enemy. He protested at once against Essex’s hesitations and compromises. In the formation of the confederacy of the six associated counties, which was to supply a basis for Cromwell’s operations, he took an active part. His influence was felt alike in parliament and in the field. But he was not in supreme command, and he had none of that impatience which often leads able men to fail in the execution of orders of which they disapprove. His precious life was a sacrifice to his unselfish devotion to the call of discipline and duty. On the 18th of June 1643, when he was holding out on Chalgrove Field against the superior numbers of Rupert till reinforcements arrived, he received two carbine balls in the shoulder. Leaving the field he reached Thame, survived six days, and died on the 24th.
Hampden married (1) in 1619 Elizabeth, daughter of Edmund Symeon of Pyrton, Oxfordshire, and (2) Letitia, daughter of Sir Francis Knollys and widow of Sir Thomas Vachell. By his first wife he had nine children, one of whom, Richard (1631-1695) was chancellor of the exchequer in William III.’s reign; from two of his daughters are descended the families of Trevor-Hampden and Hobart-Hampden, the descent in the male line becoming apparently extinct in 1754 in the person of John Hampden.
John Hampden the younger (c. 1656-1696), the second son of Richard Hampden, returned to England after residing for about two years in France, and joined himself to Lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney and the party opposed to the arbitrary government of Charles II. With Russell and Sidney he was arrested in 1683 for alleged complicity in the Rye House Plot, but more fortunate than his colleagues his life was spared, although as he was unable to pay the fine of £40,000 which was imposed upon him he remained in prison. Then in 1685, after the failure of Monmouth’s rising, Hampden was again brought to trial, and on a charge of high treason was condemned to death. But the sentence was not carried out, and having paid £6000 he was set at liberty. In the Convention parliament of 1689 he represented Wendover, but in the subsequent parliaments he failed to secure a seat. He died by his own hand on the 12th of December 1696. Hampden wrote numerous pamphlets, and Bishop Burnet described him as “one of the learnedest gentlemen I ever knew.”
See S. R. Gardiner’s Hist. of England and of the Great Civil War; the article on Hampden in the Dict. of Nat. Biography, by C. H. Firth, with authorities there collected; Clarendon’s Hist. of the Rebellion; Sir Philip Warwick’s Mems. p. 239; Wood’s Ath. Oxon. iii. 59; Lord Nugent’s Memorials of John Hampden (1831); Macaulay’s Essay on Hampden (1831). The printed pamphlet announcing his capture of Reading in December 1642 is shown by Mr Firth to be spurious, and the account in Mercurius Aulicus, January 27 and 29, 1643, of Hampden commanding an attack at Brill, to be also false, while the published speech supposed to be spoken by Hampden on the 4th of January 1642, and reproduced by Forster in the Arrest of the Five Members (1660), has been proved by Gardiner to be a forgery (Hist. of England, x. 135). Mr Firth has also shown in The Academy for 1889, November 2 and 9, that “the belief that we possess the words of Hampden’s last prayer must be abandoned.”
[1] Hampden was one of the persons to whom the earl of Warwick granted land in Connecticut, but for the anecdote which relates his attempted emigration with Cromwell there is no foundation (v. under [John Pym]).
HAMPDEN, RENN DICKSON (1793-1868), English divine, was born in Barbados, where his father was colonel of militia, in 1793, and was educated at Oriel College, Oxford. Having taken his B.A. degree with first-class honours in both classics and mathematics in 1813, he next year obtained the chancellor’s prize for a Latin essay, and shortly afterwards was elected to a fellowship in his college, Keble, Newman and Arnold being among his contemporaries. Having left the university in 1816 he held successively a number of curacies, and in 1827 he published Essays on the Philosophical Evidence of Christianity, followed by a volume of Parochial Sermons illustrative of the Importance of the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ (1828). In 1829 he returned to Oxford and was Bampton lecturer in 1832. Notwithstanding a charge of Arianism now brought against him by the Tractarian party, he in 1833 passed from a tutorship at Oriel to the principalship of St Mary’s Hall. In 1834 he was appointed professor of moral philosophy, and despite much university opposition, Regius professor of divinity in 1836. There resulted a widespread and violent though ephemeral controversy, after the subsidence of which he published a Lecture on Tradition, which passed through several editions, and a volume on The Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. His nomination by Lord John Russell to the vacant see of Hereford in December 1847 was again the signal for a violent and organized opposition; and his consecration in March 1848 took place in spite of a remonstrance by many of the bishops and the resistance of Dr John Merewether, the dean of Hereford, who went so far as to vote against the election when the congé d’élire reached the chapter. As bishop of Hereford Dr Hampden made no change in his long-formed habits of studious seclusion, and though he showed no special ecclesiastical activity or zeal, the diocese certainly prospered in his charge. Among the more important of his later writings were the articles on Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, contributed to the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and afterwards reprinted with additions under the title of The Fathers of Greek Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1862). In 1866 he had a paralytic seizure, and died in London on the 23rd of April 1868.
His daughter, Henrietta Hampden, published Some Memorials of R. D. Hampden in 1871.