Hampden, with his head drooping, and his hands leaning on his horse’s neck, moved feebly out of the battle.  The mansion which had been inhabited by his father-in-law, and from which in his youth he had carried home his bride Elizabeth, was in sight.  There still remains an affecting tradition that he looked for a moment towards that beloved house, and made an effort to go thither to die.  But the enemy lay in that direction.  He turned his horse towards Thame, where he arrived almost fainting with agony.  The surgeons dressed his wounds.  But there was no hope.  The pain which he suffered was most excruciating.  But he endured it with admirable firmness and resignation.  His first care was for his country.  He wrote from his bed several letters to London concerning public affairs, and sent a last pressing message to the head-quarters, recommending that the dispersed forces should be concentrated.  When his public duties were performed, he calmly prepared himself to die.  He was attended by a clergyman of the Church of England, with whom he had lived in habits of intimacy, and by the chaplain of the Buckinghamshire Greencoats, Dr. Spurton, whom Baxter describes as a famous and excellent divine.

A short time before Hampden’s death the sacrament was administered to him.  He declared that though he disliked the government of the Church of England, he yet agreed with that Church as to all essential matters of doctrine.  His intellect remained unclouded.  When all was nearly over, he lay murmuring faint prayers for himself, and for the cause in which, he died.  “Lord Jesus,” he exclaimed in the moment of the last agony, “receive my soul.  O Lord, save my country.  O Lord, be merciful to—.”  In that broken ejaculation passed away his noble and fearless spirit.

He was buried in the parish church of Hampden.  His soldiers, bareheaded, with reversed arms and muffled drums and colours, escorted his body to the grave, singing, as they marched, that lofty and melancholy psalm in which the fragility of human life is contrasted with the immutability of Him to whom a thousand years are as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.

The news of Hampden’s death produced as great a consternation in his party, according to Clarendon, as if their whole army had been cut off.  The journals of the time amply prove that the Parliament and all its friends were filled with grief and dismay.  Lord Nugent has quoted a remarkable passage from the next Weekly Intelligencer.  “The loss of Colonel Hampden goeth near the heart of every man that loves the good of his king and country, and makes some conceive little content to be at the army now that he is gone.  The memory of this deceased colonel is such, that in no age to come but it will more and more be had in honour and esteem; a man so religious, and of that prudence, judgment, temper, valour, and integrity, that he hath left few his like behind.”