fertile fields. Many of the most important parliamentary leaders either belonged to Buckinghamshire, or had extensive family connections among its landed gentry; of this cousinhood were Oliver Cromwell, John Hampden, Sir Hardress Waller, Sir Richard Ingoldsby, Oliver St. John, General Ireton, Simon Mayne, the two Fleetwoods, James and Bulstrode Whitelock, and Sir Harbottle Grimstone.[1]
Our eyes ranged over estates which had been owned by “true-hearted Nathaniels,” and less spiritually-minded country squires; who nevertheless raised whole regiments, or commanded the troops they had levied in the popular cause.
The home of the Hampdens has occupied its present site since the days of King John; he visited the master who owned the inheritance in his reign, and a north-west chamber is named after that unworthy Plantagenet. The guest of Griffith Hampden has left her traces in the venerable pile, for the state bed-room is yet called “Queen Elizabeth’s,” and some of its antique hangings may have sheltered the Virgin Majesty of England. The windows of this apartment open upon a lawn of exquisite turf, into which the foot sinks silently and deeply: with such her great minister, Francis Bacon, covered the garden of his imagination, which he painted after the desires of his own heart. A few grand old cedars stand about the porch, but it is doubtful if sunshine and rain had fed and ripened the seeds from which they sprung in the days of John Hampden; and the interior and exterior arrangements and aspect of this ancestral home have been so frequently changed, that a small room on the ground-floor, called the Brick Parlour, is almost the only part remaining which can be associated with our hero. There he may have explained to his mother the causes of the great quarrel between King Charles and his Parliament; for, like her father and brother, the daughter of Sir Henry Cromwell of Hinchinbrook, had a most loyal soul, inspired by all a courtier’s ambition. When there were “multitudes of lords a-making,” we know that she wished her great son to be one of them. John Hampden succeeded in his infancy to the family estates, for his father died in 1597, when his heir was little more than three years old, and his will directs that his wife, Elizabeth, shall continue to enjoy the use of such apartments as she may choose in Hampden House. She had a long lease of those chambers, in a dwelling often visited by trouble and death; for we learn from the parish register, that she departed this life February 21st, 1664, having lived a widow sixty-seven years, and attained the great age of ninety. Her lengthened life comprehended more than twenty-eight years of Elizabeth’s reign. She had discussed as county news the whole history of the Gunpowder Treason, which was hatched at Gayhurst in Buckinghamshire; and, almost before the victim’s blood was dry, the hideous details of Sir Everard Digby’s execution must have reached her solitary chamber. From its windows, she might have listened to the chaunted psalm, and the dull sound of the muffled drums, as she watched the long procession of disheartened troops, who bore, with furled ensigns, through the ancient woods, to the chancel vault in his parish church, all that remained of the great son she had borne—truly a Master in Israel! The still days of her saddened life were creeping over the Chiltern hill-sides when King Charles was led to the scaffold through the long gallery at Whitehall. She witnessed the rise and fall of the Commonwealth, and wondrous tidings, in the shape of family news, must have reached her solitude, of the crowning dignities of her slovenly nephew Oliver. As a very old woman, she heard, on her lonely hill, that wild midnight tempest of the 2nd of September, 1658, which traversed England, while one of the mightiest among the erring souls of men fluttered from the snares of his mortality. The next January saw her only surviving child, Richard Hampden, Lord of Emmington, in Oxfordshire, laid in the family grave, and it must have seemed a matter of little moment to her, when, in the following May, her great-nephew, Richard Cromwell, resigned the Protectorate, and retired into private life. Four years afterwards, this aged woman joined her family of ghosts.
The career of John Hampden belongs to the history of England: during his last seven years “he became the argument of all tongues,” yet very few traces of his existence remain among us, and we can glean no incidents to illustrate his private life at his ancient seat, though that was the home of his boyhood, youth, and manhood; and there he spent the days of his most “jolly conversation,” and those dark ones, when troubles fell heavily on his family and friends, and “he retired to a more reserved and melancholy way of life,” preparing himself for the coming struggle.
We find him sending from thence, in 1631, to his dear friend, Sir John Eliot, then a prisoner in the Tower, books to solace his lonely hours, and a small buck out of his paddock. On the 3rd of October, in the same year, he announces to this correspondent a welcome birth, in these words:
“God, I thank Him, hath made me father of another Sonne.” In August, 1634, his beloved first wife died; and “the reader who would learn how tender, and yet wise, John Hampden was—affectionate without weakness, and pious without affectation, may turn aside to the sequestered church of Great Hampden, and read the exquisite memorial which describes his wife’s virtues and his own bereavement.”[2]
Many good portraits, that must be marked as unknown, adorn the chambers and passages of this rambling old mansion. They represent fair and dignified women: men evidently prosperous and important in their generation. Among that nameless crowd are the masters and mistresses, sons and daughters, honoured guests and valued friends of Hampden House for the last 200 years; they all belonged, by kindred or alliance, to the old line and its branches, that came there in turn, to rule and occupy, and to die out. No chronicler was born among them to collect and record the fleeting interest and associations attached to these relics and portraits of the dead; so every clue by which they could now be identified is buried with