On one hand, Yelton says the movement was a "bottom-up" effort to make the Church of England more Catholic, but the "bottom" he refers to definitely doesn't include the people of the parishes -- it was a movement almost exclusively limited to clergy and (Anglican) religious, and Yelton goes farther to say it embraced sbout 1000 Anglican priests in total between 1900 and 1960. Most, though, died off by the 1940s. It ended entirely with the adoption of vernacular liturgy and other reforms by Rome during Vatican II, when the ultramontane Church it aspired to emulate disappeared.
In fact, I would say that rather than being "bottom-up" it was more like an esoteric passive-aggressive effort either to irritate Church of England bishops or render them irrelevant, and in doing this, it probably achieved its end. The resistance to the authority of Church of England bishops among Anglican Papalists as defined by Yelton centered on two of the Thirty-nine Articles, XXIV, which says it is "repugnant. . . to minister the Sacraments, in a tongue not understanded of the people", and XXV, which says, "The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly use them."
As opposed to Anglo-Catholics, which were more likely to use Tridentine vestments and Continental church furnishings but in the context of the Book of Common Prayer, the Anglo-Papalists were more likely to use the Latin mass in whole or part, or some uniate English translation, and were more likely to reserve the Sacrament or use it in Corpus Christi processions, all illegal and a direct challenge to the bishops. An attempt to revise the Church of England prayer book in the 1920s was on one hand meant to compromise with Anglo-Catholic innovations, but on the other intended to make existing prohibitions more enforceable; the effort failed.
Frederick Kinsman was plainly familiar with this movement, and he saw it as part of a fundamental difficulty in Anglicanism. On one hand, there were priests who said the mass in Latin, on the other, there were priests who denied the Resurrection or the Trinity; once he became a bishop, he recognized the futility of imposing some sort of discipline on any of them. Through the 1920s and 1930s, the peak of the Anglo-Papalist movement, Church of England bishops mainly looked the other way, and although holdovers like Fr Hunwicke allege that Anglo-Papalists were somehow persecuted, formal actions against even the most extreme adherents were rare.
There's another difficulty with Anglo-Papalism on the ground. Of seriously Anglo-Papalist priests, we see ultramontanism that appears to aspire toward unity with Rome, although what form this would take -- should Rome simply declare the provinces of York and Canterbury again under the authority of the Holy See, should there be some unspecified other structure, or should certain Anglo-Papalists become the primates of their own tiny groups? -- was never remotely explained or agreed on.
On the other hand, as Diarmaid MacCulloch and others have pointed out, Anglo-Catholicism has been a refuge for gay priests from the start (he has his questions about William Laud), and that goes the more for Anglo-Papalists. Yelton's account is peppered with arrests for indecency or immorality, which may or may not have ended priests' careers. Some early members of the movement were closely associated with Oscar Wilde at Oxford; Yelton also says that TS Eliot's involvement with the movement is underreported (as is Eliot's homosexuality). This is not compatible with Roman Catholicism, which does not ordain men who are actively gay.
Yelton also covers interest in the occult among Anglo-Papalists very lightly. Necromancy is a mortal sin according to the Catholic Catechism, but influential figures in the Church of England, including Anglo-Papalists during this period, don't seem to have seen any contradiction between their version of Christianity and occultism. James Pike's ultimately fatal descent into the occult was fostered and encouraged by Anglican clergy and prebendaries.
As a result, while some Anglo-Papalists did eventually become Catholic priests or laymen, most did not, and the movement on the whole strikes me as delusional. I think there are lessons to be drawn in explaining the currently disappointing outcome of Anglicanorum coetibus.
