of it, he wrote two copies of this letter, with slight alterations of language, that the king might select between them the one which he would officially recognise.  Both these copies are extant; both were written the same day from the same place; both were folded, sealed, and sent.  It seems, therefore, that neither was Cranmer furnished beforehand with a draught of what he was to write; nor was his first letter sent back to him corrected.  He must have acted by his own judgment; and a comparison of the two letters is singular and instructive.  In the first he spoke of his office and duty in language, chastened indeed and modest, but still language of independence; and while he declared his unwillingness to “enterprise any part of that office” without his Grace’s favour obtained, and pleasure therein first known, he implied nevertheless that his request was rather of courtesy than of obligation, and had arisen rather from a sense of moral propriety than because he might not legally enter on the exercise of his duty without the permission of the crown.[428]

The moderate gleam of freedom vanishes in the other copy under a few pithy changes, as if Cranmer instinctively felt the revolution which had taken place in the relations of church and state.  Where in the first letter he asked for his Grace’s favour, in the second he asked for his Grace’s favour and licence—­where in the first he requested to know his Grace’s pleasure as to his proceeding, in the second he desired his Most Excellent Majesty to license him to proceed.  The burden of both letters was the same, but the introduction of the little word license changed all.  It implied a hesitating belief that the spiritual judges might perhaps thenceforward be on a footing with the temporal judges and the magistrates; that under the new constitution they were to understand that they held their offices not directly under God as they had hitherto pretended, but under God through the crown.

The answer of Henry indicated that he had perceived the archbishop’s uncertainty; and that he was desirous by the emphatic distinctness of his own language to spare him a future recurrence of it.  He accepted the deferential version of the petition; but even Cranmer’s anticipation of what might be required of him had not reached the reality.  In running through the preamble, the king flung into the tone of it a character of still deeper humility;[429] and he conceded the desired licence in the following imperial style.  “In consideration of these things,”—­i.e. of the grounds urged by the archbishop for the petition—­“albeit we being your King and Sovereign, do recognise no superior on earth but only God, and not being subject to the laws of any earthly creature; yet because ye be under us, by God’s calling and ours, the most principal minister of our spiritual jurisdiction within this our Realm, who we think assuredly is so in the fear of God, and love towards the observance