The Declaration

Key Text: The declaration of His Highness William Henry, by the grace of God, Prince of Orange, &c. of the reasons inducing him, to appear in armes (The Hague, 1688).

On 5 November 1688 a Dutch army landed in Devon to conquer Britain. 400 ships had transported c. 40,000 soldiers, sailors and other attendants: the largest maritime invasion force Europe had seen, twice as large as the Spanish Armada. The expedition’s commander, Prince William of Orange, claimed that he was merely responding to English pleas to be rescued from the high-handed rule of the Catholic King James II. Amongst the muskets and cannons, the Dutch expedition carried a far more potent weapon: thousands of copies of a pamphlet headed the Declaration of his Highness William Henry of the reasons inducing him to appear in arms. This short 5,000 word text, all-but forgotten today, was at the centre of arguably the most successful propaganda campaign to that point in European history.

Romeyn de Hooghe’s depiction of William of Orange’s invasion fleet (1688), Scottish National Portrait Gallery, P 9487. Creative Commons CC by NC.

The Declaration was one of the most widely-circulated texts in the seventeenth century. In an age where a best-selling pamphlet rarely ran to more than 3,000 copies, well over 100,000 copies of the Declaration were printed. Mobilising printers across the Dutch Republic, the centre of the European book trade, tens of thousands of copies of the Declaration were printed in advance of the Dutch invasion. Translated into Dutch, French, German and Latin, at least twenty-one editions of the Declaration were printed in 1688. This broad linguistic coverage, combined with subsequent print runs in Britain, the Netherlands and Germany helped to circulate the text across Europe.

The Declaration of his Highness William Henry, perhaps the most widely-circulated pamphlet in seventeenth-century Europe. Image courtesy of Leiden University.

Remarkably given the vast print run of the Declaration, it was written and dispatched in almost total secrecy. Supporters of William in England and Scotland covertly collaborated on the text, secretly dispatching drafts to The Hague. William’s leading advisors subsequently collated and edited these versions into a single text, which was finally translated into English by Gilbert Burnet, an exiled Scot sheltered at William’s court.

Aware that something was afoot, the English Ambassador at The Hague, the Marquis d’Albeville, a former spy, was told to ‘spare for no money’ in acquiring a copy. Yet two weeks later, Albeville had to report that all of his efforts had proved fruitless for, ‘the States printer is not to be corrupted’. Simultaneously, thousands of copies of the Declaration were being smuggled across the North Sea to England and sent to book sellers and supporters of William across the country, to be distributed as soon as the Dutch landed. As soon as William’s invasion fleet set sail, copies were handed out to all foreign ambassadors at The Hague – excluding the English and French representatives – and the text was read throughout the courts of Europe.

The Declaration was written to appeal to this broad audience. It presented William’s invasion as a response to the arbitrary rule of James II on behalf of his oppressed subjects. William had come as a defender of the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of England, all of which had been threatened by James. This was a message that naturally appealed to James’ predominantly Protestant subjects, but by framing the invasion merely as a defence of the religion and liberties of the English nation, rather than an aggressive assault on Catholicism, William was attempting to allay the fears of his allies, the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain.

Yet the Declaration also served another agenda of William’s. As both James’ nephew and son-in-law through his marriage to James’ eldest daughter, Mary, William had long been viewed as the most likely heir to James’ throne. In July 1688, however, James had celebrated the birth of his son. Yet from the outset rumours had circulated that the infant was not in fact the royal couple’s but had been smuggled into the Queen’s chamber. William cynically exploited these rumours in the Declaration, claiming that the baby ‘was not born by the Queen’.

As William’s forces slowly advanced, the Declaration was distributed, displayed and read aloud by William’s supporters to mass gatherings in villages and towns. Readings of the Declaration also precipitated mass desertions of soldiers from James’ army. After the garrison at Plymouth had the Declaration read to them, for instance, the troops unanimously declared their willingness to serve William in securing the religion and liberties of England. Haemorrhaging supporters from his army, nobles and even within the royal family, James II fled England for exile in France. William had landed in England prepared to conquer the country. Thanks largely to the Declaration, though, opposition to him had simply evaporated.

William’s arrival in London was celebrated on a euphoric scale, one newspaper claimed that ‘the like was never seen’ before. When a hastily assembled convention of MPs and Lords met to deliberate on whether to offer the crown to William and Mary, they began by reading the Declaration aloud. Indeed, over the following months of furious debate over the political settlement, the Declaration’s slogan of defending the laws of England and the Protestant religion were constantly repeated and absorbed into the political psyche. Eventually William and Mary were offered the throne in February 1689, yet for the first time the offer of the crown was conditional on the monarchs agreeing to a Declaration of Rights, promising to  rule in accordance with Parliament and making Protestant faith a prerequisite to claim the throne. These unprecedented conditions were later codified as the Bill of Rights, commonly seen as the birth of British constitutional monarchy.

A contemporary playing card depicting William’s entry into London in December 1688, c. 1688-89. Image courtesy of the British Museum.

In the months following William’s accession, his new subjects chose to forget that they had ever been invaded. Instead, the events of 1688-89 were commemorated as a ‘Glorious Revolution’; a bloodless coup in which the English had risen up in defence of their religion and liberties and fashioned a political settlement ensuring that their monarch could never threaten these again. The Declaration was so successful in recasting the Dutch invasion of 1688 as a native revolution that, paradoxically, it has obscured the decisive role played by the Dutch. A key text that all-but wrote itself out of history, the Declaration bears vigil to the European influence in the development of Britain’s parliamentary democracy.

Basil Bowdler is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of St Andrews.

Selected Bibliography.

Primary Sources
Prince William of Orange. Declaration of his Highness William Henry of the reasons inducing him to appear in arms (The Hague, 1688)
Papers of Charles Middleton, Second Earl of Middleton, – British Library, Add. MS 41818

Secondary Sources
Claydon, Tony. ‘William III’s Declaration of Reasons and the Glorious Revolution’, The Historical Journal 32 (1996), pp. 87-108.
Harris, Tim. Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685-1720 (London, 2006).
Israel, Jonathan I. ‘The Dutch role in the Glorious Revolution’ in Jonathan I. Israel (eds.) The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its world impact (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 105-162.
Schwoerer, Lois G. ‘Propaganda in the Revolution of 1688-89’, The American Historical Review 82 (1977), pp. 843-874.
Der Weduwen, Arthur. State Communication and Public Politics in the Dutch Golden Age (Oxford, 2023).

3 November 2023.