Bumping for interest (and I voted - A) -
I think Columbus' voyage and reports on his return were a necessary condition for Henry VII to buy into Cabot's plan to cross the Atlantic to reach the east. By itself, the Columbus expedition was probably a sufficient cause. By the time Henry started to support Cabot, the English Court knew that the Spanish court had supported expedition across the Atlantic that returned with gold. Had Spain (nor anyone else) supported Columbus' western voyage into the Atlantic during the 1490s, Cabot might not have proposed the voyage, or if he did, the generally fiscally prudent Henry VII would not have agreed to support the 1497 expedition. In the absence of gold discoveries and the reemergence of other pressing business, Henry VII and the English stopped supporting exploratory expeditions until the 1570s or 1580s, three generations after Columbus and two generations after the exploitation of Mesoamerican and Peruvian precious metals became a thing.
While Bristol and other European fishermen may have seen land or signs of land independently of any state-sponsored exploration by Columbus or anywhere else, and may have stopped in Labrador or Newfoundland to dry their catch, even before 1492, this likely was not known or of interest to the royal court. Fishermen didn't publicize where they got their product, and nobody asked them where the fish came from anyway. In the absence of a Columbus or Cabot expedition, fishermen could have occasionally used the northeast North American coast to take on water or dry their catch, without the English, or any other European court, taking interest, for at least two generations. Even then if knowledge of land across the Atlantic diffused and became the focus of a royal investigation, it does not mean that any European court would make colonization of the area a priority. If the English Court (or another Court) were motivated to support an exploratory expedition to check out the fishing grounds and lands near them in maritime Canada, they still might only sponsored continued expeditions if they find something profitable on the other end.
Certainly there's no guarantee that explicit English royal knowledge of dry land on the other side of the Grand Banks (gained either through interrogation/interviews of fishermen or through a one-off exploratory voyage) would mean that a fanning out in all directions along the coast has to happen as rapidly as it did in the case of the Spaniards of 1492 [Reviewing Spanish timeline - 1493-1515, 22 years saw the successive discoveries of the major Caribbean islands and exploration of the Caribbean shores of South and North America. This led to discovery of Mexico, Florida and the Pacific coast of Panama by 1520, global circumnavigation by 1522 and the conquest of the Inca by 1534.