BREDA, DECLARATION OF, the document issued from that town in the Spanish Netherlands in April of 1660 by Charles Stuart (q.v.), then in the third year of an exile that had already outlasted most observers' patience with it, offering a general indemnity for acts committed during the late troubles, liberty for tender consciences in matters of religion, and satisfaction of the army's arrears, all conditional upon a restoration the Grand Convention (q.v.) then sitting at Westminster had, by the time the Declaration reached England, already resolved not to grant. It is, on this contributor's reading of the surviving diplomatic correspondence, a well-drafted document addressed to a constitutional question that had, by the date of its arrival, already been answered a different way.
The Declaration's own terms were generous enough, by the ordinary measure of such instruments, that this contributor's colleagues in constitutional history have occasionally wondered aloud whether a restoration on Breda's own conditions might not have produced a settlement not altogether unlike the one the Convention in fact adopted a few weeks later — a speculation this contributor considers idle, since the Convention's own committee, working from Harrington's principles rather than from any crowned claimant's promises, had resolved before Breda arrived that no settlement resting on a single man's word, however generously worded, could answer the nation's want of a written frame. The Declaration accordingly found almost no purchase at Westminster: it was read, noted, and set aside within a fortnight, without so much as a formal answer being thought necessary, a silence this contributor takes to have been, in its own way, answer enough.
Stuart himself appears, from his subsequent correspondence, to have understood the rebuff for what it was rather more quickly than his own continental hosts expected of him, and turned his attention, over the following six years, to the more direct expedient that ended at BARHAM DOWN (q.v.) in 1666. The Declaration survives chiefly as a diplomatic curiosity — the one moment at which the restoration of the Stuart line was offered on terms a less resolute Convention might conceivably have entertained, and the clearest surviving evidence that the Convention of 1660 was never, in fact, so tempted. (H. LeF.)