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And if the issue was momentous, the sequel showed that, chance or no chance, it could have been entrusted to no better hands than Hampden's.

'His carriage throughout was with that rare temper and modesty that they who watched him most narrowly to find some advantage against his person to make him less resolute in his cause were compelled to give him a just testimony.'

This is why, although it does not refer to the case actually tried, we feel that scrawled return from the assessors of ship-money at Kimbell Magna,' reproduced in facsimile in Lord Nugent's memorials, to be a momentous document, and why it is not without a thrill that at the head of that list of some thirty Buckinghamshire countryfolk we read the signature of John Hampden, Esquire.

The arguments of counsel, the opinions of the judges, were circulated throughout the country, and men were convinced that if the majority (it was the smallest possible majority) of the judges were against them the weight of argument was on their side.

As for Hampden, from being comparatively of local reputation he became the argument of all tongues,' and when three years later events in Scotland at last forced Charles again to summon a Parliament, he held a position in it second to none.

The episode of the attempted arrest is one in which Hampden was necessarily conspicuous by his absence. When the news came that the King, entering the nearest coach, was on his way down Whitehall, the five members retired-Hampden, Hazelerigg, Holles, and Pym without demur, Strode reluctant and dragged by the cloak. The scene that followed was enacted without them. The entry of the King' through that door which none of his predecessors had ever passed,' his passage up the House, the members standing bareheaded on either side, his request for the loan of the Speaker's chair, his questions Is Mr. Pym here?' 'Is Mr. Holles here?' falling on a silence broken perhaps by the clink of steel in the hands of the bravos at the open door, his assumption of a cheerful bonhomie, his confession of an abortive errand, his belated assurance of good intentions, and his gloomy retreat, followed by cries of protest from an outraged House-all these have been described in graphic words by persons present at the scene.

Hampden's hour of triumph came six days later, when he returned to Westminster amid the firing of guns and the cheering of crowds; and the petition against his impeachment, brought in person by four thousand gentlemen and freeholders of Bucks, was an impressive VOL. XXV.-NO. 145, N.S.

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demonstration of the esteem in which he was held in his native county.

After the impeachment and attempted arrest, Hampden, if we may believe Clarendon, was much altered, his nature and carriage seeming much fiercer than before.' He was determined to secure the safety of Parliament, and it was his motion to add to the acknowledgment of a conciliatory message from the King, 'to desire the King to put the town of London and the ports of the Kingdom into such hands as Parliament could confide in,' which precipitated the appeal to arms.

As a soldier Hampden was ever for action. Called upon to enforce the militia ordinance in Bucks, he had mustered his men on Chalgrove Field, when news was brought him that Lord Berkshire was in the neighbourhood preparing to execute the King's commission of array. Without breaking up the meeting he withdrew with a small detachment, captured the Earl, and sent him as a prisoner to London.

On the morning after Edgehill, he urged Essex, whom he had just joined, to push on and get between Charles and London. When the Royal and Parliamentary armies were confronting each other on Turnham Green, Hampden would advance to Acton and turn the King's flank-had started, indeed, when he was recalled by the caution of the professional soldiers. Later he advised the Parliamentary Committee for carrying on the war to march not on Reading but on Oxford. 'If,' says Clarendon, they had taken that resolution. . . without doubt they had put the King's affairs into great confusion.'

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'He was of a personal courage equal to his best parts,' says the same historian, and it was his readiness to take a personal share in such risks as offered which brought him to his death. The situation was this. The King was at Oxford. Essex had his headquarters at Thame, but his army was squandered along a line extending from Wheatley, near Oxford, to Wycombe in the Chilterns. To attempt to cover so wide an extent of country was to invite attack from cavalry superior to his own. Rupert was on the alert, and being informed by Colonel Hurry, who had deserted from the Parliamentary army, that a sum of 21,000l. was on its way from Thame to Windsor, he resolved to strike for the prize.

Let us follow Rupert as he started out of the ports of Oxford at four o'clock on Saturday afternoon, June 17, 1643. Over Magdalen bridge, through the unlovely suburbs of the lovely city,

out into the open country past Garsington, on whose salubrious hill the Fellows and scholars of Trinity used to sojourn when the plague raged in Oxford, till, as we descend the slope towards the Thame, we see behind the budding woods and copses of Chiselhampton Lodge the blue line of the Chiltern Hills. And here is Chiselhampton bridge, its grey stone piers looking much as they did when Rupert's horsemen clattered over them that night, but bearing an iron framework and railings due to the taste of some country surveyor of later times. Yet half a mile beyond the Thame and we reach Stadhampton. Here on that night of June 17 Rupert diverged from the Watlington Road to be heard of later by Colonel Morley's troop at Postcombe and the newly raised Bedfordshire levies at Chinnor. We hold on our way across the plain till a low square tower, a quarter of a mile to the right, warns us that we are approaching our goal. It is Chalgrove Church, and this level ploughland Chalgrove Field. Where the road we are following is crossed at right angles by a lane from Chalgrove village stands the monument which marks the place where Hampden fell. As we face northwards and turn our backs on Chalgrove village we see extended to our left the fair pasture' of Clarendon's description. It was still open ground when Lord Nugent published his Memorials of Hampden' in the year of the Reform Bill, and the smallness of the hedgerow timber shows that its enclosure is of no ancient date. In front the lane from the village leads, tending leftwards, to Warpsgrove farm. To our right rises a low hill, Golder Hill, hiding from our sight the Chilterns to the east, and holding, curiously secluded in its folds, Easington village, a low barn-like church, and a solitary farm.

In those flat fields Rupert, returning half baffled, half triumphant, from his foray, came up with a regiment of his infantry, sent it forward to keep open his passage at Chiselhampton bridge, and turned to face his pursuers. Over that lift of ground came Gunter with three troops of horse, his own and those of Captains Sheffield and Crosse. For the last five miles they had hung on Rupert's rear, and on the way they had been joined by fifty men sent by the officer of the watch at Thame to inquire the cause of the fire at Chinnor, a troop of horse, a troop of dragoons, and some sundries, in all some three hundred mounted men to face Rupert's one thousand. With them was Hampden. He had lain the night before, tradition says, at Watlington (perhaps really at the house of his first wife's father at Pyrton Manor, a mile from there), and

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'being abroad with Sir Samuel Luke and onely one man, and seeing Major Gunter's forces, did go along with them, putting himself in Captain Crosse's troop.' There was Rupert at bay, and the thing was to hold him till Essex could come up from headquarters in sufficient strength to deal effectually with him. Down over Golder Hill they came, Urry that renegado' (to quote a Parliamentary print) crying, for the information of his fellows, That's Hampden'; That's Gunter'; 'That's Luke.' Gunter fell at the first charge, and it seems that Captain Crosse, whose troop, Hampden in it, was further to the right, was advancing from the direction of Warpsgrove to support his chief, when Hampden got the hurt which cost him his life. His head hanging down, and resting his hands upon the neck of his horse,' so runs the report by one of the prisoners taken on that day, he was seen to ride off the field before the action was done, which he never used to do.' First it would seem he headed towards Pyrton, the direction from which he had come, as though he would have made for that familiar house, the home of the wife of his first love. But the enemy held the ground in that direction (Essex writes that Rupert was in such strength that he was able to outflank the Parliamentarians and charge them in the rear), and so he turned north-westwards, meaning doubtless to strike the road between Stadhampton and Thame and make his way to Essex's headquarters at the latter place. We are told of an incident in that mournful ride. When he was come to a considerable rivulet he was much put to it what to do. He thought that if he alighted he could not possibly get up again, and how to get over he could not well tell, but he resolved at last to try what his horse could do, and so clapt his spurs to and got over.' Following in Hampden's track one makes an attempt to identify the spot. Mr. Blackall, of Great Haseley, whose grandson told the story to the fourth Lord Macclesfield, locates it at the brook which divides the parishes' of Haseley and Pyrton. Hampden was last seen crossing the grounds of Little Haseley Court. Head northwards from Little to Great Haseley, and you strike nothing more considerable than a meagre drain, dry when the writer saw it in June last year. But take a bee line from Haseley Court for Thame, and you will find yourself brought up by a running ditch with soggy banks, an affluent of the Haseley brook. Those who hunt with the South Oxfordshire must know it well and have crossed it often, and will admit that it was something to give pause to a wounded man on a tired horse. That is where the writer thinks he has identified

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Hampden's leap within a field or so. And yet, after all, Mr. Blackall of Great Haseley may be right: water was more plenty in Hampden's time than now, and that dry drain between Great and Little Haseley may have been a considerable rivulet the day that Hampden rode from Chalgrove Field to Thame.

As to the way in which Hampden came by his death, it seems to the writer that the account which purports to have been given by his son-in-law, Sir Robert Pye, to Sir Edward Harley has not received the attention it deserves. The provenance of the MS., now in a Berkshire country house, is obscure. Baldwin, who printed it in the 'St. James' Chronicle' for 1761, told the father of Henry James Pye, the Poet Laureate, that he found it in a book which came into his possession out of Lord Oxford's family. But the grounds on which Lord Nugent dismisses it-namely, that Pye the Laureate was assured by his father that Sir Robert Pye never mentioned it to his grandfather, though the latter lived with him till he was eighteen-are not conclusive. Sir Robert Pye was on the best of terms with his father-in-law, and the rueful tone in which the tale is told conveys the impression that the incident was not one to which he cared to recur, though it does not exclude the possibility that he related it in a moment of confidence to a friend. After describing how Hampden made his way to Thame, the letter proceeds:

As soon as he possibly could he sent for me; he was in very great pain, and told me that he suspected his wound was mortal, but what makes it still more grievous to me, says he, is, that I am afraid you are in some degree accessory to it, for the hurt I have received his (sic) occasioned by the bursting of one of those pistolls which you gave me. You may be sure I was not a little surprised and concerned at hearing this, and assured him they were bought from one of the best workmen in France, and that I myself had seen them tried. You must know it was Mr. Hampden's custom whenever he was going abroad always to order a raw serving boy that he had to be sure to take care that his pistols were loaded, and it seems the boy did so very effectually, for whenever he was thus ordered he always put in a fresh charge without considering or examining whether the former charge had been made use of or not, and upon examining the remaining pistoll they found it was in this state, quite filled up to the top with two or three supernumerary charges. And the other pistoll having been in the same condition was the occasion of its bursting and shattering Mr. Hampden's arm in such a manner that he received his death by the wound and not by any hurt from the enemy.

The letter has a certain interest, but the matter with which it deals is not of great importance. There was a time when controversy raged round it, and Lord Nugent, author of 'Memorials of Hampden,' went so far as to attempt to settle the question by

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