The story of his early life is soon told.  He was the head of a family which had been settled in Buckinghamshire before the Conquest.  Part of the estate which he inherited had been bestowed by Edward the Confessor on Baldwyn de Hampden, whose name seems to indicate that he was one of the Norman favourites of the last Saxon king.  During the contest between the houses of York and Lancaster, the Hampdens adhered to the party of the Red Rose, and were, consequently, persecuted by Edward the Fourth, and favoured by Henry the Seventh.  Under the Tudors, the family was great and flourishing.  Griffith Hampden, high sheriff of Buckinghamshire, entertained Elizabeth with great magnificence at his seat.  His son, William Hampden, sate in the Parliament which that Queen summoned in the year 1593.  William married Elizabeth Cromwell, aunt of the celebrated man who afterwards governed the British islands with more than regal power; and from this marriage sprang John Hampden.

He was born in 1594.  In 1597 his father died, and left him heir to a very large estate.  After passing some years at the grammar school of Thame, young Hampden was sent, at fifteen, to Magdalen College, in the University of Oxford.  At nineteen, he was admitted a student of the Inner Temple, where he made himself master of the principles of the English law.  In 1619 he married Elizabeth Symeon, a lady to whom he appears to have been fondly attached.  In the following year he was returned to parliament by a borough which has in our time obtained a miserable celebrity, the borough of Grampound.

Of his private life during his early years little is known beyond what Clarendon has told us.  “In his entrance into the world,” says that great historian, “he indulged himself in all the licence in sports, and exercises, and company, which were used by men of the most jolly conversation.”  A remarkable change, however, passed on his character.  “On a sudden,” says Clarendon, “from a life of great pleasure and licence, he retired to extraordinary sobriety and strictness, to a more reserved and melancholy society.”  It is probable that this change took place when Hampden was about twenty-five years old.  At that age he was united to a woman whom he loved and esteemed.  At that age he entered into political life.  A mind so happily constituted as his would naturally, under such circumstances, relinquish the pleasures of dissipation for domestic enjoyments and public duties.

His enemies have allowed that he was a man in whom virtue showed itself in its mildest and least austere form.  With the morals of a Puritan, he had the manners of an accomplished courtier.  Even after the change in his habits, “he preserved,” says Clarendon, “his own natural cheerfulness and vivacity, and, above all, a flowing courtesy to all men.”  These qualities distinguished him from most of the members of his sect and his party, and, in the great crisis in which he afterwards took a principal part, were of scarcely less service to the country than his keen sagacity and his dauntless courage.