HAMPDEN, John II

An ancestor of the famous seventeenth-century John Hampden†, Hampden was usually known as ‘of Great Hampden’ to distinguish him from his relative, John Hampden I* of Great Kimble. Long established landowners, the Hampdens of Great Hampden were part of a network of upper gentry resident in the Thames valley, and Hampden was a member of a circle headed by his father’s friend, the influential Thomas Chaucer*. He married a niece of the half blood of Chaucer’s wife Maud, and subsequently entered the service of the Chaucers’ son-in-law William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. An indication of Hampden’s local prominence is his ranking in the list of Buckinghamshire men expected to swear the oath to keep the peace administered throughout the country in 1434. His name appears in sixth position, immediately after the four knights then resident in the county and just one other esquire, John Cheyne I*.8 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 279; CPR, 1429-36, p. 397.

If Hampden had yet to come of age when his father died, he must have achieved his majority very soon afterwards. He inherited estates at Great Hampden and elsewhere in central Buckinghamshire, at Yielden in Bedfordshire, at Kidlington in Oxfordshire and at Theydon Mount in Essex. He subsequently augmented his Buckinghamshire holdings by acquiring a manor at Little Missenden near Amersham, and he also held property in Wallingford, an Oxfordshire borough where both Chaucer and de la Pole wielded considerable influence.9 VCH Bucks. ii. 247, 287-8, 305, 357; iv. 24; VCH Oxon. xii. 190; VCH Essex, iv. 277-8; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 124, 614, 616; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 278; Boarstall Cart. (Oxf. Historical Soc. lxxxviii), 274-5. Hampden is first heard of in November 1420, when he attested the election of Buckinghamshire’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of that year. Although probably still a young man, he was made escheator of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire less than two years later, an appointment renewed a month after the accession of Henry VI.10 CFR, xv. 13. A few weeks after taking up office as escheator, he was placed on the commission of the peace for Buckinghamshire. He was dropped from the commission a year later, but he served continuously as a j.p. until his death following his reappointment in the summer of 1431.11 As a j.p., he never served on the quorum, unlike his kinsman John I. The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 280; iv. 422, claims that the subject of this biography was the John Hampden who attended Lincoln’s Inn (L. Inn Adm. i. 2; L. Inn Black Bks. i. 2, 4), but it is much more likely that John I was the lawyer in question. Notwithstanding his appointment to several commissions of gaol delivery, it cannot be proved that the MP was a member of the legal profession. Hampden went on to serve a second term as escheator and no fewer than four as sheriff. During his third shrievalty a suspected murderer broke out of Aylesbury gaol. He incurred the blame for the ruinous state of the prison that made the escape possible, but he was subsequently pardoned for his shortcomings in this respect and again pricked for the office near the end of his life.12 CPR, 1446-52, p. 571.

An active role in the administration of his county was just one sign of Hampden’s local status; another was the frequency with which his fellow gentry in the Thames valley and elsewhere called upon him to act as a witness and trustee.13 CP25(1)/292/68/189; 293/71/331, 336; CAD, i. C1229; ii. C2794; CCR, 1422-9, pp. 150, 446; 1435-41, pp. 236-7, 357; 1441-7, pp. 141, 197, 310; CPR, 1429-36, p. 247; 1436-41, p. 51; 1446-52, pp. 228, 311-12, 376; Boarstall Cart. 186, 197-9. Among those whom he served in this capacity was his half-brother, the Oxfordshire esquire, Thomas Stonor I*. In his will of 1431 Stonor asked Hampden, Thomas Chaucer and John Warfield* to assist his widow, Alice Stonor, with the tasks of selling the marriage of his eldest son, Thomas II*, and providing for his daughters.14 Stonor Letters, i (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xxix), 48-49. At the end of the following year, Alice and her new husband, Richard Drayton*, set aside an annual rent from the Stonor estates for Hampden and others to spend on raising and educating Isabel, one of the dead man’s daughters. Hampden was likewise a trustee for Chaucer and William de la Pole, and his association with both of these nationally important figures must have done much to advance his parliamentary career.15 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 346, 444, 448-9, 451; 1436-41, pp. 75; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 335-7; 1435-41, pp. 91-93; 1447-54, pp. 209-15; 1454-61, p. 133; 1461-8, pp. 337, 354-5.

Just one of a number of Chaucer and de la Pole clients to sit in Parliament, Hampden was returned to the Commons on at least five occasions (although he was to sit in just four Parliaments) and summoned to great councils in 1434 and 1455.16 PPC, iv. 213; vi. 340. Returned to his first known Parliament in 1427, he was re-elected to the following assembly alongside another member of Chaucer’s circle, the lawyer Andrew Sperlyng*, at a county court held at Aylesbury on 31 Aug. 1429. No fewer than 125 attestors witnessed the return,17 The constituency survey for Bucks. (in The Commons 1386-1421, i. 277) and Sperlyng’s biography (ibid. iv. 422) respectively give the incorrect totals of 128 and 129. so it is possible that the election was contested. It was certainly controversial, thanks to the behaviour of the sheriff, Sir Thomas Waweton*, who ten days earlier had played a prominent part in an irregular election in Huntingdonshire. Setting aside the election of Hampden and Sperlyng, Waweton returned into Chancery a false indenture of the same date. This recorded that 80 named men had elected Sir John Cheyne (one of those who had attested the original indenture) and Walter Strickland I*. Presumably with Thomas Chaucer’s support, Hampden and Sperlyng responded by petitioning the Crown, which set up a commission to investigate the matter two days after the Parliament opened. On 1 Mar. 1430, a week after the dissolution of Parliament, a judicial hearing held at Aylesbury by the justices of assize for Buckinghamshire established that Waweton had made a false return and that the petitioners should have sat for the county. As a result, Waweton forfeited £100 for breaching the statute of 1406 against corrupt elections, a fine that Hampden and Sperlyng themselves collected. On the same 1 Mar. Hampden was appointed to a commission of oyer and terminer ordered to investigate widespread complaints about the ‘oppressions, extortions, assaults and injuries’ committed by Cheyne, his brother Thomas and others on the Buckinghamshire-Hertfordshire border. The Cheynes were subsequently arrested, although they were acquitted when the matter came before the court of King’s bench in Michaelmas term 1430.18 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 553; iv. 422; CPR, 1429-36, p. 39; E159/206, brevia Trin. rot. 4; E403/700, m. 12. In the following December Hampden and Sperlyng were returned to the short Parliament of 1431, and this time they were able to take up their seats. Hampden was also re-elected to the following Parliament, although not alongside Sperlyng. His fellow MP in 1432 was none other than Sir John Cheyne, but in spite of the controversy of 1429 there is no proof of any personal animosity between the two men, nor any evidence suggesting that they were unable to co-operate with each other as knights of the shire.

The Parliament of 1432 was the last in which Hampden sat during Thomas Chaucer’s lifetime. When Chaucer died in November 1434 his son-in-law, William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, was already steward of the King’s household. Edmund, Hampden’s younger and more prominent brother, joined the Household, but there is no evidence that the MP himself became a member of the royal establishment. He nevertheless enjoyed his share of Henry VI’s largesse. In early May 1438 he became master and surveyor of the deer and fisheries in the King’s park at Risborough. In the following month, the Crown granted him the park’s herbage and pannage, rent-free and for life. In March 1441, he and Richard Brout received a grant for their lives in survivorship of the position of parker of Risborough, an office that previously Brout had exercised alone. It also appears that the King awarded Hampden an annuity of six marks, drawn upon a rent the Crown received from the nearby abbey of Missenden, although the date of this grant is not known.19 CPR, 1436-41, p. 185; 1461-7, p. 214.

In mid 1440 Hampden acquired letters patent granting him an exemption for life from public office and the honour of knighthood.20 CPR, 1436-41, p. 405. As it happened, he continued in public office, but was never knighted, even though he was easily of the means to support the status. A concern that parliamentary knights of the shire should possess such means, even if not actually belted knights, prompted the famous statute passed in the Parliament of 1445,21 . PROME, xi. 499-501. the last in which Hampden is known to have sat. When the Parliament was summoned William de la Pole, now marquess of Suffolk, was in France, at the head of an expedition tasked with escorting the King’s new bride Margaret of Anjou back to England. It is nevertheless likely that Hampden enjoyed the support of Alice, his patron’s formidable marchioness, and other de la Pole retainers when he stood for the Commons. The Parliament, the longest of Henry VI’s reign, was not dissolved until 9 Apr. 1446. Just under ten weeks later Hampden received a formal pardon from the Crown. This was one of three such pardons to him recorded on the pardon rolls, but it is likely that these were pro forma grants since they cannot be linked with any serious misconduct on his part.22 C67/39, m. 34 (20 June 1446). The other two pardons are dated 6 June 1437 and 11 Nov. 1452: C67/38, m. 21; 40, m. 14. Whatever the case, he continued to enjoy the King’s favour, for in February 1447 he obtained a royal charter granting extensive jurisdictional rights on his manor of Great Hampden to him and his heirs.23 CChR, vi. 82-83.

In the following decade Hampden retained his links with the de la Pole circle, headed by Alice de la Pole since her husband’s downfall and murder in 1449-50,24 It is said that ‘Sir’ John Hampden, Suffolk’s steward, was murdered not long after his master, at Flint castle in N. Wales at the time of Cade’s rebellion: C.L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 366. It is incorrectly assumed by R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 369, 643, that this mysterious John was the MP. and the Court. In April 1455 he and other knights and esquires sympathetic to the Lancastrian government and Household received summonses to a great council at Leicester, an assembly which never met because it was overtaken by the battle of St. Albans in the following month.25 PPC, vi. 340; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 160-1. Among those summoned was Sir Thomas Tuddenham*, one of the most prominent de la Pole retainers in East Anglia. In 1456 he and Hampden were co-plaintiffs in the court of King’s bench, where they sued John Strange*, a follower of the Mowbray duke of Norfolk. They alleged that in February the previous year Strange had broken into their property at Brampton, Suffolk, cutting down wood and depasturing the land. Strange denied any such trespass, claiming that the very same property was his, by demise of the daughters and heirs of Peter del Clyff, whose family had once held the manor of Brampton Hall. In response Hampden and Tuddenham asserted that the demise was illegal, since an uncle of the coheiresses had alienated Brampton Hall away from the del Clyff family over 30 years earlier. They added that John Belley, another de la Pole retainer, had lawfully acquired the manor and that he had demised both it and the property in dispute to them, evidently in the capacity of his feoffees.26 KB27/782, rot. 88.

By now nearing the end of his life, Hampden began his last term as sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire in the autumn of 1456. Appointed to his final ad hoc commission late in the following year, he made his will on 10 Feb. 1458 and died a week later, on the 17th. He therefore never lived to see the country slide into the civil conflict in which his brother, a committed Lancastrian, played an active part. In his will he sought burial in the chancel of Great Hampden church, where his parents already lay.27 Shakespeare Centre Archs., Ferrers mss, DR 3/542. He assigned 1s. to Lincoln cathedral, the mother church of the diocese in which he resided, and left the rector of Great Hampden 6s. 8d., in return for ten obits. He also bequeathed sums of 20s. to the fabric of the same parish church and a mark to the local poor. To his eldest son and heir, Thomas, Hampden bequeathed various items of silver plate and cooking utensils, and he left his lady, Alice de la Pole, dowager duchess of Suffolk, an ornate silver cup, asking that it should pass after her death to her son, John, duke of Suffolk. The most striking part of the will is Hampden’s order that his funeral expenses should not exceed 20s., excepting alms given to the poor attending it, a direction exactly replicating a clause in his father Edmund’s similarly brief and austere will. It has been suggested that Edmund’s will reflected a desire to avoid the sort of complications he had encountered while an executor for others, but more recent work suggests that he may have sympathized with the lollard movement.28 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 279; M. Jurkowski, ‘Lollard Bk. Producers’, in Text and Controversy ed. Barr and Hutchinson, 207-8. If the MP entertained similar sympathies, he must have preserved an outward façade of orthodoxy, for he died a respected member of the Thames valley gentry, as indeed had his father. He appointed several executors, among them his wife Elizabeth, his brother Edmund and John Durem*.

In the summer of 1458 there were inquisitions post mortem for Hampden in Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Oxfordshire. While the jurors found that his son Thomas was his heir and aged about 24, each inquisition produced a nil return as to his lands, indicating that he had conveyed away all his estates to feoffees.29 C139/167/19. A Chancery case of about 1469 shows that Hampden’s widow remarried, although only the Christian name of her second husband, ‘Peers’, is known. By then a widower, he was the plaintiff in this case, but his surname is no longer legible on the bill he lodged against Thomas Hampden, for denying his mother her rights of dower and jointure in the Hampden estates in Buckinghamshire.30 C1/41/193.