A Chosen People? How God Made the English

'There are four fighters up there and I don't know what...'

On a summer's morning in 1940,

hundreds of fighter planes took off from runways all over England.

A decade before I was born, this country faced annihilation.

In World War II, my mother and father were both army officers

and all through my childhood they looked back

to that most frightening summer.

'Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation.'

It was of course soon known as the Battle of Britain.

But even though that was its name,

it wasn't actually fought over the whole of the British Isles.

It was the skies over England, Sussex, Kent, East Anglia,

that saw most of the action.

And the Battle of Britain wasn't just a one off.

It fitted into a glorious series of victories,

Crecy, Agincourt, the Spanish Armada, Trafalgar.

But most of those victories were not British but English.

'And there's a spitfire just behind the first two.

'He'll get them. Oh, yes.'

GUNFIRE

The odds of survival were low

but those fighters had a confidence that the English have always had.

And still do.

It's given this corner of an island a belief in its own importance,

way beyond its geographical size.

But why?

The answer lies somewhere you might not expect.

The reason the English have always felt supremely self confident,

is because for over a thousand years they've believed

that they possessed the greatest asset you could hope for,

God.

Nowadays, such an idea might seem preposterous.

But I hope to show you that is the evidence from history.

In this series I'll be exploring English identity.

To try and find out what it is and how it's changed through time.

You can't imagine this happening in England, can you?

I'll be challenging some stereotypes,

that to be English is to be tolerant, or to be white,

Anglo-Saxon.

And I'll reveal that national identity

has never been just one thing.

It's evolved,

not always in ways to be proud of.

But there's been one constant,

religion.

A force that's shaped the English soul.

And I'm starting with the idea that to be English is to be special.

To be better than others.

To have God on your side.

I'm going to trace the origins of the idea

from the Dark Ages to the present day.

To show how this conviction has fuelled

a passion for justice and duty.

But has also made the English feel entitled

to tell the rest of the globe what to do.

And give them the self confidence

to create one of the largest Empires in the world.

This is the story of the English.

And how God made them.

We all know the cliches of what the English are like.

Reserved, but eccentric, with a commitment to duty and fair play.

And there's one characteristic in particular

that marks the English out from the rest of the United Kingdom.

What makes the English different

from the Welsh the Scots or the Irish?

I think it's summed up in a comic song from my youth,

which Flanders and Swann used to sing. The opening lines are,

# The English, the English, the English, they are best

# I don't give tuppence for all the rest. #

That's it, you see, the English think they are best.

Because of that,

they view themselves not as mere spectators of history,

but as a people called upon to play a role in shaping it.

And nowhere is more symbolic of effortless English superiority

than the Houses of Parliament.

Their official name is the Palace of Westminster,

and that's because from the 11th century it was the home of Kings.

And English Kings not British kings.

Ever since, it's been the heart of England.

I'm making for the centre of this building

where you can begin to find clues as to why

the English have always believed they're better than anyone else.

You could try explaining it in all sorts of ways,

the food, the weather, the fact they live on an island.

But I believe it's got everything to do with God.

This place is full of symbols

and the most important symbols are religious.

What we've got here is an eight-pointed-star,

which is originally a Jewish symbol.

But on it is a Latin inscription from the Bible, from the Psalms.

And it reads, "Unless the Lord build the house,

"they labour but in vain that build it."

Which is saying, government and legislation need God behind it.

And that's a bit of a surprise in what you might think is

the centre of a secular democracy.

And once you start looking,

it's not the only religious inscription.

The building is crawling with them.

This one says, "The heart of the Queen is in the hand of the Lord."

In other words,

everything the monarch does is inspired by God.

And further behind the scenes

is a very grand chamber used by the Lords for committees.

It's got an intriguing name.

It's called the Moses Room,

and on the end wall you can see an enormous fresco

of Moses giving the Hebrews the ten commandments.

Yet more religion.

And what's fascinating, is that

in their original context, the Jewish Bible,

these images had nothing to do with the English at all.

So much of this symbolism is about Israel.

The land the Jews believed God had given to them.

They were his people, chosen by him

and the land was the symbol of their favoured status.

So why are Jewish symbols

and quotations from their holy scripture

all over the palace of English kings?

I think that this Biblical sense of being a people chosen by God,

is the key to understanding why the English have always felt special.

And to discover what it means to be a Chosen People,

I'm going to witness an ancient Jewish ritual.

I've been invited to attend a ceremony

which is one of the most important moments in any Jewish boy's life.

His initiation into the faith, his circumcision.

The idea of being a chosen nation

is one that begins with the Jewish people.

The Holy Scriptures claim that God chose a man called Abraham

to be the father of a great nation.

The Jews.

They made a covenant, an agreement,

the Jews would be faithful to God

and in return he would reward them with a land.

The mark of this unique relationship, was circumcision.

The Jews believe that in this ceremony,

their identity as God's Chosen People

is literally carved into the flesh.

But claiming you're a nation picked out by God,

might sound like you think you're better than everyone else.

I wondered what the rabbi would say about that.

Thank you for inviting us.

One thing people might say about the idea of the Chosen People

is that it's an arrogant idea. What's the comeback on that one?

It wasn't so much that the Jewish people were chosen,

to exclude anybody else.

It's not based on race or genetics,

because any person who would like to can join this mission.

And the concept of being chosen is more one of a person's obligation,

so to speak, for service.

That seems to be the point, being a Chosen People involves duties,

it involves service,

it's not actually luxuriating in the idea of being a Chosen People.

Exactly, it's completely and wholly about duties.

As an example, in Judaism, there's an obligation to give to charity,

it's not a luxury, you have to give ten percent of your earnings.

The object is to represent the concepts

that God hands down to the world.

THEY SING

I'm leaving this celebration with a big question.

How on earth did this ancient Jewish belief

of being singled out by God as a special people,

come to be applied to the English?

Well, there was one community who knew these ideas inside out,

monks.

And it was a monk who first applied this concept

of a nation chosen by God, to the English.

Before the English as a people even existed!

It's here in what was the Anglo Saxon kingdom of Northumbria

that the idea of England as God's chosen nation really began.

With the work of a monk who was the greatest historian of his age

in all Europe, God's spin doctor.

At the end of the 7th century,

a 7-year-old boy was brought here by his parents.

This was a monastery.

And the boy they left here

was devoted to a life of prayer and learning.

His name was Bede and in the course of his life as a monk

he wrote books that, more than anything else,

shaped the soul of the English.

The monastery's biggest treasure was its library.

Which, of course, housed the Bible

and the stories of God's Chosen People, the Jews.

Well, the library's long gone, but I'm standing where it once stood.

And these paving stones mark out the lines of its walls.

Now Bede hardly left the confines of this monastery for half a century

but all the time he was making journeys of the mind,

right across the known world,

simply through the manuscripts in this room.

What Bede wrote here did nothing less than invent the English.

Bede's masterpiece was a brilliant and engaging book called

The Ecclesiastical History Of The Gens Anglorum.

That's Latin for The English people.

It tells the story of how Roman Christianity arrived on these shores

and how the conversion of the people to Catholicism

changed English society.

One of the earliest copies of it dates back to the 9th century,

and I'm excited about getting my hands on it.

Thank you.

Well, historians like me, even if we read Bede in Latin,

generally do it from a modern text

but this book is only 100 years younger than Bede himself.

Now Bede's story starts in Rome where Pope Gregory I,

on his own initiative, decided to send a mission

to this northern island.

He sent out a party of monks led by a monk called Augustine.

And in 597 they arrived in the kingdom of Kent.

From there, Roman Christianity spread through the land.

This was this was the very first time

that a Pope had ever sent a mission anywhere.

And for Bede this sense of being singled out for special treatment,

chosen, was hugely significant.

He paints a picture of the English

as a people who adored the memory of Pope Gregory,

who were absolutely committed to this Roman Christianity.

And united by it.

For Bede, to be English is to be one people with one Christian God.

But what's intriguing about this history,

is that Bede was describing something

which didn't actually exist.

The story of the mission from Rome was true.

But the people they came to convert were far from united.

The Anglo-Saxon world wasn't a single nation, England,

but a collection of Kingdoms, ruled by warlords.

Repeatedly at each other's throats.

Until Bede wrote this history,

there was no such thing as the English.

Even less, a people united by God.

So why was this unity so important to Bede?

A unity which didn't in fact exist.

Well, the answer lies in another of book of Bede's

and we have a copy here.

It's quite a surprising subject for a medieval best seller.

Because what it is, is a Biblical commentary.

A detailed description of only four chapters of the Bible.

But the chapters describe something very particular.

The house of the Lord which King Solomon built in Jerusalem.

In other words, the temple in Jerusalem,

the centre of the identity of Israel.

For the Jews, the place where God lived.

And the description in the Bible is elaborate enough,

but Bede just dwells on it, he can't leave it alone.

He saw in the temple, meaning for his own land.

It had been built after once-warring-tribes

were united into one holy nation.

Chosen by God.

Israel.

And from this unity followed wealth and God's protection.

Now all that resonated with Bede.

And now he applied it to his own people, the Angli,

the Gens Anglorum.

The Pope had chosen them above all others.

And if the warring tribes of the Angli could unite,

under this Catholic Christianity, they could be a new Israel.

That would make them a great people

and they would be a beacon for all Europe in their Christianity.

So Bede gave the Angli, the English,

the idea that they would be a Chosen People.

It was a vision rich with possibilities.

But a vision is all it was.

It just needed someone to take it out of the dusty library

and make it real.

And one of England's greatest medieval leaders did just that.

Alfred the Great.

150 years after Bede's death,

the Anglo Saxons kingdoms found themselves under attack.

From the Vikings.

The people here have not forgotten the Vikings.

Every year they gather at nightfall,

in a festival to commemorate Viking invasion.

The marauding Scandinavians were a fearsome enemy.

And as they moved south, one Anglo Saxon King, Alfred,

had to defend his kingdom, Wessex, against them.

But he failed

and was forced into hiding.

Alfred believed he understood the reason for his defeat.

He knew the writings of Bede,

in fact, he'd had it translated from Latin into Anglo Saxon,

the language of his people.

And it was Bede that inspired him to find an answer

to this terrifying threat.

Alfred fled here.

To the Somerset levels.

They were a huge swamp then,

and even now often the best way of getting around is by boat.

Here Alfred brooded on his downfall.

Bede had convinced him that this land was chosen by God.

And under God's protection.

So why then had the Vikings been so successful?

For Alfred, the answer was in the Bible.

Being a Chosen People had strings attached.

The prophets said that the rich must look after the poor.

That the oppressed must be relieved and if you didn't do this,

God would do some serious smiting.

Alfred decided that his people were at fault.

They'd failed to show enough devotion to God and his church,

so God had sent the Vikings as a punishment.

Understanding that was the key to defeating the invaders.

Alfred was convinced that there would be no victory without God.

OK, you couldn't bribe the Almighty,

but surely he would look with much more favour on his nation

if it knew his laws and obeyed them.

Alfred's solution was to draw up a law code based on the Old Testament.

I've come to meet Anglo Saxon Historian Simon Keynes,

who's going to show me one of the oldest copies of it,

from the 10th century.

It's the earliest surviving manuscript of the chronicle.

He believes these laws weren't just everyday bits of administration,

they trumpeted biblical symbolism.

Here the law code starts with a list of chapter headings,

which, as you can see, are organised in 120 chapters,

which of course is a highly symbolic number,

it's the age of which Moses died.

So yes, we've got Moses the law giver,

and now we've got Alfred the law giver?

Yes. He sees himself as standing in this distinguished tradition

and he sees his law code as very much an English manifestation

of the kind of legislation that he would have seen in the Old Testament.

And the Old Testament theme goes on?

Yes, you turn the page, and it's no surprise to find

that it in fact begins with the Ten Commandments.

So you think Alfred really believed that,

if people obeyed God's laws, that would avert God's anger?

Yes. Alfred is trying to ensure that his people are seen to be doing

what is pleasing in the sight of God.

And the hoped for outcome would be that this would help them

to earn God's support in their struggle against the Vikings.

Alfred's genius was to pick up Bede's big idea and run with it.

He saw Bede's point.

The Anglo Saxons were the Israelites of the Old Testament.

Draw the moral from their story. It fitted his kingdom.

Keep God's laws and God will defend you against his enemies.

In this cold northern island,

a new Biblical identity was beginning to set firm.

Alfred defeated the Vikings

and he began to see himself, not just as a king of one petty region,

amid a confusion of peoples, but as leading a whole chosen nation,

bound by God's laws.

And only a quarter of a century after Alfred's death,

it fell to his grandson Athelstan finally to make Bede proud.

He transformed Bede's vision of a united English people

from fantasy into reality.

Athelstan was crowned with a new title,

King of England.

So it was an idea which created England, a Biblical idea.

Call these the Dark Ages?

Well, they were bright enough for the English

to borrow an entire new identity from God's Chosen People, the Jews.

And it was so successful, it lasted a thousand years.

Up until the 16th century, what it meant to be English

was defined by Catholic Christianity.

This was a people singled out by God,

and dedicated to the Pope.

But English identity is always evolving

and an English king was to break with Rome.

A split which threatened to cut down Bede's vision

of this nation as God's people in its prime.

These walls are all that's left of one of the greatest

medieval monasteries of Catholic England.

It bears witness to a period of destruction

which changed the soul of England.

In September 1539, three royal commissioners rode into this Abbey

on the orders of Henry VIII.

Henry's men weren't interested in the holy reputation

of this ancient monastery.

What they were after was evidence against its Abbott, Richard Whiting.

And despite the fact they couldn't find anything incriminating at all

he was imprisoned and put on trial.

The real reason they were after him was that he'd defied the King.

The row had all started because the Pope had refused

to declare Henry's first marriage null and void,

to let him marry Anne Boleyn.

In his fury,

the King declared himself the Head of the Church in England.

Those who dared oppose him, suffered terrible consequences.

Up there on the hill, the Abbott and two of his monks were hanged,

disembowelled, beheaded and quartered.

The Abbot's head was put on a spike above his own gateway

for all Glastonbury to see, and his quarters, were boiled in pitch,

and displayed in Wells, Bath, Ilchester and Bridgwater.

The monastery buildings were torn down.

In an act of absolute contempt for Papal authority, within four years,

Henry had closed all 800 Catholic religious houses in the land.

This was extraordinary.

English identity had been invented by a monk, Bede.

Now a King of England was destroying all the monasteries.

The last people who'd destroyed monasteries were the Vikings

and they were the enemies of God and you'd expect that.

But a divinely anointed monarch

supposed to safeguard God's Chosen People?

In the time of King Alfred,

just neglecting the Church had led to Viking invasion.

When a monarch defied the Pope and closed all the monasteries

surely divine vengeance was going to be much worse?

But Henry and his advisors had very good reasons for believing

that England's status as his chosen nation wasn't in jeopardy.

They believed they could prove Christianity in England

owed nothing to the Pope.

But it involved a radical rewriting of history.

This is one of Glastonbury's most famous landmarks.

And the site of an ancient legend

about a visitor from the Middle East.

It was a story which gave Henry ammunition

to justify his break with Rome.

It's a bit battered don't you think? Someone's had a go at it.

I went to talk it through with the author Clifford Longley.

Now this is a truly extraordinary tree which comes from Israel,

according to the legend.

It was planted here originally by Joseph of Arimathea

who appears in the Bible as the man who lent his tomb to Jesus.

He drove his staff into the ground and as a result,

miraculously a thorn bush appeared,

and its descendent is here in front of us.

It's a link therefore demonstrating that Joseph of Arimathea

planted the first Christian church in this country.

I suppose what's attractive to Henry VIII in this story,

is that here is a direct link from the heart of Christianity

here to England without any visit to Rome in the process?

Well, it provides him with a very interesting narrative

about how he's right to get rid of the power of the Pope

in this country.

Because what he is really saying is

that English Christianity did not derive from Rome

and was never really Roman Catholic.

It was, as it were, more primitive than that.

It goes right back to the first century in Israel

and derives directly from those sources.

So Augustine of Canterbury's mission to England,

back in the 6th century, suddenly becomes irrelevant?

Worse than that, it becomes a kind of Papal aggression.

That normative English Christianity is disturbed by this

foreign invasion of the monks who are accompanying Augustine,

and, if you like, an assertion therefore of foreign power,

which is what Henry was wrestling with.

And this, if you like, symbolises that England

had a purer form of Christianity right from the start,

and did not depend therefore on any foreign interference.

There can't be many trees which are responsible

for an established church I think.

No, it's looking a bit sorry for itself.

Do you think that's a metaphor?

THEY LAUGH

It was a masterstroke.

Henry had redefined why the English were God's Chosen People.

Not because of the nation's unique loyalty to Rome,

but because Jesus' immediate followers had come here.

In a bold move, Henry had rewritten English history.

But he was turning his back on nearly 1,000 years

of Papal authority,

so you might expect him to have some sleepless nights.

'This train is for Hampton Court.'

But a happy event convinced him that God was still on his side.

This was one of Henry's favourite Royal Palaces.

It was here that in October 1537, Henry's then wife,

Jane Seymour, gave birth to a son, Edward.

After nearly 30 frustrating years of praying for a male heir,

he finally got what he wanted.

But for Henry this wasn't just about happy families,

it had profound religious significance.

He saw the break with Rome and the arrival of Edward

as inseparably linked.

He'd prayed to God for this greatest of blessings

and the fact that God had answered his prayers,

after he'd expelled the Pope,

was absolute proof that he'd done the right thing.

To mark Edward's birth

Henry commissioned an extraordinary artwork.

It celebrated the arrival of his son,

but it was also a very public statement

about the legitimacy of his new role,

Leader of God's reinvented Chosen People.

This Great Hall of Hampton Court

was the stage set for Henry VIII's greatness.

The place he presented himself to his people,

to his nobility, to foreign diplomats.

And an essential part of that stage set are these tapestries.

Ten of them. And the statistics of them make you gasp.

88 yards long.

Took two years for a team of craftsmen in Brussels

to make them out of gold and silver thread.

These were the single most expensive item that Henry VIII owned.

And it's what these scenes depict that's so revealing.

In effect, this is a deluxe strip cartoon

of the life of the Biblical figure, Abraham.

Father of the original Chosen People, the Jews.

And just like Henry VIII,

late in life, he'd made an agreement with God.

And his reward was to be father in a different sense,

to have a legitimate son, Isaac.

Henry could not resist this symbolism.

He was the new Abraham, father of his people. Father of Edward.

And there's one panel that really hammers the message home.

I was frustrated to find it in storage for conservation.

But I had a plan B.

Here, tucked away behind Westminster Abbey, are the Dean's lodgings.

And in an ancient and private room,

aptly known as the Jerusalem Chamber

there happens to be a 16th century copy of just what I wanted to see.

Well, I have been in this room before

but I've never really understood the significance

of this particular object.

Viewers of a nervous disposition may wish to turn away now

because what we're seeing here is Abraham circumcising Isaac,

in other words, physically introducing into the Chosen People.

So what Henry VIII is doing with this tapestry,

is saying that Abraham was leader of the old Chosen People, Israel.

I am the leader of the new Chosen People, England.

Accept no substitutes for me, particularly not the Pope.

From now on, the chosen nation

was the enemy of the Pope and Catholicism.

To be English was to hate Rome.

King Henry's rewriting of history changed England forever.

And in a weird and very English contradiction,

everything had changed and nothing had changed.

Nothing had changed

because the English still knew they were special.

But before Henry VIII, being special had meant

showing all Catholic Europe how best to be loyal to the Pope.

Now, being special meant showing all Protestant Europe

how best to fight the Pope.

That was God's new plan.

And the English were well pleased with it.

So despite this Protestant Reformation,

God was still shaping the English.

And Henry's cheeky piece of national rebranding

created a self confidence that once again shifted thinking

about being the chosen nation.

By the 18th century to be English was more than just to be special.

It was to be better than anyone else.

It was a sense of superiority that became the basis

for one of the most implausible Empires in world history.

Everybody must move behind the chains please!

Every year at Gun Wharf

the crowds gather to watch a rather noisy ceremony

marking the anniversary of the Queen's coronation in 1953.

This is the Honourable Artillery Company

doing what soldiers do best.

Firing 62 rounds on three guns.

A century ago this sound would've roared

throughout the British Empire.

Well, here I am back in our Imperial Glory Days,

when we were the people who ruled the world.

But the Empire wasn't just an English enterprise.

It was a joint enterprise with the Protestant Scots.

A deal was done between the two nations

and in 1707 there was a full-scale partnership,

uniting the two Parliaments in London.

The union christened itself Great Britain.

And it marked a new phase in the development of the chosen nation.

The English kindly lent their superiority complex

on the newly invented British.

They never bothered to sort out the differences

between the two identities. And why should they?

Because after all the English knew they were the Chosen People.

Just like ancient Israelites,

only better because they were Protestants.

That's what motivated them to go out and conquer the world.

And woe betide anyone else who stood in the way of God's plan.

By the 20th century, more than 450 million people across the globe

had come under British rule.

Once the chosen nation had been Catholic England,

then Protestant England.

Now it became Protestant Britain.

The Empire was born from the conviction

that God was on Britain's side.

The wealth of Imperial Britain was amassed

through trade at ports like this.

In the 19th century, ships came and went daily,

carrying cotton from the Americas, silks and tea from the Far East.

The prosperity of the country only served to reinforce the idea

that all this was the reward for having special status

in the eyes of God.

But the Imperial expansion,

saw a new twist to the chosen nation mythology.

And not an attractive one.

It's obvious there are real dangers in thinking

you're God's Chosen People.

There can be good results,

so Bede persuaded the Anglo-Saxons that they were one single nation.

King Alfred instituted the rule of law to please God.

But combine power and military success

and then add in an Empire across the world,

and it's fatally easy to forget the difference between yourself and God.

Arrogance can have dark consequences.

And it was this growing arrogance that led the British to believe

they had something more to export than just linen and cutlery.

They had their faith and their morals.

And at the forefront of this venture was a new breed of Christian,

the Protestant Evangelical.

Evangelicals saw the Empire as God's gift,

but it was a gift with strings attached.

God wanted conversions. That's what the Empire was for.

It was a moral crusade and a chosen people had every right

to tell people what to believe and how to behave.

But there was a problem.

The chosen nation was hardly in a position

to take the moral high ground.

It was itself engaged in an activity

that was degrading and corrupt, slave trading.

And one Evangelical in particular sought to remedy the contradiction.

By fighting to abolish the trade.

His name was William Wilberforce.

And the idea he drew on

was the nation's special status in the eyes of God.

Wilberforce's argument amounted to saying that

the Chosen People would not treat slaves so inhumanly.

Our unique status forced a duty on us

to behave better than other people. To set an example to the world.

And so, Britain led the way in abolishing the slave trade.

But this moral imperative

led to a rather ambiguous new global role for the Chosen People.

As God's policeman.

Imperial Britain believed that its special status in the eyes of God

gave it a right to correct bad behaviour everywhere.

And its first job was to enforce its anti-slavery policy

on a reluctant world.

Of course, Britain had this unprecedented mixture of naval, commercial...

I'm meeting historian Richard Drayton, on the HMS Trincomalee,

a 19th century naval ship.

After the slave trade is abolished in 1807,

vessels such as this are involved

in preventing slaves from being loaded or carried

off the coasts of west and east Africa.

And this particular vessel

was involved in policing the waters off of Cuba.

So this is the start of Britain's role as the world's policeman,

fighting for freedom globally?

Absolutely, but the thing about a policeman is,

a policeman, at least nominally,

is supposed to be acting in response to a particular set of laws,

which the community which the policeman is part of, agrees to.

Now one of the things which the Royal Navy is doing

in the early 19th century is breaking international law in many cases.

Simply by taking upon itself the arbitrary right to board vessels

and to confiscate cargo prior to an exiting treaty framework.

So this is genuinely God's policeman,

people who are acting in ways which are, as they understand them,

to be significant for the national interest.

The Empire has gone but are we still doing this?

Are we still thinking of ourselves as a moral force in the world?

Well, the suppression of the slave trade figures very prominently

in the identity of the Royal Navy.

The Royal Navy of course is involved in anti-piracy actions

in several parts of the world.

In the suppression of human trafficking

and these are linked in very deliberate ways

with of course this 19th century heroic story.

At the dawn of the 20th century,

once again English identity had both changed and remained the same.

Bede's vision of a Chosen People was still in rude health.

But power always corrupts.

And the power of the world's greatest empire did just that.

It was an easy step to move from the ideal of a united people,

protected by God,

to becoming a nation that believed itself invincible.

God's influence on the nation's character was at its peak.

But all of that was challenged by a cataclysmic event...

The Great War.

The 1st of July 1916.

The day which saw one of the worst disasters

in British military history.

And a moment when an ideology the English had nurtured

for over 1,000 years began to disintegrate.

Here in the fields of Northern France,

thousands of troops gathered

for the largest offensive of the First World War.

I'm in one of the front line trenches on the Somme,

and, as a soldier, I would be able to see individual Germans

on the other side of the field there, they're that close.

And what the generals are ordering me to do,

along with hundreds of other young men,

is to climb out of the comparative safety of this trench,

over here into a hail of machine gun fire.

And I don't stand a chance.

At 7.30am British soldiers clambered out of these trenches

and surged across No Man's Land.

Line after line of men fell.

In a single day the British Army suffered nearly 60,000 casualties.

19,000 deaths.

Back home, the Church of England was perfectly clear

about the purpose of the trenches.

The Bishop of London, called this a Holy War,

and the Dean of Durham said in 1916, a new link between church and nation

will have been forged in the furnace of affliction.

They were ideas put into practice in a divine recruitment drive.

Anglican clergy across the land

preached that the nation was drunk and promiscuous

and that they must repent for God to be on their side.

And a practical way of showing repentance was to join up,

an act that was the beginning of a submission to God's will.

The mission's aim was to kick start a religious revival

in the face of a war which was not going well.

This vast, lonely structure

bears witness to the dead of the Great War.

Over a million British and Imperial soldiers

sacrificed their lives in the conflict.

These names are those of the 72,000 whose bodies were never even found.

It was these heavy casualties that called Anglican piety into question.

If God's chosen nation had gone to fight in a war

they hadn't even started, in obedience to His purpose,

then it had kept its side of the agreement.

God's role in return, was to see that his people came through.

But where was the God of the English at the Battle of the Somme?

He seemed to have forgotten his side of the bargain.

For 200 years the English had lent the British Empire

the idea of being a Chosen People.

Now this most destructive of wars

mocked both chosen Empire and chosen nation.

The onslaught was certainly enough to dent the self confidence

of the British Empire.

But while the First World War damaged the chosen nation myth,

it didn't kill it.

The idea was so deeply carved into England's history

and collective memory that it couldn't be erased.

Echoes of it can still be heard.

And nowhere do they more clearly reverberate down the centuries

than here, in a building that best encapsulates the relationship

between church and state.

And in the national rituals that take place here.

'And here comes the sovereign's escort of the Household Cavalry.'

Nearly 40 years after the Somme,

the myth was recalled at an event watched by the world.

The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth

was a moment designed to unite the nation.

For the first time in history this ancient ceremony was televised.

'Her Majesty wearing the crimson parliament robes and upon her head,

'a jewelled diadem.'

Me and my parents were invited round to the one of the very few people

in the neighbourhood who had a television.

Actually the first time I saw a TV.

I don't actually remember too much about it

because I was less than two at the time,

but looking back at the film now what strikes me is not just church

and state working together, it's the sheer Englishness of the event.

This was the Chosen People who Henry VIII would've recognised.

The millions who saw it were witnessing the culmination

of over a thousand years of English history.

The service had first been designed back in the 10th century.

And what's fascinating is

that this isn't just the handover of earthly power,

it's a ritual which charts the key moments in the evolution of an idea.

Madam, is your Majesty willing to take the Oath?

I am willing.

Bede's notion of a nation committed to God is there,

alongside Alfred's that the law was the means to win divine favour.

Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the laws of God

and the true profession of the Gospel..

There's the Reformation

and the recasting of the chosen nation in a Protestant mould.

Will you maintain and preserve inviolably

the settlement of the Church of England

and the doctrine, worship, discipline and government thereof,

as by law established in England?

All this I promise to do.

And at the heart of the ceremony, the anointing of the monarch,

is the unmistakeable comparison of England

to God's original Chosen People, Israel.

It was a moment so sacred it wasn't even allowed to be televised.

Be thy head anointed with holy oil,

as kings and priest and prophets were anointed.

And as Solomon was anointed king by Zadok the priest

and Nathan the prophet, so be thou anointed, blessed,

and consecrated Queen over the peoples,

whom the Lord thy God hath given thee to rule and govern.

London in 1953 melted into Jerusalem 3,000 years before.

And just as Hebrew prophets and priests had anointed a Hebrew King

so now God gave his Anglican seal of approval on this new reign.

MUSIC: "Zadok the Priest" composed by Handel.

It reminds us that even now, the sovereign rules as God's anointed.

The coronation shows that the idea of the English as God's Chosen People,

is still woven into the political fabric of the nation.

It's a concept that can't be extricated

from a thousand-year-old ritual.

But that doesn't mean that it lives on undiminished.

Long after the Battle of the Somme was over,

it claimed another casualty.

It wasn't apparent at the time

but nonetheless changed the myth once more.

A casualty that even during this moment of celebration

was taking its last breaths.

The national expression of belief in God.

Today, in private, most people still claim to believe in God,

but in public he's barely mentioned.

You might think that the idea of a people chosen by God

would suffer a similar fate, well no.

In the last 75 years we've intervened in more than 22 conflicts.

'War in the Gulf has begun.'

And it's evident from the words of the leaders who've started them,

that the motivation isn't only economic,

or to do with national security.

Tonight British forces are in action over Libya.

They still assume this nation has a duty

to intervene in the affairs of others.

CAMERON: It is right because I believe we should not stand aside

while this dictator murders his own people.

BLAIR: We are doing what is right for a world that must know that

barbarity cannot be allowed to defeat justice.

This is simply the right thing to do.

There's still a sense that the country should set a moral standard

for the rest of the world.

As we have done throughout history.

Centuries ago, when Kings, Emperors and warlords reigned over

much of the world it was the English who first spelled out

the rights and liberties of man.

That we are still a Chosen People.

This country is a blessed nation.

The world knows it.

In our innermost thoughts, we know it.

This is the greatest nation on earth.

But since the First World War there's been something missing.

A key element.

God's no longer doing the choosing.

After one battle, it was easier for the English to feel

that God had abandoned them.

And a century later, in public at least,

the English have largely abandoned God.

The English still have the sense of being a people so special

that they feel duty bound to set an example to the world.

But God seems to have left the building.

I'm astonished at how enduring this myth has been.

The English aren't the only nation to have believed they're chosen by God,

but they believed it the longest and with the most passion.

It's an idea that outlasted the Somme, the end of the Empire,

the emptying of the pews.

It remains to be seen whether it will survive what many predict

is the next big challenge, the fragmentation of Great Britain.

Never underestimate the power of a myth.

Over 1,000 years after an Anglo Saxon monk first conceived of it

in a small Northumbrian monastery,

this myth of the Chosen People lives on.

Next time, I'll be looking at England's reputation for tolerance

and revealing it's not always been what it seems.

The English once did persecution in a way which would make any modern dictator proud.

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