In the April/May 2010 issue, we identified the ten greatest women in British history so now we turn our attention to Britain’s most notable men. Historian and TV presenter, Dan Snow, reports on those that he feels have made an indelible mark. By Hilary Macaskill. 

Dan Snow, historian and television presenter, has a particular interest in military history – his most recent series was Empire of the Sea, a history of the Royal Navy and its impact on the wider world. His most recent book, Death or Victory: a history of the Seven Years War in North America, was published last year to mark the 250th anniversary of the fall of Quebec. Following our feature on famous women in British history, we asked him to tell us who he thought are the top ten most notable men.

Alfred the Great (849–99)
Alfred the Great is really the father of England. Before Alfred the idea that you could unify quarrelsome Saxon kingdoms and the Celtic kingdoms of South West and Britons of the north west was a pipe dream. But he achieved that. To start with, he was a great military ruler: as King 
of Wessex he saw off the Viking threat, which threatened to carve up England. By inventing a system of fortified towns, a military innovation, 
he protected Wessex. The Vikings were tough and scary, but what they couldn’t do was besiege. They came by boats and couldn’t bring heavy equipment: put a wall in front of them, they were in trouble.

Alfred also had a profound effect not just in the military area but on learning and education, too. He was far-sighted: it was he who started the codification of English legal system. He was a founding father of the English project – he began 
to call himself King of the Angles and Saxons – and his descendants, particularly his grandson Athelstan, went on to conquer the whole of England. He was altogether a really extraordinary man who began the movement to a more integrated British Isles.

Robert Bruce (1274–1329)
Robert Bruce, on the other hand, was someone who was as important in the history of Scotland. He is one of the most important Britons ever – I’m often asked about top British people and no one mentions anyone who lived outside England. He was the first King of Scotland: he crowned himself at Scone, very symbolic as Edward I, King of England, had removed the Stone of Scone to form part of the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey.

It is thanks to Robert Bruce and virtually him alone that there was no lasting conquest of Scotland. When Scotland and England did later join together to form Britain, it was as equal partners rather than one as a conquered nation. What most people know about him is the legend of the spider that is supposed to have inspired him when hiding in a cave, but the important thing is his massive impact 
on British history. His actions explain why there are two 
separate countries of England and Scotland – it was the result of Robert Bruce’s seemingly hopeless opposition to Edward I and Edward II. He was a great leader and a great warrior: he managed to put together a coalition and defeat a massive English army and establish an independent Scotland. Bannockburn was by far the most significant and far-reaching English defeat. After that, there was no serious attempt to annexe Scotland.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
William Shakespeare is absolutely a man of history, one of the most significant human beings that has ever lived. He is the finest writer of English in history, and probably the greatest wordsmith in history. If you are going to talk about the English language – or even just language – you have to talk about Shakespeare: he means something to everyone. He has been translated all over the world. It’s almost ironic to put him in a list of Britons: he doesn’t really belong to any one place, I don’t think, though of course he was born and raised in England, in Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare is for everyone. His history plays alone have coloured every succeeding generation’s view of the kings of England. Richard still languishes in ignominy while Henry V is an unblemished hero!

Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540)
Thomas Cromwell, when he was chief minister to Henry VIII, engineered the break with Rome. But he did more than advocate the Reformation – he started to define the rights and status of the English Parliament in England and the king’s relationship with Parliament: the idea that the highest law of the land is that which is voted for in Parliament and assented to by the King is one that remains to this day.

He was also a terrifically good organiser and a moderniser. It was he who instituted the registration of births, marriages and deaths in each parish, for example. He tried to break the power of the church, of aristocratic privileges; he sorted out the anomalies left over from medieval history, he brought in legislation to make things uniform, and to help the state to tax people effectively. He started to turn England into a modern power.

John Churchill, 1st Duke of 
Marlborough (1650-1722)
I wanted to include a general and decided that, rather then the Duke of Wellington, and the Battle of Waterloo, or Montgomery of Alamein, who helped turn round the Second World War, Marlborough was more significant. He was a particularly extraordinary general who won very significant battles against Louis XIV who at that time was the most powerful man in Europe.

Very interestingly, he was also a diplomat and a politician – his wife was Queen Anne’s best friend. He was a man who moved in the highest circles of governmental life as well as military. His diplomatic skills were fundamental to holding together the Grand Alliance, that coalition against Louis XIV. He lived to be a fine old man – he was 72 when he died. And, of course, he had a famous descendant – Winston Churchill was born in the house that Marlborough built, at Blenheim Palace – named after one of his victories.

Joseph Banks (1743–1820)
Just as Shakespeare had an impact on global culture, I wanted to choose someone who had an impact on the birth and growth of science – and Joseph Banks had a huge effect both in his own work – he took part in one of the most significant scientific explorations with Captain Cook on the Endeavour through the South Pacific, bringing back hundreds of botanical specimens – but almost more importantly as a hub for other scientists. He got Kew Gardens up and running, but he was also patron of Herschel, one of greatest astronomers and discoverer of Uranus, 
and the chemist and inventor of the Davy miner’s lamp, Humphrey Davy. He was a kind of one-man lobbying group for science, as President of the Royal Society for 41 years. He was at the centre of this remarkable upsurge in science and exploration, taking Britain to the very forefront of world science. Much of that research would allow Britain to develop the biggest economy in the world, and would lead on to real economic benefits in a generation.

Adam Smith (1723-90)
In a different vein, Adam Smith was an academic, a thinker. His ideas, most famously laid out in The Wealth of Nations, form the basis of the modern globalised economic system, rightly or wrongly, and are therefore very important. And his texts are still read, by anyone studying economics around the world.

He was born in Kirkcaldy, near Edinburgh, went to Glasgow University at 14 and later became a Professor of Moral Philosophy there, becoming a prominent figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. His lectures there, published as The Theory of Moral Sentiments, won him a European reputation, but it is The Wealth of Nations, which he wrote after returning to Kirkcaldy, which has cemented his reputation.

In the short term, his ideas helped to bring about reform and practices in Britain and helped turn Britain into the largest economy in the world. His legacy is the globalised capitalist system of 20th century. He is the intellectual father of modern capitalism. His ghost is still with us, of course.

George Stephenson (1781-1848)
George Stephenson was another who had a huge impact 
on the modern world. The great theme running through the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries was making the world smaller, the shrinking planet. And George Stephenson – who had started as a cowherd and then became a colliery fireman before developing his expertise in engineering – took one of the greatest steps in this process by developing, and accelerating, the move towards trains. He didn’t invent the first-ever locomotive engine. What he did was develop it. He established the first passenger train service. He was a pioneer of railways.

And trains brought about an unbelievable change. For the first time, ordinary people could travel outside 30 miles of where they were born. That had never happened before and the world became radically different. Stephenson’s work on trains transformed the world. He saw the impact trains would have and he was instrumental in extending railways all over the world (adherence to the standard gauge was very much his doing): the American West and central Asia were opened up by trains.

The other interesting thing about George Stephenson was that he was self-educated – and that says something important about that period – people had access to learning, not formally. Many cities had learned societies where one could find out about latest inventions, what was coming over from Paris and Europe. George Stephenson was a product of this world.

David Lloyd George (1863–1945)
To choose Lloyd George might seem a bit cheeky – he is my great-great-grandfather – but I wanted to include a great Prime Minister. Churchill would be the obvious choice, and certainly things were dark in the summer of 1940 when he took that role, but I think, in many ways, Lloyd George’s now largely forgotten role of turning things round in the First World War is even more impressive. In 1916, things were extremely bleak, with Russia tottering on the brink of revolution, industrial relations in Britain at a low, and British forces on Western front under immense pressure. As Minister of Munitions, he had hugely improved that industry, and then he became a great wartime Prime Minister. He provided charismatic, morale-raising leadership that helped Britain win the war.

He was a successful unifying war leader. But his time as Chancellor was almost more important. He was one of most radical Chancellors in history. He laid many of the foundations of the Welfare State, and indirectly he broke the power of the House of Lords, establishing the absolute supremacy of the House of Commons: the House of Lords threatened not to pass his budget and Lloyd George had a stand off with them and made them admit that the House of Commons was in fact superior. Behind that is the admission that people were sovereign, that Britain was a democratic country not an aristocratic one.

He was a commoner, brought up in a shoe-maker’s cottage in North Wales, speaking Welsh, who became Prime Minister of the world’s largest empire. And on the way up, in doing so he was a radical politician, he did a huge amount for social justice and broke the power of the House of Lords. He was a remarkable man.

Tim Berners-Lee (1955-)
Finally, Tim Berners-Lee is a man of global significance in effectively inventing the World Wide Web. When he was working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Berners-Lee proposed a global project based on the concept of hypertext to facilitate sharing information among researchers, a ‘web’ of documents. He saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet, so that researchers could link from remote sites and, in 1990, the World Wide Web was born – and it was one of the most significant inventions in history

I’ve chosen him to symbolise what is the greatest revolution since the Industrial Revolution. He’s very modest about it. But the digital age has changed all our lives so completely and dramatically and we’re only just discovering what it can really do.

Dan Snow was talking to Hilary Macaskill.

MORE MEN OF NOTE

Francis Drake (1540-1596): Fired the imagination of a nation. From Drake onwards Englishmen, and then Britons, looked to the sea for wealth, power and adventure.

Isaac Newton (1643-1727): Redefined the universe and our relationship with it. He built the foundations of modern science.

William 
Wilberforce (1759-1833): One of an extraordinary group of men who managed to get slavery abolished.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859): Ships, tunnels, buildings, trains and much more. The great genius of the Industrial Revolution.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882): Made the biggest, most dangerous and far-reaching scientific breakthrough in history. We are not what we once thought we were.

Winston Churchill (1871-1965): Mobilised the English language to stiffen the sinews of a nation after a terrible defeat and the prospect of a long war.

Alan Turing (1912-1954): He was instrumental in the development of computers and also breaking the Nazi top-secret code during the Second World War.

DO YOU AGREE?

What do you think about Dan's choice of famous men throughout history? Have we missed anyone out? Do tell us who you think makes the grade, at www.britain-magazine.com/categories/men. In the magazine's next issue, Britain's most notable men!

Where to find out more

• Bannockburn Heritage Centre (National Trust for Scotland), Stirling. Site of Robert the Bruce's victory over King Edward II. Tel: 0844 493 2139; www.nts.org.uk.
• Blenheim Palace, Woodstock. Built for 1st Duke of Marlborough by Queen Anne and a 'grateful nation'. Tel: (01993) 810500; www.blenheimpalace.com.
• George Stephenson's Birthplace (National Trust), Northumberland. Born here in 1781, George and his whole family lived in the one room. National Railway Museum, York. The world's only working Rocket replica is here. 
Tel: (01661) 853457; www.nationaltrust.org.uk. Tel: 0844 8 15 3139; www.nrm.org.uk.
• Hyde Abbey and Winchester Discovery Centre. Hyde Abbey was founded for the burial of Alfred in 1110. www.visitwinchester.co.uk.
• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Under Joseph Banks' supervision, Kew became one of the world's foremost botanical gardens. Tel: (020) 8332 5655; www.kew.org.
• Shakepeare Country. Explore Stratford-upon-Avon and South Warwickshire where the Bard was born and lived, and take in a play 
at Shakespeare's Globe, 
the Elizabethan theatre on London's Bankside, with museum and tours. 
www.shakespeare-country.co.uk. www.shakespeare.org.uk. 
www.notjustshakespeare.org. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and Museum, tel: (020) 7902 1400; 
www.shakespeares-globe.org.
• Woolsthorpe Manor (National Trust). Woolsthorpe near Grantham, Lincs. Isaac Newton was born in this modest manor house in 1642 and he made many of his most important discoveries here. www.nationaltrust.org.uk.