John Hampden

John Hampden (* 1594, † June 18, 1643 ) was an English politician.

Life and work

Hampden was the eldest son of William Hampden, of Hampden House, Great Hampden in Buckinghamshire, a descendant of a very old English family, and of Elizabeth, second daughter of Sir Henry Cromwell, and aunt of Oliver Cromwell. He studied at the University of Oxford.

The town of Hamden, Connecticut, USA, was named after him, as is the Hampden - Sydney College in Virginia USA.

In 1636, John Hampden, later one of the most important leaders of the English bourgeois revolution, the royal tax collector refused the "ship money " to pay - a tax that had not been confirmed by the House of Commons. The subsequent trial before the Supreme Court, in which he was convicted, won him wide popularity and led to the growth of the bourgeois opposition to absolutism.

In 1640 he entered Parliament at the head of the opposition, and was one of the five members of the lower house, which were in 1642 indicted by the upper house of high treason. In the English Civil War (1642-1649) Buckinghamshire was set mainly parliament. John Hampden helped in the battle of 1642 to defend Aylesbury and was at Chalgrovefield, a few miles from Oxford, mortally wounded in a rider meeting on June 18, 1643.

Swell

  • John Adair: John Hampden, the Patriot, 1594-1643. MacDonald & Jane's, London 1976, ISBN 0-354-04014-6.
445732
de