Bill of Rights 1689
The English Bill of Rights receives royal assent and becomes statute
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The official statute database still heads it "Bill of Rights [1688]" — even as it records royal assent on 16 December 1689, because England's legal year began on 25 March.
Assent at Westminster
On 16 December 1689 royal assent was given at Westminster to An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown, now known as the Bill of Rights.
The assent gave statutory force to the Declaration of Rights that had been read to William and Mary on 13 February, when the Convention offered them the Crown. They had therefore already been monarchs for ten months; the Act confirmed their authority and the succession settlement rather than putting them on the throne that day.
Thirteen articles
The House of Commons Library summarizes thirteen articles defining limits on the Crown and confirming parliamentary and individual rights: parliamentary consent for taxation and for a peacetime standing army, free elections, freedom of speech in Parliament, the right to petition, and prohibitions on excessive bail, excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishments.
The Act also confirmed the succession settled on William and Mary and their designated Protestant heirs, while excluding persons professing Roman Catholicism from the Crown.
Read the small print
This was mainly a settlement of Crown–Parliament relations and of grievances against James II, not a modern universal declaration of equal individual rights. Its freedom-of-speech provision protects speech and proceedings in Parliament, not public expression generally.
Parliament expressly says the February Declaration was not imposed as a condition William and Mary had to accept before becoming king and queen. And though the Act said its provisions would remain law forever, portions have since been amended or repealed.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 2 audit passes, 1 issue open Traditional date
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Traditional date. This date is the conventional one, not one fixed by a contemporary record.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The date 16 December 1689 is the contemporary English Old Style date and corresponds to 26 December in the Gregorian calendar.
- Official revised-statute collections often classify the Act as the Bill of Rights 1688 because the parliamentary session began on 13 February 1688 under the old English convention in which the legal year began on 25 March. This does not mean royal assent occurred in modern-calendar 1688.