on. It was the village where he had wedded
the wife he loved so well, and beyond it among the beech-trees of the
Chilterns lay his own house of Hampden. But it was not there that he was
to die. A party of Royalists drove him back from Pyrton, and turning
northwards he paused for a moment at a little brook that crossed his
path, then gathering strength leaped it, and rode almost fainting to
Thame. At first the surgeons gave hopes of his recovery, but hope was
soon over. For six days he lay in growing agony, sending counsel after
counsel to the Parliament, till on the twenty-fourth of June the end
drew near. "O Lord, save my country," so ended Hampden's prayers; "O
Lord, be merciful to----!" here his speech failed him, and he fell back
lifeless on his bed. With arms reversed and muffled flags, his own men
bore him through the lanes and woods he knew so well to the little
church that still stands unchanged beside his home. On the floor of its
chancel the brasses of his father and his grandfather mark their graves.
A step nearer to the altar, unmarked by brass or epitaph, lies the
grave in which, with bitter tears and cries, his greencoats laid the
body of the leader whom they loved. "Never were heard such piteous cries
at the death of one man as at Master Hampden's." With him indeed all
seemed lost. But bitter as were their tears, a noble faith lifted these
Puritans out of despair. As they bore him to his grave they sang, in the
words of the ninetieth psalm, how fleeting in the sight of the Divine
Eternity is the life of man. But as they turned away the yet nobler
words of the forty-third psalm broke from their lips, as they prayed
that the God who had smitten them would send out anew His light and His
truth, that they might lead them and bring them to His holy hill. "Why
art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou so disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall yet praise him, which is the help of my
countenance, and my God!"

[Sidenote: Relief of Gloucester.]

To Royalists as to Parliamentarians the death of Hampden seemed an omen
of ruin to the cause he loved. Disaster followed disaster: Essex, more
and more anxious for a peace, fell back on Uxbridge; while a cowardly
surrender of Bristol to Prince Rupert gave Charles the second city of
the kingdom, and the mastery of the West. The news of the loss of
Bristol fell on the Parliament "like a sentence of death." The Lords
debated nothing but proposals of peace. Lond