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As King James I was traveling to London after his accession in the spring of 1603, a delegation of ministers presented to him the Millenary Petition, so called because it claimed to represent "more than a thousand" ministers desiring the reform of abuses in the English church. This petition requested a conference on these matters. The king is said to have promised that he would hold a conference, which finally met early the next year at Hampton Court. This fact is commonly found in histories of King James, but without any reference to contemporary documents.1 One might assume that like other well-established facts this one is recorded in public archives that anyone can easily check. But in all the material which has come down from the first year of James's reign,2 the only reference to this delegation of ministers, of their petition, or of the king's response, is a report or rumor of a petition exhibited to the king by a thousand ministers.3 A document does in fact exist which identifies itself as a petition addressed to James in the name of "more than a thousand" ministers of the Church of England and which does mention a "conference among the learned" as one of the ways in which the petitioners were prepared to make clear to him that the offenses they complained of were contrary to scripture. Although this document may have been presented to the king, no trace of this document can be found in any of the collections of public papers, either in the British Public Records Office or the papers kept by Robert Cecil, the king's principal secretary; nor is there any contemporary record of its presentation to the king or the king's response to it. Many details of the king's journey are recorded, including the presentation of some relatively unimportant petitions; but there is not a single record which says, in effect, "While the king was at X, certain grave preachers came and exhibited a petition for removing abuses from the church, which he graciously promised to consider." It is all very well to say that "It is well known" that "the Hampton Court conference resulted from King James's favorable response" to the Millenary Petition's request for a conference, but if this knowledge has no contemporary evidence to support it, then historians must read the evidence again.