George Washington, that is. The Revolutionary War general and our first president, more than 212 years after his death, is still one of the most dreaded people in British history. That’s according to a poll conducted at London’s National Army Museum, which asked visitors to a conference marking an online exhibit devoted to “Enemy Commanders” to select our former colonizers’ most implacable battlefield foe.
After an online poll that attracted some 8,000 votes, Washington and four other finalists advanced to an in-person vote at the museum on Saturday. And, whew—the man who could not tell a lie wound up in the company of a verifiable rogues’ gallery.
Washington won with 30 of 69 votes cast, beating out the likes of Irish Republican Army founder Michael Collins, diminutive French autocrat Napoleon Bonaparte and Third Reich Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Another general who went on to found his nation, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, finished fifth.
The poll included only battlefield commanders, thereby excluding the likes of Adolf Hitler or King Philip II of Spain.
But just why is George Washington still so reviled by the Brits? After all, don’t we and Dear Old England enjoy a “special relationship” these days?
“The American Revolution is regarded by the Brits as something we’d rather never happened,” Sir Peter Westmacott, the British ambassador to the United States, told WTOP. But Westmacott—sorry, we don’t have to call him “Sir Peter” on this side of the Atlantic—also admitted the Redcoats botched the Revolutionary War, saying it was “badly mishandled at our end.”
That’s not to say the National War Museum’s portrait of Washington isn’t still a little butthurt. It states: “Despite many setbacks he consolidated and guided his forces to victory and helped secure independence from Britain.” Additionally, the longer biography of Washington on the museum’s website devotes considerable attention to Washington’s September 1776 evacuation from New York City, which was one of the bloodier and more embarrassing defeats for the Americans.
