May 8. 1833
Civil War of the Seventeenth Century — Hampden’s Speech
I know no portion of history which a man might write with so much pleasure as that of the great struggle in the time of Charles I., because he may feel the profoundest respect for both parties. The side taken by any particular person was determined by the point of view which such person happened to command at the commencement of the inevitable collision, one line seeming straight to this man, another line to another. No man of that age saw the truth, the whole truth; there was not light enough for that. The consequence, of course, was a violent exaggeration of each party for the time. The King became a martyr, and the Parliamentarians traitors, and vice versâ. The great reform brought into act by and under William the Third combined the principles truly contended for by Charles and his Parliament respectively: the great revolution of 1831 has certainly, to an almost ruinous degree, dislocated those principles of government again. As to Hampden’s speech1, no doubt it means a declaration of passive obedience to the sovereign, as the creed of an English Protestant individual: every man, Cromwell and all, would have said as much; it was the antipapistical tenet, and almost vauntingly asserted on all occasions by Protestants up to that time. But it implies nothing of Hampden’s creed as to the duty of Parliament.
Notes
1 On his impeachment with the other four members, 1642. See the “Letter to John Murray, Esq. touching Lord Nugent,” 1833. It is extraordinary that Lord N. should not see the plain distinction taken by Hampden, between not obeying an unlawful command, and rebelling against the King because of it. He approves the one, and condemns the other. His words are, “to yield obedience to the commands of a King, if against the true religion, against the ancient and fundamental laws of the land, is another sign of an ill subject:”—“To resist the lawful power of the King; to raise insurrection against the King; admit him adverse in his religion; to conspire against his sacred person, or any ways to rebel, though commanding things against our consciences in exercising religion, or against the rights and privileges of the subject, is an absolute sign of the disaffected and traitorous subject.”—ED.