u/F1Fan43

England has had our fair share. A selection are:

-Æthelred the Unready. His name is an Anglo-Saxon pun meaning Well-advised the badly advised, and he earned it by doing his best to lose England to the Vikings (and eventually succeeding).

-King John. Lost the Angevin Empire, caused the Magna Carta to be signed, nearly lost England to the Dauphin of France and was the inspiration for the Robin Hood legends because of how shit he was. Ruined any success he might have otherwise had either through luck or his own personality.

-Edward II. Lost to the Scots, and could not play the game of politics well, becoming overly reliant on favourites (the second in particular becoming hated) and eventually getting overthrown by his own wife and her lover.

-Henry VI. In his reign England lost the Hundred Years’ War, and then his weakness and inability to keep the nobility in line caused factionalism that spiralled into the Wars of the Roses. He was deposed by the Yorkist Edward IV, and eventually murdered in the Tower of London.

-Charles I. He played a big role in causing the English Civil War, and consequently a huge amount of pain and bloodshed, lost, was offered a pretty good deal by Parliament, refused it, and proved to be so intransigent that he caused the (temporary) downfall of the monarchy itself. Perhaps his tragedy was that he was just competent enough to make a fight of it and drag it out, but not enough to actually succeed.

-James II. He got chased out of the country in the Glorious Revolution after only four years on the throne.

For monarchs, we have:

1. Elizabeth II (70 years)
2. Victoria (63 years)
3. George III (59 years)
4. James VI of Scotland (57 years, 22 of which were spent as King of England too)
5. Henry III

of England (56 years)

And for Prime Ministers we have:

1. Robert Walpole (20 years)
2. William Pitt the Younger (18 years)
3. Lord Liverpool (14 years)
4. Lord Salisbury (13 years)

For the UK, it is traditionally dark green, known as British Racing Green.

They’re generally famous and accomplished (or fun and interesting) heads of state or government, but they don’t necessarily have to be as of Civ 7.

Personally, for England I would choose Alfred the Great, Æthelflæd, Æthelstan, Henry II, Edward III, Edward IV, Charles II. For Britain, maybe a Prime Minister like Wellington, Pitt the Younger, Gladstone or Disraeli. Or maybe Admiral Nelson for a left-field choice.

The classic RAF roundel, as modelled by this SE5 from the First World War, is a red circle inside a white circle inside a blue circle. Although plenty of other variants have been used, including a version with no red in the Pacific theatre of World War Two and a version with no white.

For England, this is not a complete list. But we have Stirling Moss, Graham Hill, James Hunt, Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill and (particularly) Lewis Hamilton.

For us, I feel like it’s Queen Anne (1702-1714). She doesn’t get talked about as much compared to other Queens. But she was a competent, diligent monarch who presided over a series of cultural, political and military accomplishments.

Also, apparently there was a chance that when she was younger she could have married the future King George I, the man who would ultimately succeed her.

Again, for Britain there are many. But just a few are the Aston Martin DB5, the Jaguar E-Type, the Land Rover, the Morris Minor Traveller, the Mini Cooper and the McLaren F1.

Fighters, bombers, passenger jets, transport aircraft, planes your country bought from another country and used, anything goes.

For Britain though, I think it has to be the Spitfire.

For Britain, it’s probably:

1: Robert Blake, the General at Sea of the English Commonwealth, who fought English Royalists, the Dutch, the Spanish and Barbary Pirates and won, despite having no naval experience before the age of 50.

2: Horatio Nelson. Dubbed Britannia’s God of War by Lord Byron, an excellent leader of men who won a series of famous victories over the fleets of Napoleon Bonaparte and his allies.

3: Andrew Cunningham. Led the Royal Navy to victory in the Mediterranean in the Second World War.

And if it’s more complicated than that and there are multiple contenders, then who are they?

In England’s case, the first King of England was Æthelstan, building on the work of his grandfather Alfred the Great, his father Edward the Elder and his aunt Æthelflæd. He conquered York and unified the Kingdom in 927 AD. He reformed the legal system, and later defeated the Vikings and the Scots at the Battle of Brunanburh. Those who know about him tend to rank him very highly, but he’s not well known. Still, with the 1100th anniversary of his unification coming next year, perhaps that will be commemorated somehow.

Queen Anne was the first monarch of a unified Great Britain, ruling from 1702 to 1714 and being in charge when the Act of Union with Scotland went through in 1707. She presided over the War of the Spanish Succession and an age of political instability with the emergence of the Whigs and the Tories. She was a more capable, active and principled ruler than she is often given credit for. But, despite having 17 pregnancies, none of her children came close to outliving her, so the throne passed to the Elector of Hanover, George I.

1. The White Ship. A vessel that was supposed to be carrying King Henry I’s son and heir William Adelin across the channel, the crew got pissed and proceeded to accidentally steer the ship straight onto the rocks. The ship sank, William died, and Henry was left without an heir, setting England down the road to the brutal civil war known as the Anarchy.

2. The Mayflower. Played a major role in the origins of the United States by carrying the Pilgrims across the Atlantic.

3. The Titanic. Sank on its maiden voyage in 1912, in one of the most famous and discussed maritime disasters of all time.

4. The Olympic. Titanic’s sister ship, Olympic had a much longer and more varied career, She rammed and sank a U-boat during the First World War, and it was far from the only thing she hit.

In Britain’s case, being a maritime nation, we’ve had a few.

1. The Golden Hinde. A 16th century galleon, the Golden Hinde was the ship of the Elizabethan Sea Dog Francis Drake as he became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. This image is of a modern replica.

2. HMS Victory. Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, and the oldest commissioned warship to this day (but not the oldest one afloat).

3. HMS Dreadnought. Revolutionised naval design when it was launched in 1906, rendering every battleship in the world immediately obsolete. In World War One, she rammed and sank a U-Boat.

4. HMS Warspite. The most decorated British warship in history, she fought at Jutland, in Norway, and in the Mediterranean. Holds the joint record for the longest ranged shot landed on an enemy ship.

For Britain, probably the Battle of the Saintes 1782. The Royal Navy led by Admirals George Rodney and Samuel Hood defeated the French fleet of the Comte de Grasse in the Caribbean, capturing de Grasse’s flagship and aborting a planned French attack on Jamaica in the process. Along with the successful defence of Gibraltar, it prevented the end of the American War for Independence from being even worse for Britain.

For England specifically, probably Agincourt or Crecy.

And what about you?