Chapter 2: Shared Memory

Abstract

English subjects in the old world and colonists in the new shared their history and collective political experience for more than 150 years before the Americans declared independence. In the decades preceding that declaration, the historic memory of the Stuart monarchy in England came to play a formative part in the political dialogue of the new world and the literature of the old. This paper is about the manifestation of the seventeenth-century stories and legends of John Hampden and the English civil wars within the historic memory of eighteenth-century England and the colonies. It is about events of the seventeenth century informing the eighteenth. John Hampden occupied a major place in that shared history. His life spanned the years of the reigns of James I and Charles I, what John Palfrey, a historian in America in the nineteenth century, chose to call the Stuart Dynasty. Born in 1594, Hampden was just nine when James came to the English throne and he died in 1643 only six years before the execution of Charles. As well as Hampden’s peripheral interest in one-twelfth share of a patent for land in Connecticut, his name was linked to the early colonial period through two stories that were perpetuated in literature for years to come. Later, and quite separately from those colonial legends, Hampden became an icon of the revolutionary period for his stand against the unjust taxation by the Crown that culminated in his trial in the ship-money case in 1637. The story of how the public memory of Hampden was transmitted, and sometimes corrupted, is a complicated one, and the earlier legends particularly need to be set straight. They were, to use the words of Henry Cabot Lodge, myths ‘which masquerade as history’. In discovering how the legends involving the colonies developed we can put to rest the recurring question of whether Hampden himself ever visited the new world. The second part of the story, that of Hampden’s place in the public memory of the eighteenth century at the time of the break with Britain, is less complicated but more compelling. Let me begin at the beginning, with ship money. John Hampden became famous in England in 1637 the moment he challenged the king’s right to collect the ship-money tax, and it was sustained over generations in the hearts and minds of the people, first by contemporary news accounts and letters, and later through the great literary histories of David Hume and Lord Macaulay. In the mid-seventeenth century, when many Englishmen believed Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. •• No. •• (2008)