Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 / A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc.

As a matter of fact, the distinction of High Church and Low Church always existed in the Reformed English Church, and the history of these parties would be her history. But the names were not coined till the close of the seventeenth century, and were not stamped in full relief as party-names till the first year of Queen Anne's reign.
In October, 1702, Anne's first Parliament and Convocation assembled:
Mr. Lathbury is a very respectable authority in matters of this kind, but if he use originated in its strict sense, I am inclined to think he is mistaken; as I am tolerably certain that I have met with the words several years before 1702. At the moment, however, I cannot lay my hands on a passage to support this assertion.
The disputes in Convocation gave rise to a number of pamphlets, such as A Caveat against High Church , Lond. 1702, and The Low Churchmen vindicated from the unjust Imputation of being No Churchmen, in Answer to a Pamphlet called The Distinction of High and Low Church considered: Lond. 1706, 8vo. Dr. Sacheverell's trial gave additional zest to the dudgeon ecclesiastick , and produced a shower of pamphlets. I give the title of one of them: Pulpit War, or Dr. S——l, the High Church Trumpet, and Mr. H——ly, the Low Church Drum, engaged by way of Dialogue , Lond. 1710, 8vo.
To understand the cause of the exceeding bitterness and virulence which animated the parties denominated High Church and Low Church , we must remember that until the time of William of Orange, the Church of England, as a body —her sovereigns and bishops, her clergy and laity—comes under the former designation; while those who sympathised with the Dissenters were comparatively few and weak. As soon as William was head of the Church, he opened the floodgates of Puritanism, and admitted into the church what previously had been more or less external to it. This element, thus made part and parcel of the Anglican Church, was denominated Low Church . William supplanted the bishops and clergy who refused to take oaths of allegiance to him as king de jure ; and by putting Puritans in their place, made the latter the dominant party. Add to this the feelings of exasperation produced by the murder of Charles I., and the expulsion of the Stuarts, and we have sufficient grounds, political and religious, for an irreconcilable feud. Add, again, the reaction resulting from the overthrow of the tyrannous hot-bed and forcing-system, where a sham conformity was maintained by coercion; and the Church-Papist , as well as the Church-Puritans , with ill-concealed hankering after the mass and the preaching-house, by penal statutes were forced to do what their souls abhorred, and play the painful farce of attending the services of The Establishment.