'Evident', 'Happiness', and 'Liberty' /// Did the first sentence of William Prince of Orange's 1688 'Declaration' directly inspire the first sentence of the American 'Declaration of Independence' of 1776?

Human societies worldwide invest a lot of cultural and communal time in celebrating and remembering various historical military battles. In my visits to Plymouth I have walked around the many impressive naval war memorials at Plymouth Hoe, an area which - with sunrise joggers and dog walkers - is almost reminiscent of the areas of war memorials which I have visited in central Washington DC. A spy movie location for clandestine handovers.

Here in Northern Ireland, there is a monument in the grounds of Belfast City Hall for the 1899-1902 Boer War, but who has a clue about that any more? We recall battles on Remembrance Day each November, and of course on the 12th of July each year. But, as per the perceptive JRR Tolkien quote below, maybe the battles themselves - the leaders, the strategy, the casualties, the victories - are not actually what truly mattered. Of the millions of warriors and weapons, "that which they defend" is what mattered most. Values, aspirations, concepts of justice and liberty.

While preparing to depart Holland for England, on 10 October 1688 a Declaration was issued by William, Prince of Orange and printed on multiple Dutch presses, including the one above by Arnold Leers at The Hague. Various hands had crafted its 5000 words – very likely the Englishman John Locke who had been exiled to Holland, definitely Scotsman Bishop Gilbert Burnet and possibly Dutchman Constantijn Huygens Jr, who was the hereditary secretary to William's family. (Burnet's uncle was Archibald Johnston of Warriston - co-author of Scotland's National Covenant of 1638).

Their departure from Holland was delayed due to bad weather, which caused Burnet and William to have a famous theological dispute about predestination. Burnet and Huygens were with William's vast armada which reached Brixham on 5 November 1688. Locke returned to England in February 1689 in a ship from Holland, accompanying William's wife Mary. Mary arrived in London on 21 February and she and William were proclaimed joint sovereigns.

The careful vocabulary, and even the very existence, of the Declaration of the Prince of Orange has been almost totally forgotten. Yet, as explained in this recent blog post from King's College London, by Basil Bowdler, the 'Glorious Revolution' included 'the most successful propaganda campaign to that point in European history' - akin to the World War 2 mass propaganda leaflet drops that the Allied Forces poured from cargo planes over Nazi-occupied France, which accompanied illegal, coded, radio broadcasts (the wonderful recent Netflix adaptation of All The Light We Cannot See tells that story superbly). Bowdler says this:

"... 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..."

Michael Barone wrote that 60,000 copies had been smuggled into England a week or so ahead of William's arrival, primed for immediate widespread distribution - which Barone described as 'one of the most impressive feats of organization any early modern regime ever achieved' (source here, p 148.)

The Declaration was first read aloud when William's vast procession left Brixham and arrived in Newton Abbot, by local clergyman Rev John Reynel – I went to see the market cross monument last week when I was in Devon. The inscription repeats the common error 'of England' and it has the date wrong, saying 5th November but was actually 7th November. In later years, the people of Newton Abbot proposed demolishing the church tower behind and replacing it with "an equestrian statue of the Protestant Deliverer on a massive pedestal of Devonshire granite." (source Devon and Exeter Gazette, 4 October 1851).

THE WORDS

But what did the Declaration say? Here is the very first sentence. Look at these highlighted words –

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Holland, 10th October 1688:

"It is both certain and evident to all Men, that the publick Peace and Happiness of any State or Kingdom cannot be preserved, where the Laws, Liberties and Customs, established by the lawful Authority in it, are openly transgressed and annulled..."

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The Declaration was treason, but William's revolution succeeded. William's Declaration was taken to America and reached Boston in April 1689, causing the Boston Revolt (see previous posts here and here).

And less than 100 years later, when another revolution was being considered in America, those introductory words seem to have been dusted down. In another Revolutionary Declaration, the Declaration of Independence of 1776, the 'peerless prose' was penned by Thomas Jefferson. But when I recently compared the wording of these two Declarations, it seems that William's introduction looks to have been inspirational, the genesis of Jefferson's now near-immortal words which have been memorised by hundreds of millions of American citizens in the centuries that followed –

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Philadelphia, 4th July 1776:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it... "
.........

Perhaps the word 'evident' followed by a list of attributes was a common grammatical or rhetorical device? Jefferson's words were of course influenced by many sources, including Samuel Rutherford's 1644 Lex Rex, the above-mentioned John Locke, as well as the many 'resolves' issued by local communities across the 13 Colonies from 1774-6, many of which were Ulster-Scots emigrant descendants. It takes many streams to form a river, and the opening statement looks to have directly flowed from the Declaration of the Prince of Orange of 1688.

“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

This article draws a comparison with a 1581 Dutch document called the Plakkaat, which was effectively Holland's Declaration of Independence, freeing them from Spain (English translation here). But the intro is not the same.

I've not seen anyone else ever make a direct connection between the 1688 and 1776 Declarations before. I very much welcome readers' feedback on this.