John Hampden: the Patriot Who Defied King

He refused to pay twenty shillings. The argument helped push a kingdom toward revolution.John Hampden was not a natural rebel. He was a wealthy Buckinghamshire landowner, parliamentarian and committed Protestant who believed that monarchy, Parliament and law could coexist. But when Charles I attempted to govern without Parliament and imposed ship money across England, Hampden chose resistance.The amount demanded from him was insignificant. The principle was not.By refusing to pay twenty shillings, Hampden transformed himself into the defendant in one of the most important constitutional cases of seventeenth-century England. The Crown argued that national necessity gave the king authority to raise money for defence. Hampden's supporters answered that if the king could determine the emergency, impose the tax and judge the limits of his own power, the protection of property and parliamentary consent could become meaningless. The judges ruled for Charles by seven votes to five, but Hampden's legal defeat became a political victory.His struggle did not end in the courtroom.As England's political crisis deepened, Hampden emerged as one of Parliament's most trusted leaders. He helped challenge the Personal Rule, confronted the government of Charles I, supported the Long Parliament and escaped the king's attempted arrest of the Five Members. When negotiation finally gave way to civil war, the man remembered for defending the law took up the sword.John Hampden: The Patriot Who Defied the King follows Hampden from the ancient family estate at Great Hampden through Oxford, Parliament, the ship-money confrontation, the constitutional struggles of the 1640s and finally the battlefield. It examines his relationships with John Pym, Oliver Cromwell, Charles I and the parliamentary opposition while placing his career within the larger struggles over religion, taxation, property and royal power.Hampden was wounded at Chalgrove Field on 18 June 1643 and died at Thame six days later. His death removed him before the revolution reached its most radical conclusions, allowing later generations to remember him as the patriot who resisted arbitrary government rather than as a participant in the execution of a king and abolition of the monarchy that followed.Neither flawless constitutional hero nor secret revolutionary, Hampden was something more interesting: a man attempting to preserve an inherited political order whose defence ultimately helped transform it.Part of the Empire, Rebellion and Power series - the people, conflicts and ideas that reshaped Britain and the Atlantic world.