After Chalgrove Fight

June 18: 1643

Flags crape-smother'd and arms reversed, With one sad volley lay him to rest: Lay him to rest where he may not see This England he loved like a lover accursed By lawlessness masking as liberty, By the despot in Freedom's panoply drest:-- Bury him, ere he be made duplicity's tool and slave, Where he cannot see the land that he could not save! Bury him, bury him, bury him With his face downward!

Chalgrove! Name of patriot pain! O'er thy fresh fields that summer pass'd The brand of war's red furnace blast, Till heaven's soft tears wash'd out the blackening stain;-- Wash'd out and wept;--But could not so restore England's gallant son: Ere the fray was done The stately head bow'd down; shatter'd; his warfare o'er.

Bending to the saddle-bow With leaden arm that idle hangs, Faint with the lancing torture-pangs, He drops the rein; he lets the battle go:-- There, where the wife of his first love he woo'd Turning for retreat;-- Memories bitter-sweet Through death's fast-rising mist in youth's own light renew'd.

Then, as those who drown, perchance, And all their years, a waking dream, Flash pictured by in lightning gleam, His childhood home appears, the mother's glance, The hearth-side smile; the fragrance of the fields: --Now, war's iron knell Wakes the hounds of hell, Whilst o'er the realm her scourge the rushing Fury wields!

Doth he now the day lament When those who stemm'd despotic might O'erstrode the bounds of law and right, And through the land the torch of ruin sent? Or that great rival statesman as he stood Lion-faced and grim, Hath he sight of him, Strafford--the meteor-axe--the fateful Hill of Blood?

--Heroes both! by passion led, In days perplex'd 'tween new and old, Each at his will the realm to mould; This, basing sovereignty on the single head, This, on the many voices of the Hall:-- Each for his own creed Prompt to die at need: His side of England's shield each saw, and took for all.

Heroes both! For Order one And one for Freedom dying!--We May judge more justly both, than ye Could, each, his brother, ere the strife was done! --O Goddess of that even scale and weight, In whose awful eyes Truest mercy lies, This hero-dirge to thee I vow and dedicate!

--Slanting now,--the foe is by,-- Through Hazeley mead the warrior goes, And hardly fords the brook that flows Bearing to Thame its cool, sweet, summer-cry. Here take thy rest; here bind the broken heart! By death's mercy-doom Hid from ills to come, Great soul, and greatly vex'd, Hampden!--in peace depart!

In the heart of the fields he loved and the hills, Look your last, and lay him to rest, With the faded flower, the wither'd grass; Where the blood-face of war and the myriad ills Of England dear like phantoms pass And touch not the soul that is with the Blest. Bury him in the night and peace of the holy grave, Where he cannot see the land that he could not save! Bury him, bury him, bury him With his face downward!

John Hampden met his death at Chalgrove in an attempt to check the raids which Prince Rupert was making from Oxford. Struck at the onset in the shoulder by two carabine balls, he rode off before the action was ended by Hazeley towards Thame, finding it impossible to reach Pyrton, the home of his father-in-law. The body was carried to his own house amid the woods and hills of the Chiltern country, and buried in the church close by.

With his face downward; This was the dying request of some high-minded Spaniard of old, unwilling, even in the grave, as it were, to look on the misfortunes of his country.

O'erstrode the bounds; 'After every allowance has been made,' says Hallam, speaking of the Long Parliament from a date so early as August, 1641, 'he must bring very heated passions to the records of those times, who does not perceive in the conduct of that body a series of glaring violations, not only of positive and constitutional, but of those higher principles which are paramount to all immediate policy': (Const. Hist. ch. ix).

The axe; A clear and impartial sketch of Stafford's trial will be found in Ranke (B. viii): who deals dispassionately and historically with an event much obscured by declamation in popular narratives. Even in Hallam's hand the balance seems here to waver a little.

Heroes both;--Each his side; See Appendix B.