Christopher Hampton (bishop)
Irish bishop
Christopher Hampton (1552–1625) was an Englishman who was the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh from 1613 to 1625.
Family and education
He was born at Calais in 1552, son of John Hampton (of Frethby or Freeby in Leicestershire, a Merchant of the Staple in Calais, and a citizen of London and member of the Skinner's Company) and his wife Alice. His name is also given as John in the printed Patent Rolls. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. 1572, M.A. 1575, B.D. 1582 and D.D. 1598. He became a Fellow of Trinity in 1574.
Church career
He was ordained as a priest in 1580 and was vicar of Chesterton, Cambridge from 1585 to 1589 and Rector at Calbourne on the Isle of Wight from 1589 to 1612. By 1606, he was chaplain to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton and also had the opportunity to preach before James I on occasions, when he preached in support of royal supremacy and episcopacy. He became a royal chaplain and continued to attack presbyterianism and defend episcopacy.
On the death of Brutus Babington, Bishop of Derry, Hampton was nominated to the see by king's letter dated 21 December 1611, and was elected. He was not in fact consecrated to the see of Derry, but to that of Armagh, vacant by the death of Henry Ussher, by king's letter dated 16 April 1613, and by patent of 7 May 1613, and was consecrated the next day in St.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5112475. VIAF identifies the subject as 8448692. The Library of Congress control number is nr93005138. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1552, 1625, 1613 and 1572.
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This entry incorporates text from “Christopher Hampton (bishop)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.