I suggest that you read this article:
So many seem to think that the essence of being Protestant is to conscientiously object to what is or was Roman Catholic. A little history and a little linguistic research shows Protestant to be a much more positive word, referring to what the original Protestants stood for rather than what they stood against........Few churches ever adopted the name “Protestant.” The most commonly adopted designations were rather “evangelical” and “reformed.” ... [W]hen the word Protestant came into currency in England (in Elizabethan times), its accepted significance was not “objection” but “avowal” or “witness” or “confession” (as the Latin protestari meant also “to profess”).
-- from the thread History Lesson: Positively Protestant
I’ve heard the general claim that “Protestant” meant “one who professes,” and have generally accepted it as true. However, checking with on-line translators, that seems largely false.
“Protestari” means “to protest.”
“Protest” can also be translated as “recluso,” “acclamo,” and others.
“To profess” is “confitentur,” (as in, “confess”) or “profiteor,” as in (”to promote a belief.”
HOWEVER, I say only LARGELY false: the 12th translation in Google of “profiteor” was “protest.” But in those contexts, the correlated words all had the modern connotation of “protest” rejected by your source: “recuso” (”refuse”), “acclamo” (”object”), “interpello,” (”reject”), “intercedo,” etc. (Google find correlated words to serve the function of a thesaurus.) So even if you accept the argument that “protest” was a translation of “profiteor,” in those contexts where profiteor was translated as “protest,” the meaning of “protest” was, indeed, more likely “to object” than “to confess.”
So, while the article could possibly be somewhat accurate, it’s hard to believe that even in those days, the term “protestant” lacked any connotation of objection. Indeed, “Protestant” was rejected by many Anglicans precisely because they did NOT see themselves as protesting against the Catholic church (as they saw Calvinists and Lutherans), but rather re-establishing a Church of England which they said had existed in the same manner of independence from Rome as had the Orthodox churches.
(In this, they have their history precisely backwards, however: St. Augustine of Canterbury established the Church of England specifically to fulfill the wishes of Rome to provide an educational establishment with which to counter the monks of Ireland, which had lapsed into semipelagianism.)