You’ve been getting your history from too many teflon-suited Rev. Billies.
Many Protestants falsely believe in the Protestant version of the history of England. Edwin Jones, the well known English historian, call that history the “Great Myth”. It was started during the reign of Henry VIII and continued to develop until the nineteenth century. It was fed by Protestants determined to create a case for the “need” of Protestantism in England.
This Great Myth, which is still powerful today among Protestants, is so pervasive that it even shunts to the margins of historiogrphy some of the greatest of all historians because their works did not fit the pre-conceived mold. One of them is John Lingard. He was a Catholic priest and the author of an amazing 10 volume history of England. Although his books raised a great deal of controversy in his day (for upsetting the apple cart of Protestant myths), his works were forgotten as soon as he died. He made no impression on English history or historiography. That is all the more bizarre when one considers that he has been proven right again and again by modern historians like Norman Davies. The silence on Lingard was so deafening that Davies and Jones have both tried to relieve it somewhat by writing about him and they collaborated on a fine book about him in 2002 (that is unfortunately too rich for my blood; perhaps I’ll get a used copy one of these days).
Cobbett did use Lingard’s material to great success, however, over 150 years already. Cobbett was not Catholic, but he was a good historian and he composed one of the best English grammars ever written.