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.