mct16:
George Washington has been named Britain's greatest ever foe in a contest run by the British National Army Museum
It seems a curiously lop-sided sort of a poll to begin with; they provided a closed set of contenders, then ran a public vote, then a further closed selection was made from the top of the public poll by a panel. Setting aside some odd additional conditions (that required the candidate had to be post-17th century, but also required the enemy to have actually headed an army against the British, which was surely a rarity even in the 17th century, and which certainly ruled out Hitler), as Washington polled only two percent in the "popular" vote, I don't think this really tells us anything.
mct16:
a vote on Britain's most outstanding military figure
Edward the Black Prince, Henry V, and Francis Drake weren't British: they were English... There was no Britain when they were around (hence the post-17th century limitation I suppose set by the original pollsters).
Actually, there'd be something to be said that both George Washington and Michael Collins were both technically British; George fought the Brits to obtain independence, and Michael Collins was fighting for it when he died (also, as the link says, he doesn't actually fit the conditions of the poll, as he didn't lead an army against the British on a battle-field any more than Hitler did).
I'd also like to jump back a it to
the mention of the Pilgrim Fathers fleeing persecution: this shows one of the pit-falls of doing history at all - you end up with one side of an argument, or even a wholly fallacious spin on events which just gets accepted.
The Pilgrims weren't really being persecuted, they were just in dispute with other Protestants at the time, and were as hard on others as others were on them. Persecution is what happened to the Jews in Russia during the pogrom, and in Nazi Germany, and this just wasn't the case with the Pilgrims.
They decided that they were right, and that the Church of England were wrong, and that other Calvinists weren't hard-line enough, so they left to start their own place for English Dissenters - they didn't "flee", as no one was actually pursuing them, they just "went" (in fact they wandered about in Europe for a bit, in England, then in the Netherlands, then back in Britain, then off to the New world).
They also weren't at all interested in religious freedom, they wished to impose their own brand of religion in a manner wholly intolerant of the beliefs of others; in this respect they took some of their problems with them.