Great people in the uk

Great people in the UK

Plan:

1. 
   Alfred the Great.
   
2. 
   William Shekespeare.
   
3. 
   Thomas Cromwell
   
4. 
   John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough
   

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 the southwest and Britons of the northwest 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 Vikings, who had 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 boat and couldn’t bring heavy equipment: put a wall in front of them and they were in trouble.
Alfred had a profound effect not just in terms of the military, but also on learning and education. He was far-sighted: it was he who started the codification of the 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.
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 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 King Henry V is an unblemished hero.