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leaking the contents of the manifesto prior to the Prince’s landing. As soon as he heard of its existence, James II’s ambassador at The Hague tried to obtain a copy, entirely without success. On 28 September (new style), James’s Secretary of State pressed him: ‘It would be of the greatest importance imaginable to his Majestie to see the Declaration they intend to sett out, as soon as possible, and this I am well assured, that you have us’d your best endeavours to gett it, yet the better to enable you, you are to spare no money, nor stick at any summe, that may procure it.’ It was to no avail. ‘You may imagine I have taken all possible care to come by the Declaration which I hear is on the press,’ the Ambassador responded, ‘but the States printer is not to be corrupted; I have employ’d some to see if any of his servants can be; they are all sworn, and their places so lucrative they will not endanger them.’ Three days later he reported that ‘the manifesto or Declaration can not yet be had at any rate for I have offer’d considerably for it, and you will, I believe, see it there [in England] sooner than we here.’5 In fact, William signed and sealed the final, agreed text of the Declaration on 10 October. On 15 October, the English consul at Amsterdam reported that ‘order is come hither from The Hague for the printing of 20,000 copies of the Prince’s manifest’, and that ‘a proportionable number is printing at Rotterdam and at The Hague’, but that he too was unable to obtain a copy. ‘They are to be distributed at the same time that the Fleet putts to sea.’

Copies were finally obtained on 20 October. But in spite of the fact that the ambassador dispatched them for England ‘by an express’, his messengers were held at the Dutch coast, ‘nobody being suffer’d to pass that way or by any other till the Prince set sayle’. So although by now packages of the Declaration had been distributed to locations right across Britain to be released as soon as the Dutch were known to have set out, the government in London had still not seen it. On 2 November (old style), when William had already set out, James told the Archbishop of Canterbury he had finally been shown copies, by ‘several persons, to whom they had been sent in penny-post letters, which he had thrown into the fire; but that he had still one copy’. On 3 November, two days before William landed at Torbay, Princess Anne showed Lord Clarendon ‘the Prince of Orange’s Declaration, saying the King had lent it to her, and she must restore it to him tomorrow’.

Bentinck’s distribution machine launched fully into action on 5 November, and his agents began distributing copies everywhere. Not only was London inundated with copies, but the Declaration was now being spread all over England, and a separate Declaration of the Prince for Scotland was circulating north of the border. Simultaneously, the Declaration in Dutch, French and German was released in the Dutch Republic, the English ambassador reporting that ‘the manifesto is now sold publickly and in all languages’.

The pamphlet’s coordinated propaganda, and the build-up of expectation before it was finally released, ensured that the Declaration had a major impact, not only in England and the United Provinces but throughout Europe. It was printed in Amsterdam, Edinburgh, The Hague, Hamburg, London, Magdeburg, Rotterdam and York. Copies printed at The Hague bore the official imprimatur of the Prince: ‘Printed at The Hague by Arnold Leers by special order of His Highness’. Altogether, twenty-one editions in the four languages appeared in 1688, eight of them in English. Intended, clearly, for an international as well as an English audience, the Declaration was widely dispersed on the Continent. ‘Many thousand copies’ were sent across the Channel to be ‘consigned to some trusty person in London’. Copies were handed directly to all ambassadors and ministers at The Hague except the English and French representatives. Through copies in the Dutch language, William justified his undertaking to his Dutch subjects on the same grounds he had employed