The English statesman John Hampden (1594-1643) was a leader of Parliament in its resistance to Charles I.

John Hampden was one of the largest landowners in Buckinghamshire. By his mother he was related to Oliver Cromwell. He received a Latin grammar school education and attended Magdalen College, Oxford. His principal interest was the reading of classical and modern history, from which he derived his political principles.

Hampden's estate would have fitted him to take up a peerage during the reign of James I, but he had already become opposed to the court. He sat in the Parliament of 1621 and in all succeeding parliaments until his death. In 1625 he opposed a loan to Charles I not sanctioned by Parliament. He was also the ally and literary executor of Sir John Eliot, the most ideologically extreme leader of the opposition in Charles I's early parliaments.

In 1632 the Earl of Warwick...