By the late Victorian Era, Church of England and to a lesser extent Protestant Episcopal Church clerics and intellectuals began to write works aiming to present a sort of post-mortem on the Tractarian movement that ripped Anglican unity apart in the 1830s and 1840s. Thomas Leach, a fellow at Christ College at Cambridge, published A Short Sketch on the Tractarian Upheaval in 1887. The intervening 135 years have clouded the essential controversies that led to the Tractarian movement, and also clouded the historical taxonomies that existed in the era before Newman and his comrades departed from the Anglican traditions.

            The Tractarian controversy did not reclaim a particular strand of ritualistic and traditional high church Anglicanism parallel to contemporary Roman Catholicism, but rather the Tractarians innovated with new a contrived liturgical tradition. Anglo-Catholicism as a category was a creation of the Tractarian controversy, rather than a continuity with high church Anglicanism of the 17^th through 19^th centuries. Modern categories of high church, broad church, and low church/evangelical are creations of the middle and late 2oth Century. In the early 19^th Century there were only two parties, the high church party—what is now often called old high church in the 21^st Century—and the Evangelical party.

The high church party, Leach noted, “now be known as the Historical High Church, or the old High and Dry, were the exponents of the Hanoverian Church and State religion, which made salvation to depend largely on obedience to Acts of Parliament, with but little insistence on the spirituality of the inner life.” The High Churchmen of the 18^th Century “were careful in their compliance with the directions of the Book of Common Prayer, but had come to take up a very different position from that which had been occupied by the High Churchmen of the seventeenth century.” Apostolic succession, a major marker of Tractarian churchmanship, was not an old high church priority. “The doctrine of the Apostolical succession had gone out with the Nonjurors, who, led by Sancroft, had set an example of disinterested consistency in the reign of William and Mary; and the English Church of the Georgian era had tacitly renounced that doctrine, or did not, at any rate, employ it much in controversy with nonconformists of all denominations.” To be an orthodox high churchman of the 18^th and early 19^th Century  was to urge “the claim of the Church to attention and consideration, not so much on the ground of her connection by an unbroken episcopal chain with the Church of the Apostles, as on the fact of her being by law established.” Regular conflict with foreign foes created “vigorous national feeling,” and kept “alive the remembrance of the fact that nationalities as well as churches owe their existence to God, and are possibly as important in His sight.” The essentially national character of the Church of England was pronounced. “The state must of necessity be anterior to the Church, and must be reckoned with in any theory of corporate church life. This was clear to old high churchman from “the fact that any given system of religious worship is approved and enjoined by the powers that be, which are ordained of God, carries a weight to sober common-sense minds, which is not always at once apparent in dogmatic statements about the sanctity and the certainty of an unbroken apostolic succession.”

The national character of the Church of England was as essential as apostolic succession. The relationship between the Anglican church and the state was decidedly Protestant and Reformational, while the Tractarians innovated along the lines of a completely separate spiritual polity favored paradoxically by Evangelicals and Roman Catholics.