In January 1621, Hampden took his seat in the House of Commons.  His mother was exceedingly desirous that her son should obtain a peerage.  His family, his possessions, and his personal accomplishments were such as would, in any age, have justified him in pretending to that honour.  But in the reign of James the First there was one short cut to the House of Lords.  It was but to ask, to pay, and to have.  The sale of titles was carried on as openly as the sale of boroughs in our times.  Hampden turned away with contempt from the degrading honours with which his family desired to see him invested, and attached himself to the party which was in opposition to the court.

It was about this time, as Lord Nugent has justly remarked, that parliamentary opposition began to take a regular form.  From a very early age, the English had enjoyed a far larger share of liberty than had fallen to the lot of any neighbouring people.  How it chanced that a country conquered and enslaved by invaders, a country of which the soil had been portioned out among foreign adventurers and of which the laws were written in a foreign tongue, a country given over to that worst tyranny, the tyranny of caste over caste, should have become the seat of civil liberty, the object of the admiration and envy of surrounding states, is one of the most obscure problems in the philosophy of history.  But the fact is certain.  Within a century and a half after the Norman conquest, the Great Charter was conceded.  Within two centuries after the Conquest, the first House of Commons met.  Froissart tells us, what indeed his whole narrative sufficiently proves, that of all the nations of the fourteenth century, the English were the least disposed to endure oppression.  “C’est le plus perilleux peuple qui soit au monde, et plus outrageux et orgueilleux.”  The good canon probably did not perceive that all the prosperity and internal peace which this dangerous people enjoyed were the fruits of the spirit which he designates as proud and outrageous.  He has, however, borne ample testimony to the effect, though he was not sagacious enough to trace it to its cause.  “En le royaume d’Angleterre,” says he, “toutes gens, laboureurs et marchands, ont appris de vivre en paix, et a mener leurs marchandises paisiblement, et les laboureurs labourer.”  In the fifteenth century, though England was convulsed by the struggle between the two branches of the royal family, the physical and moral condition of the people continued to improve.  Villenage almost wholly disappeared.  The calamities of war were little felt, except by those who bore arms.  The oppressions of the government were little felt, except by the aristocracy.  The institutions of the country when compared with the institutions of the neighbouring kingdoms, seem to have been not undeserving of the praises of Fortescue.  The government of Edward the Fourth, though we call it cruel and arbitrary, was humane and liberal when compared with that of Lewis the Eleventh, or that of