All-time top Britons?
This contest started by Kevin Drum is fun.
He is sure Churchill is not top 10--as if to be provocative, he says something like top 100 at best. He wants to rank all kinds of poets and intellectuals higher (the group referred to in Aristophanes' Clouds: fortune-tellers, con artists, sophists, poets, people who just won't shut up, pathological liars--oh, and philosophers).
He lists Elizabeth I and Shakespeare near the top--surely, rightly so. As I understand it, Shakespeare actually formalized English as a respectable written language (not just the gibberish spoken by peasants and slum-dwellers), and added immensely to its vocabulary, while demonstrating that it would not necessarily respect any rules. The English language is the most successful prostitute in history--picking up everyone who is able to contribute, willy-nilly, always insisting ruthlessly that nothing be kept unless it is useful or beautiful--in rare cases, both.
Elizabeth ensured England/Britain would continue to exist as a great country. The Catholic countries of France and Spain still thought that if they got her to marry the right person, England would be a sort of province to one of them. Some French lords still thought they had the rightful claim to the throne. She dealt brilliantly and ruthlessly with Scottish and Irish problems. (The Welsh problem had been largely solved by the fact that ... er ... she was Welsh). Thanks to the somewhat fluky defeat of the Spanish Armada, Britain began to emerge as a great naval power. The biggest problem of her life, as of her father's, was the succession, and she didn't solve that; but she made it possible for her successors to solve it.
Ah yes, naval power. Nelson, as one of Drum's commenters points out. But what about Raleigh, who I think was more or less a pirate?
Churchill loved to compare himself to the generals: Marlborough (his ancestor), Cromwell, Wellington. Did any of them actually save the country, or ensure the world-wide dominance of English language and culture, the way the navy did?
Intellectuals,etc.: Locke must be the most successful political philosopher ever if that is judged by his ideas being adopted by a wealthy great power. The United States continues to defend capitalism (the right to property, the labour/investment theory of value), and to look askance at the welfare state because it allegedly saps ambition. What seem to be new and radical ideas about marriage being a contract between individuals, not something laid up in nature or Heaven, are in Locke (along with energetic efforts to show everything is in Scripture. "God wasn't giving Adam or Noah any great gifts, way back then... they had to discover that they had a right to self-preservation, and all morality and law flows from that"). The Europeans who think they are more intellectual than Americans have never really based a society on rational argument--with the arguable devastating exceptions of Communism and perhaps fascism/Nazism. They have simply gradually dissolved tradition, never being sure what comes next. They are open to the super-market of ideas because they are truly shopping. The Americans just keep exploring Locke, with just enough Spartan jingoism or exceptionalism to give them that enviable feeling of unity, "us against the world."
Anyway, I agree with commenters that Churchill is somewhere in the top 10, with a couple of notches to spare.
UPDATE Aug. 10: Robert H. Ferrell, editor, in The Eisenhower Diaries (p. 208): "Churchill now loomed as the greatest statesman in all of British history--greater than Cromwell by far, greater than his ancestor Marlborough, greater than Wellington, who was only a great captain, greater than Disraeli and Gladstone, not to mention th leaders of the early twentieth century." I would want to do some researh on Pitt the Younger, Palmerston, and maybe Salisbury. Could Churchill be the greatest when he presided over the final dissolution of the real British Empire? Maybe like Arthur in the Camelot story, he demonstrated the real nobility of the (late) regime he represented by fighting on, yet taking defeat as nobly as possible? Churchill once said the American Lend Lease program was totally lacking in squalor; perhaps this was even more true of his own actions in World War II?
Parts of the British campaign in World War II were like Cook in the Antarctic--poorly planned and hopeless, yet carried out with a stiff upper lip. Some attempt was made to hang on to Hong Kong, with the result that many prisoners were taken by the Japanese--and treated horribly. Hong Kong? Then the British fought back against Japan by struggling through the jungles of Burma (now Thailand). Burma? Did the British play the decisive role in any decisive battle?
By Salisbury's time the Empire had grown too big and, unknown to the great middle-class public, the rot was setting in. The Boer War was very foolish, and Salisbury probably never knew what to say to Rhodes and other white people who wanted to establish the Empire all over creation, other than "you've got to be kidding! Is this ever going to pay for itself, like India?" But Salisbury may have had the best grasp of the whole range of foreign policy issues, making both Disraeli and Gladstone look partial and cartoonish by comparison. Palmerston was also very intelligent, and knew how to turn off and on a kind of cracker or tough guy approach that was hugely popular.
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