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Even though the early reaction to Buckle's work was generally mixed, the burgeoning historical community was much more willing and able to reach a consensus opinion. ‘Have you seen Buckle on Civilization Vol. 1[?]’, historian William Stubbs (1825–1901) wrote to his friend and fellow historian, Edward A. Freeman (1823–92). ‘There are to be Ten. I do not believe in the Philosophy of History so do not believe in Buckle’. He went on to imply, however, that he assumed Freeman would like the work as it promoted history to the ranks of science, a proposition that Stubbs himself found attractive. He simply found Buckle's science of history to be more philosophy than it was science. ‘I fear you will make me out to be a heretic indeed after such a confession.’

However, it would be Buckle's science of history that would be denounced as heretical while Stubbs's opinion of Buckle's work would become the orthodox response from English historians. At issue was not whether or not history should become a science. This was a moot question for most. At issue, rather, was what kind of science history should become, what kind of methods history should employ, and what kind of identity the historian should adopt in order to be trusted to impart historical and scientific knowledge to peers and to the wider public.

On 19 March 1858 ‘the doors of the Royal Institution were opened some time before the usual hour to admit the throng of fashionable people who had collected’, recalls Henry Thomas Buckle's (1821–62) friend and biographer Alfred Henry Huth, ‘and by the usual time for opening the theatre was [sold-out] … by a brilliant and excited audience’. Those lucky enough to get tickets ‘were crammed from floor to ceiling’ in order to be present for the first and, what would turn out to be, the only public lecture by Buckle who himself could not procure a sufficient number of tickets for his guests. ‘It is very hard that you should be limited because of your just popularity’, John Barlow, the organizer of the event, wrote to Buckle. ‘But what can be done? I can not expand the lecture-room, nor prevent members from exercising their right to indulge themselves and their friends with a high intellectual gratification.’ The members to whom Barlow referred belonged to the Royal Institution and they were hoping to get a glimpse of the ‘great Buckle’ while hearing him speak on a surprisingly popular topic: the science of history.

Edward Augustus Freeman died at Alcante in Spain on 18 March 1892. He had been seriously ill for forty-eight hours and, as described by John Evans to the Society of Antiquaries, he was struck down ‘by a disease that in these days need not exist’: smallpox. Less than three years later, on 13 January 1895, John Robert Seeley would perish of a painful cancer that he had been suffering from for some time. In 1898 William Stubbs's health also began to fail. He preached his last sermon on February 1901 at Windsor in memory of Queen Victoria who had died the previous January, the same month that witnessed Mandell Creighton's death. On 22 April 1901 Stubbs took his final breath. That same year Lord Acton suffered a paralytic stroke. He withdrew from public life and eventually died on 19 June 1902. Within the space of ten years, the most outspoken proponents of scientific history were all dead.

When the English Historical Review was founded there was not much thought given to the writing of obituaries. However, they would become a fairly regular occurrence in the journal's pages given the fairly high casualty rate suffered by the discipline in the final decade of the Victorian period.

Even though there is clear evidence that art was once again becoming an instrument of the English historian's toolkit, and in the pages of the specialized English Historical Review no less, the profession continued its boundary work against Froude with varying degrees of success, though ending in ultimate failure. The same could certainly not be said for Henry Thomas Buckle whose presence disappeared from the discipline of history in England almost as soon as the man died of typhoid in 1862. But the violence against Froude's work spanned his entire adult life, continuing into the 1890s and even beyond. His work and method would eventually be vindicated but only well after he passed away when the work of his great scientific contemporaries began to be judged from more critical eyes.

In September of 1854, the future popular historian Henry Thomas Buckle wrote to his friend Maria Grey, who was then becoming a powerful advocate of female education, to thank her for returning his much cherished six-volume set of August Comte's Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42). He had earlier lent Gray the volumes along with a set of instructions both for reading the difficult work and also for providing for its proper care. He suggested reading the ‘Exposition’ of the first volume but then skipping the analysis of the physical sciences contained in the first three only to return to them after reading the very important, in his mind at least, later volumes on the social sciences. He pressed her to keep Philosophie positive always in a safe place when not reading it, perhaps keeping it in a cupboard, ‘as on several grounds I value it very much, and I never leave it out at home’. When she returned the volumes because she was going on a trip to the country, Buckle expressed regret that she did not take them with her. Such a trip would have been the perfect time to try and get through Comte's rather unpleasant prose, but perhaps more importantly, ‘in the country one particularly needs some intellectual employment to prevent the mind from falling into those vacant raptures which the beauties of nature are apt to suggest’.

While Stubbs was attempting to found a school for historical workers under the new inductive methodology at Oxford, his counterpart at Cambridge, Charles Kingsley (1819–75), was far less interested in advancing the cause of history as an autonomous and scientific discipline of study, or so believed his critics. Stubbs and Kingsley could not have been more different and not just in historical outlook. Stubbs was, as we have seen, a High Churchman and Tory, whereas Kingsley's Anglicanism was of the Essays and Reviews variety. He was also, for much of his life, a Christian socialist. Where controversy seemed to follow Kingsley throughout his life, Stubbs avoided it at all cost, believing it to be the natural result of an inherent subjectivity that should be suppressed. ‘Of all things in the world except a controversial woman’, Stubbs said at one of his Oxford lectures, ‘a controversial boy is the most disagreeable’. Stubbs was also a self-described historian, an editor, a diligent archival worker. Kingsley, on the other hand, would likely have never referred to himself as a historian: at best he was an historical novelist; at worst he was a writer of autobiography who hid his opinions behind the veil of ‘fiction’.

Making history a science not only involved the expression of a method that historians could ascribe to at will. For history to become a true science, the scientific method had to become a communal method – a mos communis – that would in essence form the very basis of a professional discipline of history. Making the inductive scientific method the method of history would involve a fair amount of disciplinary acts in the form of epistemic boundary maintenance. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the boundary work of scientific historians seemed to focus on separating their inductive endeavour from Buckle's more philosophical and deductive project. As we have seen, however, historians promoting history's more artistic sensibilities also criticized Buckle's science of history as a way of rejecting history's scientific status entirely. What is more, such historians tended to promote a way of writing and teaching history that was much more popular with students and the reading public than was the fact-based approach advocated by the likes of Stubbs and others.

The establishment of the English Historical Review, the Cambridge Modern History, and even a few well-researched scholarly monographs held out the hope and promise that an inductive science of history would become the rule rather than the exception, that histories from nowhere would essentially be everywhere. The reality of history publishing was far from this ideal, however. Scientific historians may have wanted to present the past in all its reality, but publishing such work was the only way to communicate the historian's findings and this left historians largely at the mercy of publishers who were themselves dependent on a readership not necessarily interested in scientific standards. For historians who were supposed to let the past speak for itself, much of their work relied on just the style they condemned in others and was directed specifically at the readers who would have had little interest in reading good scientific history. As much as the Rankean historians expressed a desire to create a normative world where their work would be read and judged by peers alone, they were still very much public figures who wanted their views concerning history to be both widely disseminated and appreciated.

Establishing history as a science certainly seemed like violent sport, largely promoted through attacks and arguments about what history should not be, rather than what it could and should be. There was a fairly consistent message behind the attacks, however, one that suggested the historian must suppress his subjectivity and present the facts in an inductive fashion. For Seeley, this involved understanding that history is not dramatic, that it is not inherently structured like a novel. One of his main goals over his tenure as Regius Professor was to impress on students and the general public that history had to eschew its literary past and embrace a way of thinking and writing about the past that likely would not be fascinating to the ordinary reader. Freeman was less convinced that history could not be entertaining but he also knew that there was a temptation to make it more entertaining than it already is with a twist of phrase or simply a literary style in general that might force a weak mind such as Froude's to consistently skew the facts to fit the story rather than making the story fit the facts.