The Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome was the first step taken in Parliament towards the extinction of the papal jurisdiction and power in England. Considerable importance therefore attaches to anything that it might be possible to discover about the origin and development of this measure. Among the state papers at the Public Record Office and the British Museum there survive no fewer than eight drafts and four fragments of drafts of the act, all on paper and most of them bearing corrections which are usually in the hand of Thomas Cromwell. The drafts are listed in The Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII, though one fragment is there wrongly attributed to a different act. In order to make reference easier, we shall assign the letters A to H to the drafts in the order in which they are now bound, and the abbreviations frg. 1 to frg. 4 to the fragments.

The correct sequence of these drafts can be established from the corrections made in them. A reasoned exposition of the whole evidence would fill many pages and is therefore impossible. The alternative is a practically dogmatic statement, but it is hoped that the relations between at least some of the drafts will become clearer in the course of this paper. Normally, corrections made in one draft are found embodied in the text of another.