Who do you think was the evilest Englishperson in history?
No living people please… Please wait a few decades before posting Simon Cowell
Damn - there goes my vote for Peter Mandelson. Although “living” is debatable - he may well be some form of undead ghoul.
Let me instead start things off with a vote for Harold Shipman, one of the most prolific serial killers in history. You might argue that he killed his victims in a relatively peaceful manner without the torture and suffering other killers have inflicted and thus was not particularly evil, but his body count is somewhere in the 250 range. All killed one at a time, up close and personal.
Quiet evil is still evil.
Cromwell.
Hmm. I’m trying to think of someone particularly nasty from Britain’s colonial past, the brutal, native-exploiting type, but while the Empire had plenty of stupidity, obliviousness and systematic cruelty, no individual military figure or administrator really stands out. Robert Clive, maybe? Cecil Rhodes?
The “baby butcher” Amelia Dyer has to rank up there somewhere. Though an exact count isn’t possible, it’s believed by some that she murdered over 400 babies.
Brigadier Dyer, of Amritsar Massacre fame. Or Aelfgifu of Northampton, from an earlier phase of imperialism, ruling Norway for Cnut.
I wish I hadn’t read that.
How about Charles Trevelyan?
Jack the Ripper comes to mind.
Good choice.
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill.
What did Churchill do that was so evil?
Hmm. Amelia Dyer, Brigadier Dyer, Danny Dyer - I’m seeing a trend here.
His position on India was wrong. He opposed independence at a point when it was both right and inevitable.
I’m going to take a different tack and go with Harold Shipman. Other Englishmen may have killed more people, or had more people killed, but they had the opportunity. Shipman had to work at being (possibly) the 20th century’s most prolific serial killer. He didn’t have other people conveniently looking the other way for him, and he was killing “respectable” (by the standards of his day) people who would be missed when they were dead. He didn’t even off transients or prostitutes or vagrants like most serial killers. Nope, he killed off grannies and grandads for relatively meager amounts of cash…and hundreds of them!
Can you imagine what Harold Shipman, who remorselessly killed hundreds of people just like him almost for sport, could have done if he’d had any political power? He would have been the UK’s Stalin or Pol Pot.
And that makes him the most evil Englishman in history? Blimey, everyone else must be positively saintly.
I’m going for Cromwell. Aside from massacring his enemies, he also cancelled Christmas.
Henry VIII
The evilest couple : Fred & Rosemary West.
Let me see.
2)Cossacks
-
Ireland. Ok fine that was Dad.
BTW, why has Peter Sutcliffe not been mentioned yet. Or Jeremy Bamber?
Was Cromwell the one who sold Irish kids into slavery in the Caribbean?
If you want to grade evilness on total amount of illness created, perhaps we should give a nod to Sir Walter Raleigh, who helped to inflict tobacco-smoking on England, Europe, and thus the wider world.