A ROUNDHEAD HERO

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 21034, 9 December 1933, Page 17

A ROUNDHEAD HERO

John Hampden. A Life. By Hugh Ross Williamson. Hodder and Stoughton. (12/6 net). From W. S. Smart.

A single line in Gray's Elegy has given John Hampden a place in the Englishman's Pantheon as the type of those who resist to the limit the encroachments of privilege, priestcraft, and despotism on civil and religious liberties. To the student of history, Hampden stands at the most forceful and efficient of the three—Pym, Hampden, and Cromwell—who rendered inevitable the great Civil War. Yet no considerable work on this remarkable man has been written since, a century ago, Lord Nugent published his Memorials.

During the current year, Mr Williamson and Mr John Drinkwater have given us serious andf scholarly studies, which fully justify everything which an Englishman feels for this great patriot. The reason for this renewed interest in Hampden, after so long a period of neglect, may perhaps be found in Mr Williamson's preface. Both he and Mr Drinkwater view the Civil War from a frankly Roundhead standpoint. It is quite possible that the Anglo-Catholic Centenary has suggested to Mr Williamson a counterblast to the false views of this period of history which he believes to be held by " Conservatives, Communists, and AngloCatholics." This partisan spirit accounts for the only blemish on a very able book. Mr Williamson rightly, and with documentary evidence to back him, convicts Charles, Laud, and Strafford of various contemptible acts. Surely this is enough, without his contemptuous references not only to these three but to nearly every one on the Cavalier side. It is true that King Charles was, on the whole, a disastrous monarch for England ; but he deserves better than the shallow judgment which Mr Williamson accords him. Archbishop Laud was something more than " a cruel, cowardly, meddling little ecclesiastic." Granted that Lord Strafford by his obstinacy and arrogance gravely imperilled the liberties of Englishmen, he was a great man who deserves even from his enemies the tribute of a serious and respectful consideration. It does not follow, however, that Mr Williamson's book is of little value. On the contrary it is an able, well documented, and very readable account of the eventful years which led up to the Civil War. Against this background Mr Williamson paints a sympathetic portrait, firm and dignified, of John Hampden, a portrait worthy to take its place among those drawn by his contemporaries, a portrait of a man so essentially noble that even his enemies, Clarendon and Sir Philip Warwick, wrote of him with tenderness and respect. The finer touches which come from a knowledge of the sitter's private life are of necessity wanting ; for little is known of Hampden's life, apart from politics. Mr Williamson has carefully sifted the evidence for and against the fables which have done duty in Nugent's book, and in many briefer notices of Hampden since Nugent's time, and we are left with little which can be taken as true. Nevertheless, he leaves us with a picture of a truly great man ; a man of whom his lifelong friend, Arthur Goodwin, could fitly write : "He was a gallant man, an honest man, an able man, and, take all, I know not to any man living second."