Hello, my name is Neil Johnston and I’m the Head of Early Modern Records at The National Archives. Today we’re going to look at a document from our Chancery collection.
Chancery is one of the oldest government departments, beginning before the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066 but emerging as a distinct office from King John’s reign early in the 13th century. The Chancery was the royal secretariat, making systematic copies of important documents on parchment membranes. As we can see here this practice went on for centuries and this one dates from the end of the 17th century. This document has a unique reference, which is C 212/18, which refers to a specific office within the Chancery where they made written copies of a whole mix of government decisions and policies. All archives need to use reference systems for their records to ensure they can be properly understood. At The National Archives the references mostly relate to the sections of the government departments that created them. In this instance we can see that there was a section of Chancery known as the pettyback, where staff started making copies of important government decisions or interactions during Henry VIII’s reign in the 16th century, and continue to store records in this way until the late 19th century. This means that once researchers learn how to use this part of the collection, they can move back and forth across the centuries as the officials continued to make copies on rolled up sheets of parchment.
Now let’s take a close look at our document and work out what it’s about. The document is called an enrolment. Information is written onto the sheets of parchment, which are stitched at the top and the bottom of each piece and rolled up like toilet paper and stored, keeping the information safe. It’s dated from February 1688, but we consider the year to be 1689. This is because in the premodern period the first day of the year was understood to be the 25th of March, Lady Day, which is 9 months before Christmas Day. So the year didn’t run from January to December but instead March to March. This changed in the mid-18th century, but for records from before this time we must mentally recalculate the year.
It is a copy of a declaration made by the two houses of Parliament known as the Declaration of Rights. William of Orange, a Dutch prince, landed in Torbay, Devon, on the 5th of November 1688 at the head of an army that challenged King James II for the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. King James was a Roman Catholic, which was deeply problematic for many English subjects, but for a time they remained loyal. Until, that is, he started to alter political and religious policy in England to accommodate Roman Catholics in senior political and military positions. He had tried to dispense with laws that made it illegal for Roman Catholics to hold office, but he sought to do this without Parliament’s consent. When James’ predecessor Charles II attempted to do just this in 1672, Charles had to withdraw his declaration of indulgence. When James tried to do the same thing over a decade later, he met with ferocious opposition from the bishops in Parliament but he was adamant that he had legal authority to do so.
James’ actions reinforced in many people’s minds that he had little consideration for Parliament, which he was supposed to rule with, not against. James also sought to discipline several bishops who opposed his plans, putting them on trial but ultimately failing to secure prosecutions. Alongside this James also maintained a standing army, which was not usual at this time. It caused many people to fear his reasons for doing this and they were afraid he would use it against them to pursue his policies, so as time passed there was an increasing opposition to James’ policies as his opponents started to fear that James was an authoritarian ruler. When James announced that his wife Queen Mary was pregnant, there was now the potential for a Catholic succession across the Stuart kingdoms. For this reason, William was invited by a group of parliamentarians to lead a Dutch Protestant army into England to take the throne by force and he set sail in October 1688. After he landed there was only minor skirmishes between James’s army and Williams invading force. James appears to have lost his nerve and he fled England, leaving the throne vacant.
In advance of his invasion William had published a pamphlet where he had stated that he did not wish to conquer England, but instead announced that he would leave it to the Westminster parliament to resolve the political question of whom should rule. However, only a legitimate monarch could summon a parliament, so an equivalent body, known as a convention, was elected to determine who was the ruler of the Stuart kingdoms.
The convention started its deliberations in January 1689 and despite requests that they quickly reach a consensus, there was large divisions between and within the Houses of Commons and Lords, and it took several weeks of debates. The main question they had to decide on was whether James in fleeing had merely left the throne vacant and was still the legitimate monarch, or whether he had abdicated, meaning that William could claim it legally if William was the legitimate ruler. James’s son was removed from the succession, meaning that Protestantism in the minds of many who were then alive was safe in the end. The two houses of parliament decided that James had un-kinged himself by fleeing and that the throne should be offered to both James’s niece Princess Mary and her husband William, and that they were to be joint rulers with power vested in William.
This was announced in the Declaration of Rights alongside a series of requests that resolved many of the most important political questions of the day. It determined that the monarchs could not dispense with the law as they saw fit, but had to consult parliament; that parliament was to meet regularly to decide on matters of taxation; that it was illegal for a standing army to be maintained in peace time in England; and that the monarch could not marry a Roman Catholic. The declaration went on to list many grievances that had built up over the previous decades, mainly about how England was governed, and asked that William and Mary consider these matters and legislate for them through parliament. Importantly, as the convention had not been summoned by a king, the peers and MPs asked that William and Mary would summon a full parliament as soon as they could to pass legislation to resolve many of the complaints.
William accepted but was not bound by the terms of the Declaration of Rights and was declared King alongside Mary, who was Queen. Later in 1689 they did summon a full parliament, which passed legislation on many of the grievances within the Declaration of Rights and it remains one of the most important documents in the development of the English political nation. A separate political settlement was needed for Scotland, and James and William fought for control of Ireland in the subsequent years.
This is just one of many of hundreds of documents from this heated political moment in English history and it’s available to view at The National Archives.