continuity of the Church of England with the past, so it tended to underplay the Reformation, seeing it as at best a necessary evil to purge the Church of some of the worst excesses of Rome and at worst a wholesale distortion of the truth. By the end of the 1830s, approaches to the Reformation could be polemically charged. A good example is offered by Hurrell Froude, a close friend of John Keble and Newman, and one of the youthful leaders of the Oxford Movement in the 1830s, who had the misfortune
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