[5] He grew up in a high-church Tory family from which he rebelled as early as 1850, being "temporarily banished from his uncle's house for ridiculing the uproar over 'Papal Aggression.

'"[6] He entered the church, being ordained to the diaconate in 1860,[7] and served various cures in London, under a constant strain caused by delicate health.

[4] After suffering from failing health he abandoned these projects and instead concentrated his energies on the preparation of his A Short History of the English People, which appeared in 1874, and at once gave him an assured place in the first rank of historical writers.

[9] More recently J. W. Burrow proposed that Green, like William Stubbs and Edward Augustus Freeman, was a historical scholar with little or no experience of public affairs, with views of the present that were Romantically historicised, and who was drawn to history by what was in a broad sense an antiquarian passion for the past, as well as a patriotic and populist impulse to identify the nation and its institutions as the collective subject of English history, making ... the new historiography of early medieval times an extension, filling out and democratising, of older Whig notions of continuity.

[citation needed] His wife assisted him in carrying out and completing his work as his broken health took its toll during his few remaining years.