Froude meant the Church of the Reformation, of private judgment, of an open Bible, of lay independence of bishop or priest.
To that Church he was faithful, and he sympathised in sentiment, if he did not agree in dogma, with evangelical Christians.

With Catholics, Roman or Anglican, he neither had nor pretended to have any sympathy at all.

The Reformation is a convenient name for a complex European movement, difficult to describe, and almost impossible to define; but so far as it was English and constitutional, it is embodied in the legislation of Henry VIII., which substituted the supremacy of the Crown for the supremacy of the Pope.

It was because Froude wrote avowedly in defence of that change that he incurred the bitter hostility of a powerful section in the English Church.

He also irritated, partly perhaps because his tone betrayed the influence of Carlyle, a large body of Liberal opinion to which all despotism and persecution were obnoxious.