Bill of Rights 1689
The English Bill of Rights receives royal assent
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The law is universally called the Bill of Rights 1689, yet the official statute book assigns it to 1688.
16 December 1689
On 16 December 1689 William III and Mary II gave royal assent to the Bill of Rights, turning it into an Act of the English Parliament. The House of Lords had passed it on 23 November.
The date is Old Style, corresponding to 26 December in the Gregorian calendar — and official statute collections often label the Act the Bill of Rights 1688, following regnal-year and Old Style conventions.
From declaration to statute
The Act gave statutory force to the Declaration of Rights presented to William and Mary the previous February, including limits on suspending laws, on taxation, and on peacetime standing armies without Parliament.
It also confirmed William and Mary as sovereigns, settled the succession, and excluded Catholics — and people married to Catholics — from the Crown.
Read the clauses, not the legend
This was not a modern universal catalogue of individual rights. Much of it addressed Parliament's privileges and the actions its preamble attributed to James II's government, among them illegal dispensing with laws, taxation, and maintaining a standing army.
The celebrated arms clause applied only to Protestant subjects, to arms suitable to their condition, and as allowed by law.
The surviving original is an iron-gall-ink manuscript on parchment, held by the Parliamentary Archives.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited Date corrected
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →
Date corrected. The research places this at 1689-12-16.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The standard British date, 16 December 1689, is Old Style (Julian); it corresponds to 26 December in the Gregorian calendar.
- Official statute collections often label the Act the Bill of Rights 1688 because of regnal-year and Old Style dating conventions, even though royal assent occurred in 1689.