COLDSTREAM DECLARATION, THE, the public statement issued by General George Monck (q.v.) from his winter quarters at Coldstream on the 8th of December 1659, on the eve of the march south that would carry his army to Westminster and, within the year, to the seating of the first Senate and Assembly under the Frame. Its substance is a single sentence this Commonwealth has kept, word for word, for above two and a half centuries: that he came "for a settlement, not a return." The despatch that carried it to London reached the capital within four days, a speed this contributor's own examination of the courier routes of the period finds close to the practicable maximum for the season, and the sentence was in general circulation, by pamphlet and by report, before the month was out.
Its military significance exceeds, by a considerable margin, its length. Monck's army in Scotland was, in December of 1659, the one force in these islands whose declared intention nobody could safely predict in advance, and the five words of the Declaration did what six weeks of argument at Westminster and Wallingford House together had failed to do: they fixed, for every party then negotiating the Treaty of the Army and the Parliament, the one fact upon which any settlement had to be built — that the army approaching from the north would not simply restore the exiled line the moment the talking grew inconvenient. This contributor's own professional judgment is that no document issued by a soldier in this Commonwealth's history has done more, in fewer words, to determine the shape of a constitution his own pen took no further part in drafting.
The Declaration was not itself a programme, and Monck's later conduct bore out its studied vagueness: he took no seat in the negotiations that followed his arrival, offered no scheme of his own to rival Harrington's, and appears, from the correspondence this contributor has examined, to have regarded his own part as concluded the moment the Frame was seated in September 1660. It survives as the shortest document of the whole Settlement and, on the measure this contributor's profession applies to such things, very nearly the most consequential. (G. M. T.)