The Paper Itself
The document at the center of this record carries a heading rather than a title page: “At White-Hall the 13th of February, 1688/9.” The double year is not an error. England still used the Old Style calendar, under which the new year began in March, so a document dated February 1688 by the people who signed it falls in February 1689 by modern reckoning. On that date, Parliament presented the paper to William and Mary of Orange at the Palace of Whitehall in London.
Its full title is “The Declaration of the Lords and Commons Assembled at Westminster; Presented to Their Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Orange.” It is cataloged as YHC/CL/JO/6/2, held at The National Archives and searchable through the archive’s online catalog, Discovery, having arrived there with the transfer of Parliament’s own Archive Collections.
No single author signed it. A committee drafted the text, chaired by John Somers, a lawyer who later served as William III’s chief minister, but the document itself carries no individual’s name, speaking instead in the collective voice of “the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons.”
The Thirteen Charges
The Declaration lists thirteen specific complaints against James II. It states that he suspended and dispensed with laws without Parliament’s consent, and prosecuted bishops for petitioning against that dispensing power. It records the creation of an Ecclesiastical Commission under the Great Seal, the raising of money beyond what Parliament had granted, and the keeping of a standing army in peacetime without Parliament’s approval, with soldiers quartered on subjects unlawfully. It states that Protestants were disarmed while Catholics were armed and given office in violation of the law, and that elections to Parliament were interfered with.
Every grievance is written as a general pattern of conduct. None is tied to a named minister, a dated incident, or a single case. The document describes a pattern of governance, not a set of specific incidents.
The Thirteen Terms
A second list follows, matched point for point: thirteen restrictions on royal power set out as what Parliament asked in exchange for offering the crown, including no suspending of laws without Parliament’s consent, no standing army in peacetime without that consent, free elections, and the right of Protestants to bear arms for their own defense.
Parliament’s own record of that day states that the clerk of the House of Lords read the Declaration aloud, and that the Marquess of Halifax, speaking for the assembled estates of the realm, then asked William and Mary to accept the crown. Parliament’s later account is worth stating plainly: the Declaration was not presented as a condition they were legally required to accept before being made king and queen. It was read to them as a statement of the rights and liberties of the subject, not tendered as a contract needing a signature.
Parliament’s Verdict, and What Followed
The Declaration states its own conclusion in one sentence: that James II’s conduct was “contrary to the known laws and statutes and freedom of this realm.” On that basis, Parliament treated the throne as vacant rather than simply unoccupied, and offered it jointly to William and Mary, who were crowned King William III and Queen Mary II at Westminster Abbey on April 11, 1689.
Later in 1689, Parliament re-enacted the Declaration as a statute, “An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown,” known since as the Bill of Rights. The National Archives dates this simply to “later in 1689”; Parliament’s own record gives the Act’s royal assent, and its statutory effect, as December 1689. Either way, the change in form mattered: a one-time political indictment against one king became standing law binding every monarch who came after him.
The Names That Aren’t There
Across all thirteen grievances, the Declaration blames unnamed “Evil Counsellors, Judges, and Ministers” for aiding James II. Not one is identified by name. No bishop is named among those prosecuted, no election named among those interfered with, no regiment named among those unlawfully quartered. It levels a systemic accusation, without naming the individuals involved.
That gap is a fact about the paperwork, not a fact about what happened. A general indictment may simply have suited Parliament’s purpose better than a detailed one, since naming individuals invites individual defenses, and this document was not built to survive cross-examination. Whether the absence of names reflects caution, haste, or a deliberate choice to indict a system rather than a list of people, the record does not say.
The Missing Defense
No document in this record carries James II’s response to any of the thirteen charges, and no rebuttal from his supporters was entered alongside the Declaration in Parliament’s own archive. The file, as it survives, is one-sided by construction: an accusation drafted by the party that had already resolved to remove the man it accused.
Nothing in the record explains why no defense survives. It may never have been formally made, or may have been made and not recorded, or recorded somewhere outside the papers that reached The National Archives. Each of those is a guess, not a finding, and none is supported by anything currently cataloged under this reference.
What Historians Have Made of It Since
Three things belong to later commentary, not to the 1689 text. The National Archives’ own catalog note observes that the Declaration uses, in its words, outdated language to describe Roman Catholics, without specifying which terms it means; historians have pointed to this as characteristic of the anti-Catholic sentiment common to the period, rather than anything unusual to this particular document.
The National Archives has also noted a structural resemblance between the Declaration’s list of grievances and the list of charges against George III in the United States’ Declaration of Independence, drafted almost a century later, in 1776. That is offered as an observed echo in form, not as a claim that one document influenced the other.
James II’s removal was followed, in the decades after, by a series of Jacobite risings aimed at restoring his line to the throne. Those risings are a later historical consequence of 1689, not something the Declaration itself addresses or anticipates, and lie outside what this particular record contains.