The narrative historiography of Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859; History of England from the accession of James the Second, 5 vols, 1848-59) signalled the end of the “philosophical” tradition of history-writing exemplified by David Hume. Macaulay shared with Hume and the Enlightenment historians a sense of history’s upward progress (known, after Macaulay, as “Whiggish”, i.e. with a Liberal teleology), as well as an idea that amidst the crises and conflicts of history, the best way forward was a “golden mean” or mid-way course, e.g. between the extremes of the country’s monarchist and parliamentary, or Catholic and Puritan, traditions. This propensity to highlight compromise between extremes suited Macaulay’s political statesmanship – he held government posts from 1839 on – and set British historians apart from the more dialectic mode of Hegel (and Marx) and Michelet, which explained the forward impetus of history from the conflict between antagonistic opposites, and their sublation (Aufhebung) rather than their reconciliation. Of continental historians, Guizot came closest to this British historiographical view.

With Carlyle and his adept James Anthony Froude (History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1850-70), a strongly denominational inflection set in, which derived English national identity and strength from the Reformation, entailing the congruence of state and Church against Catholicism, and a centuries-long inculcation of Protestant moral values. This Protestant view of the English national character was all the more remarkable since it was propounded by intellectuals who themselves struggled with their faith, and eventually became agnostics (but always remained anti-papist as well as anti-Jacobin).

These intellectuals inflected their moral post-Protestantism with a strongly racial view of the nation, stressing its Germanic (Anglo-Saxon, Danish) origins. Historically, this placed England in an intermediate position between, on the one hand, its Anglo-Saxon and Danish cradle-lands on the continental shore of the North Sea (Motley’s fervently anti-Catholic Rise of the Dutch Republic widely and empathetically read in Britain) and, on the other hand, a westward-growing empire with for its future base the Protestant, Anglo-Saxon-colonized North American lands.  This Saxonist attitude, also expressed in Kemble’s The Saxons in England: A history of the English commonwealth (1849), meant that most national histories set the country’s beginnings among the conquering Anglo-Saxons and Danes, with the British-Roman period relegated to the status of pre-history.

In contrast to the 18th-century preoccupation with the conflicts of the period 1640-90, Victorian historians developed lenient views on Cromwell, following Carlyle’s 1845 edition of the Letters and speeches (which set them sharply apart from Irish cultural memory). Instead, the country’s two main historical turning-points were located in the reign of Elizabeth (with its consolidation of the Reformation, its staving-off of the Armada, and the foundation of future imperial expansion), and the Norman Conquest. “1066” was seen as the foundation of an ongoing battle between the native-Saxon tribal-democratic institutions and the imposition of a Continent-imported feudal aristocracy (the “Norman yoke”) – a historicist trope going back to the propaganda of the 17th-century Civil War and given fresh currency by Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and its historiographical echo in Thierry’s Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normans (English trl. 1841). William Stubbs’s magnum opus, the Constitutional history of England (3 vols, 1874-78), still followed this tradition, but emphasized, in the “golden mean” mode, that the relations between Crown and Parliament were as often based on common interest as on antagonism.

Froude’s views, with their combined celebration of Puritan-derived ethics, Saxonist racial supremacism and colonial imperialism, were challenged by the less Carlylean E.A. Freeman (History of the Norman conquest, 1867-76); in Ireland, his Anglocentrism was challenged by W.E.H. Lecky (History of England in the eighteenth century, 1878). Their criticism came at a time when Saxonism was on the wane and anglocentric chauvinism found a fresh, less historicist outlet in global imperialism. Significantly, the main critics were academically established historians (Freeman would be appointed regius professor of history at Oxford in 1884, as successor to Stubbs; Lecky was a fellow of Trinity College Dublin), while Froude himself, following the crisis of faith which severed him from the Anglican Church, made his living as a self-employed author, journalist and lecturer.

The professionalization of history-writing and the development of archive-anchored critical standards had set in with the establishment of a centralized national archive in 1838 (the Public Record Office) and culminated in the foundation of the English historical review in 1886. Its national emphasis (England’s constitutional history and foreign policy) was accompanied by an older tradition of local antiquarianism (“County histories”) and a more recent transnational interest in intellectual and literary history following the work of Henry Hallam and Henry Thomas Buckle – both private scholar-critics. Lecky published a History of the rise and influence of the spirit of rationalism in Europe (1865) and a History of European morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869).

It was the nationally-focused trend, however, that was institutionalized in the new university departments that formed around the existing regius chairs and in the new “redbrick” universities. Here as in other countries, the new departments were more factualist and archive-based in their approach than their narrative forerunners; here as in other countries, their new factualism failed to undo the appeal that the earlier, more Romantic and melodramatic histories had exercised on the public imagination. Dickens’s Child’s history of England (1851-53; a school text well into the 20th century) continued the Carlyle view in milder form; less attenuated was the reactionary imperialism of the School history of England by Rudyard Kipling and C.R.L. Fletcher (1911). Historical novels like those of Charles Kingsley, and the boys’ adventure novels of G.A. Henty, were deeply Froudesque; and popular histories like the clergyman John Richard Green’s A short history of the English people (1874) continued Froude’s Saxonism. Green’s sense of an archaic Germanic continuity still traceable in present-day Englishness would (together with H.M. Chadwick’s ethnographic-historical The origin of the English nation, 1907) inspire the mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien.