Serene Master requests from your Royal Highnesses you will understand better from his own Letter. Which letter I am ordered to deliver to your Royal Highnesses with all observance and due respect; and, should your Royal Highnesses, as we greatly hope, grant a favourable and speedy answer, you will both do an act most gratifying to the Lord Protector, who has taken this business deeply to heart, and to the whole Commonwealth of England, and also restore, by an exercise of mercy very worthy of your Royal Highnesses, life, safety, spirit, country, and estates to many thousands of most afflicted people who depend on your pleasure; and me you will send back to my native country as the happy messenger of your conspicuous clemency, with great joy and report of your exalted virtues, the deeply obliged servant of your Royal Highnesses for evermore."[3] [Footnote 1: So dated in the official copy preserved in the Record Office (Hamilton's _Milton Papers_, p. 15) and in the copy actually delivered to the Duke (Morland, pp. 572-574)--the phrase in both being "_Dabantur ex aula nostra Westmonasterii_, 25 _Maii_, _anno_ 1654." In the Skinner Transcript, however, the dating is "_Westmonsterio, May_ 10, 1655;" which again is changed into "_Alba Aula, May_ 1655," i.e. "Whitehall, May 1655" (month only given) in the Printed Collections and in Phillips.] [Footnote 2: There are one or two slight verbal differences between Milton's original draft, here translated, and the official copy as actually delivered to the Duke, and as printed by Morland. Thus, in the first sentence, instead of _"Redditæ sunt nobis e Geneva, necnon ex Delphinatu aliisque multis ex locis ditioni vestræ finitimis, literæ,"_ the official copy has simply _"Redditæ sunt nobis multis ex locis ditioni vestæ finitimis literæ."_]