For many nineteenth-century writers, [Diarmaid MacCulloch] claimed, the Reformation simply ‘did not happen’, or if [it] did happen, ‘it happened by accident rather than design or . . . was half-hearted and sought a middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism’.

While this is about as gross a distortion of history as it is possible to make. . .

Such a myth lies behind the grandiose claim of some nineteenth-century figures who viewed Anglicanism as the English branch of the Church Catholic alongside—and perhaps even superior to—Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy and quite distinct from the heresies of Continental Protestantism. While this is about as gross a distortion of history as it is possible to make, it was deeply influential on the perception and identity of Anglicanism, not least in its approach to theology, as well as in the closely related fields of liturgy and architecture.

Mark D. Chapman, Anglican Theology, 2, quoted in Michael Jensen, Reformation Anglican Worship, 95