A Tolerant People? How God Made the English

400 years ago, throughout the summer of 1605,

a group of men spent their nights

rowing back and forth across this river.

They were religious extremists intent on carnage.

What they were doing was transporting barrels of gunpowder

from a house further down the Thames up to the Houses of Parliament.

Their aim was to blow up the building and with it the King,

his family, the nobility, the bishops, the MPs.

In effect the entire English establishment.

It's what we all know as the Gunpowder Plot.

And in the end it failed.

POLICE SIRENS

On the 5th November, Guy Fawkes was discovered by guards,

in a vault below the House of Lords, about to light the touchpaper.

This conspiracy had the potential for destruction on a 9/11 scale.

Now these men would be seen as terrorists.

They were the Al Qaeda of their day.

Catholics.

And their conspiracy remains one of the greatest threats

to state security in English history.

We've never forgotten Guy Fawkes.

We remember, remember the 5th November.

But this episode clashes

with everything the English think about themselves.

The English have a rooted belief

that they have a long and glorious tradition of tolerance.

Multi faith, multi ethnic, everybody welcome here.

But Guy Fawkes night is certainly not about live and let live.

It's the symbolic enactment of burning a Roman Catholic,

Guy Fawkes.

It's a memory of a time

when this nation was one of the least tolerant in the world.

In this series, I'm examining English identity.

What it is.

And how it's changed through time.

In this programme,

I'll be tracing the English attitude towards tolerance.

Looking at how they've treated those they've regarded as different.

And I'll reveal there's been a profound transformation.

The English have gone from being religious persecutors,

to pioneers of freedom of belief.

Some might argue this change was inevitable.

As religion lost its grip on society.

And secular ideals took hold.

So the English became more civilised,

more tolerant.

I disagree.

I believe the root of English toleration

is to be found in its Christian history.

But this is no simple story of love thy neighbour.

It's been a journey of accident rather than design.

It's often the fears of the English Church

which have paved the way

for toleration of different cultures and beliefs.

This is the story of how the English discovered liberty and tolerance.

And the remarkable role the church played in it all.

Every year people flock to Britain to start a new life.

One of the things this country does really well

is to invent brand new rituals.

And one of the latest is a citizenship ceremony,

which is for those who want to settle here.

And I've come to Camden Town Hall just to see how it's done.

Could those becoming citizens please get together their photo ID

and their invitation letter.

In these ceremonies, about 200,000 immigrants a year

swear their loyalty to the UK.

SONG: "God Save the Queen"

But I want to know what it is about England in particular

that attracts them.

SONG: "God Save the Queen"

I came from Philippines,

and the freedom of speech in our country is a bit limited.

Erm, unlike in England where you can voice out your own opinions freely.

I belong to a minority Muslim community

it's in minority in Pakistan, and there's a lot of persecution against

the community as such. We're not very free to practice the religion.

And I think one of the things that I absolutely love about this country

is that I feel free to do whatever I want to do.

What these folk think they'll find is an indifference to difference.

Room to be themselves.

England's reputation for tolerance

is something the nation prides itself on.

But before the English get too pleased with themselves,

behind this modern day story

of freedom and individual self expression,

there is a rather more discreditable tale.

The English once did persecution and intolerance

in a way which would make any modern dictator proud.

Yet, curiously, it was often strands from this dubious past,

which prompted the English to discover tolerance.

And at the heart of that change was the Christian church.

In the City Of London there are traces of one of the first

groups to experience persecution in England.

These street names date to 1070.

When William the Conqueror first brought Jews here, from Normandy.

With a single purpose.

Moneylending.

This was a time when Medieval England

was a proudly Catholic nation.

But the Catholic church insisted

that lending money at interest was a sin.

And since everyone in England was Catholic, that was a problem.

So it was a stroke of financial genius on the part of King William,

to import a set of non-Christians to do the money lending.

After all, what's it matter if Jews do the sinning.

But money lenders are never popular.

And in less than a century things would turn poisonous.

Anti-Jewish feeling in England can be traced back

to the story of an horrific murder.

On Easter Saturday 1144, the dead body of a 12-year-old boy

was found here.

He was gagged and half naked.

His name was William.

And he'd been missing since the previous Tuesday.

Over the Easter weekend people came out here from the city

to gawp at the site of the killing.

And soon the rumours started.

Some of the family said that he'd been murdered by Jews.

Well, that was horrific enough,

but then came the story came that he'd been crucified

in mockery of the death of Christ.

The argument went that, if,

as the Gospels claimed, the Jews had killed Jesus,

then it was in their nature to kill a child in the same way.

It was the start of a toxic Christian myth,

known as The Blood Libel.

A false accusation that the Jews murdered Christian children

and used their blood in their own religious rituals.

William was soon seen as a Saint.

And his body was brought here to Norwich Cathedral.

His shrine has long disappeared.

But I've come here to meet the historian, Miri Rubin,

to discuss why the Jews were blamed for his murder.

Did the Jews really kill little William of Norwich?

No, and we have absolutely no evidence from the period

that's at all reliable to suggest so.

So why do the Jews get the blame for it?

Well, just like we know from our own times,

a child disappears, a child dies, it's absolutely appalling.

You look to blame people.

Families tend not to look at themselves,

but rather to seek someone already thought to be evil

or different or other.

And the Jews are the only religious minority in England.

So they're, you know, the typical sort of outsider group

in whose houses one can imagine appalling things happening.

So what were the consequences for the Jews of England?

Well, the story had a real afterlife

and very soon, indeed the second half of the 12th century

we have a number of copycat cases, really, where it was rumoured

that Jews might have been involved in the killings of little children,

usually boys.

We know also that in 1255 in Lincoln

such an accusation unfolds fully whereby Jews of the city are accused,

they're arrested and ultimately executed.

So over a century of the aftermath of Norwich, really,

this becomes a very powerful, well known, resonant narrative

about Jews and what they might do to Christians.

The English had set in motion a devastating rumour.

Which spread across Europe.

Triggering pogroms and massacres of Jews.

And not just in the medieval period.

In 21st century England

with its synagogues and flourishing Jewish communities,

it's painful to acknowledge the English invention

of this most poisonous of lies.

The English ruthlessly used and then abused the Jews.

In 1290 they expelled them altogether.

The first kingdom to do so in all Europe.

But it wasn't just the Jews.

The medieval English church hounded anyone

who resisted official doctrine.

Heretics were forced to convert to the Catholic faith

and if they resisted, they faced death.

But what I find fascinating

is what lay behind this systematic brutality.

It's too simple to dismiss these medieval Christians

just as sadists or bigots.

There was a good reason for persecuting non believers.

And it stemmed from a fear.

A fear of hell.

In the leafy suburbs of Surrey, in a church dating back over 800 years,

you can still get a glimpse

into the terrifying fate that the 13th century English believed

was awaiting them after death.

If they failed to live exemplary Christian lives.

Paintings like this were the way

that most Christians learned their Christianity

because they couldn't read or write so pictures were everything.

And this picture taught them their priorities.

Look at the middle of it.

We've got this quite narrow white band.

Now that is the here and now.

That's where you and I live.

And everything else is the afterlife.

Now also look, there's a ladder.

It goes in two directions.

And upwards it goes to a distant heaven.

But downwards and look at those souls tumbling down, into hell.

It was this fear of eternal pain in the afterlife

which underlay English persecution of those who were different.

If Jews, heretics or sinners failed to change their ways

they would be damned forever.

So medieval Christians argued

that forcibly converting such deviants to true Christian faith

was an act of compassion.

We think that tolerance of all beliefs or none is a good thing.

They thought it was wicked.

You were preventing people getting to heaven.

You were condemning them to hell.

You were a murderer of souls.

It's shocking to realise that for the first 1,000 years

of English history what defined this nation was its intolerance

of all who were different.

Quite a contrast with this country today.

But just as it was religious fear that sparked English persecution

so it was fear that also fired the English to become more tolerant.

And I'm heading to Italy to uncover why.

Every Good Friday this quiet Italian town,

is transformed by a unique religious ritual.

Dating back at least 1,000 years.

The ceremony gives us a glimpse of what Catholic England

would've have looked and felt like 500 years ago.

It begins outside the Cathedral.

And everyone seems to have turned out.

You couldn't imagine this happening in England could you?

What's different, I think,

is the way in which church has spilled out into the street

and yet England was like that once.

In the 15th century the English were extrovert, emotional,

they had great processions in the street.

This was England about 1480.

Up until the 16th century to be English was to be Roman Catholic.

Devoted to the Pope.

But for many in secular England today, this Catholic pageantry

comes from an alien and perhaps rather frightening world.

All these hoods might suggest the stifling of free expression.

The tyranny of Catholic belief.

The received wisdom is that when the Catholic Church

lost its grip on England,

so more enlightened values began to flourish.

That's when the English started to become a more tolerant nation.

And this process is seen as beginning with the Reformation.

In 1534 the Pope and Henry VIII fell out spectacularly.

Over the annulment of Henry's first marriage.

England was going to break with Rome.

And all this Catholic drama would disappear as if it had never been.

The statues destroyed, all the holy objects burnt.

A thousand years of English history was going to be junked.

I agree that this Reformation was a watershed.

And that the English eventually did become more tolerant.

But it had nothing to do with supposedly more noble,

secular values.

Quite the contrary.

The road to tolerance is entirely tangled up with religion.

The Protestant reformation actually unleashed a new religious fear.

This time of Catholics.

And the funny thing is that's what first pushed the English

towards becoming a more tolerant people.

Here at one of Henry VIII's favourite palaces,

you can get a taste of just how this hatred of Catholicism began.

In one of the corridors is a chillingly brutal image.

Which set the tone for the next four centuries of English history.

King Henry commissioned this picture

soon after he'd been excommunicated by Pope Paul III,

and it's a real distillation of his rage into an allegory.

A set of symbols.

The violence in this painting is extraordinary.

There, the Pope is actually dying.

He's being trampled underfoot.

He's being stoned to death,

but I think the most surprising,

in fact, shocking aspect of the painting is that the stones

with which the Pope is being killed are labelled.

They're labelled with the names of the gospel writers.

There's Matthew,

Luke,

Mark,

and John.

So, the weight of true religion is killing the enemy of God, the Pope.

Early in Henry's reign,

the Pope had honoured him as defender of the faith.

The Catholic faith.

This painting shows how far he'd strayed from that role.

It was the first step in a process of demonisation of Catholics,

which had far reaching consequences

for the English journey towards toleration.

Henry had broken with the Rome, but his son Edward opened the doors

to Europe's new form of Christianity,

Protestantism.

But Edward died prematurely, at the age of 16,

and his half sister, Mary, seized the throne.

She was still a loyal Catholic.

And enraged by Edward's Protestant Reformation,

she launched a violent campaign of persecution.

In three and a half years,

she had over 300 Protestants executed for heresy.

One man grasped the opportunity to record the atrocities.

This is Fox's Book of Martyrs.

A record of the burnings of Protestants.

Which began to push the fear of Catholicism out of the palaces

and into the parishes of England.

The author of this book

was John Fox, a Protestant clergyman

who had to flee abroad under Queen Mary.

While he was in exile, abroad, he started collecting stories

of the people who work being burnt at that time.

It became a bestseller, partly because of pictures like these.

I think this is one of the most horrific.

It's three people, and one of them is a pregnant woman.

She's tied to the stake and she is giving birth,

we know from the story that her baby was then thrown back into the fire.

The stories of the burning martyrs

fanned equal flames of Protestant hatred.

Catholicism was shown as pitiless, tyrannous and cruel.

When Mary died, England officially became Protestant once more,

under Elizabeth I.

Across the country, Fox's book was placed in churches,

alongside the Bible and the book of Common prayer,

by government order.

Fear of Catholicism

was beginning to seep into the national consciousness.

The real nail in the Catholic Coffin came during Elizabeth's reign.

When a papal order transformed them

into full-blown enemies of the state.

In 16th century England, this was a place of terror.

In 1570, the Pope excommunicated Queen Elizabeth.

Absolving English Catholics from any loyalty to her and her laws.

It was a moment which cast ordinary Catholics as potential traitors.

And this was where those accused of treason were held.

Well, this is a prison cell,

but as you can see it's quite a luxury prison cell.

It's got a fireplace, it's got windows.

That tells you straight away this was for high status prisoners,

dangerous people.

Attempted poisoners of the Queen, assassins.

When you look closely at the walls, you can see Catholic inscriptions.

Carved by those who were locked up here.

Now, I think Catholics may well find this offensive and rightly so,

but if I say the Elizabethan government thought of these

people like Al Qaeda, they are terrorists.

And they are the worst possible danger to the Crown.

If a Catholic was held here under suspicion,

he knew what fate awaited him.

Interrogation, torture.

And, at the end of it all, hanging, drawing and quartering.

English suspicions of Catholic treachery were amply confirmed

by conspiracies like The Gunpowder Plot.

It was a dramatic turnaround,

Henry VIII, Fox's Book of Martyrs,

and the reign of Elizabeth had a devastating effect

on how the English viewed Catholicism.

Within a generation it changed

from being the only religion tolerated in England,

to being the religion of the devil.

For the next 300 years, Catholics would be excluded

from all positions of power,

fined if they refuse to worship in Protestant churches,

and often treated with the utmost suspicion.

But here's the strange thing,

it was this Protestant religious bigotry

which first got the English seriously thinking about

the very possibility of tolerance.

And it all happened in the wake of a bloody religious conflict...

..that ripped England apart.

This building still bears witness to the reasons behind England's descent

into civil war in 1642.

The present Somerset House is essentially a very grand office block

for 18th century civil servants,

but its predecessor was a real Royal palace for the wives of kings.

And below this great courtyard,

one Stuart Queen in particular has left her mark.

Now this is called the Dead House,

because it's actually built over the site of a graveyard

and some of the gravestones are still here, built into the walls.

What strikes me straight away is that there is something very strange about this.

This lady died in 1633 and yet she has a Catholic prayer for the dead.

"Pray God for her soul."

Now, it was illegal to practice your catholic faith

in England at the time and yet here,

are Catholic gravestones in a palace owned by a Protestant monarch.

The King in question was Charles I.

And it was his wife, Henrietta Maria,

who caused these graves to be here.

Henrietta Maria was a French Catholic and at her court,

Roman Catholicism was openly practised.

In 1630, she commissioned a Roman Catholic chapel

to be built on this spot,

the only one to have a legal existence in England at the time.

Members of her household were buried here and these are the last traces.

It was small concessions to Catholicism like these

that ultimately cost Charles his life.

The vast majority of Charles' subjects

saw him as dangerously soft on Catholics.

The gunpowder plot showed you couldn't trust Roman Catholics.

Now, here was the king, not just married to one,

but allowing her to practice her faith in public.

All good Protestants snarled.

And when Irish Catholics massacred Protestants in Ireland,

these godly men, brought up on Fox's book of martyrs,

wouldn't trust the King to put the rebellion down.

So civil war broke out.

Charles was defeated

and put to death for endangering the Protestantism of this nation.

Out of the chaos, one general, Oliver Cromwell,

was left ruling these lands.

Yet the war led the English to think the un-thinkable.

It inadvertently opened up the first national debate about toleration.

I met up with the historian Alexandra Walsham to talk about why.

Alex, it's odd isn't it that this civil war period

is the clash of opposing intolerant ideologies?

And yet at the end of it all, we've got much more of an idea of toleration.

How do we get to that?

One of the consequences of the descent into civil war

is the breakdown of control, the collapse of institutions

that had been responsible for harassing and repressing

religious dissenters in the past.

And there's been a total collapse

of the mechanisms of press censorship,

and into the vacuum of power, has emerged a flood of radical sects

that have begun to articulate ideas

and to behave in ways that completely horrify their conservative contemporaries.

Groups like the Quakers,

who believe that the inner light that illuminates them

is superior to the Bible and the groups such as the Ranters,

whose view is that the moral law no longer applies to them.

So they can say the un-sayable suddenly?

And I guess this is exciting, isn't it?

Absolutely yes, and it's in a sense that capacity for people

to articulate new ideas that allows calls for toleration

to be brought into the public domain.

With all these horrifying opinions around,

why would tolerance be considered a virtue?

Toleration, of course, had hitherto been regarded

as a recipe for social chaos, for political anarchy,

but over time, people come to realise

that the sky is not going to fall in

and some people are coming round to the view that toleration

may be a better solution to the problem of religious pluralism

than the attempt to persecute religious dissent out of existence.

The civil war had created a new climate.

For the first time in their history,

the English could openly voice ideas about tolerance.

And the war also set another remarkable precedent.

In 1657, this Jewish graveyard

was opened on the orders of Oliver Cromwell...

..following a radical decision.

Against the advice of his closest councillors,

he decided to re-admit the Jews

and so they came back, after an absence of 366 years.

It's a moment the English are proud of,

their first step towards creating a multi-faith society.

But it had little to do with an enlightened commitment to diversity

and everything to do with Cromwell's obsessive Christian beliefs.

He was convinced that the end of the world,

the last days predicted in the Bible, were just around the corner.

Jesus would come again, the wicked would be judged.

But Cromwell also knew that one thing needed to be in place

before the last days were ushered in.

According to scripture, for Christ to come again,

the Jews had to be living in all four corners of the world.

And that included England.

It was Cromwell's longing to speed up the return of Jesus

which was behind his decision to let them back in,

not a nice piece of Guardian-reading liberalism at all.

The 17th century didn't just see the return of the Jews.

Protestant dissenters, like Quakers, Baptists and Ranters,

were now being heard.

But they were still illegal.

That was about to change in a great Act of Parliament,

triggered once again by English terror of Catholics.

Everybody behind the chains, please!

Cromwell's Protestant rule had been short-lived,

and in 1660, the monarchy was re-instated.

In 1685, James II came to the throne.

He was a convert to Catholicism

and determined to improve the lot of English Catholics.

What this meant in practice was that he began to introduce Catholics

into the army and universities, after a century of exclusion.

And he began to put his supporters into positions of power

in local and national government.

The obvious aim was equality for his fellow Catholics in national life.

James really believed in religious toleration.

In a remarkable speech,

he said it made as little sense to hate people of differing Christian beliefs

as it did to hate a black man.

Anglicans fumed. He must be stopped.

Politicians wrote to the Dutch Prince, William of Orange,

Protestant son in law to James, asking him to intervene...

..and save Protestant England.

Five months later, their prayers were answered.

A Dutch monarch invaded on these shores.

It's become known as the Glorious Revolution.

James II fled abroad.

The Protestant hierarchy so hated Catholics,

that they'd rather suffer a foreign invasion

than have a home-grown Papist King.

And this event had huge implications for Protestant dissenters,

who'd eventually lent their support to this Anglican revolution.

This was a moment of unity for all Protestants,

Anglicans and dissenters alike.

The dissenters demanded a reward.

And what they got from the new King William and the new Queen Mary

was a law finally legalising all Protestant denominations.

It was known as The Act of Toleration.

And the original is kept here, in the Parliamentary Archives.

We have every Act of Parliament in here, dating from 1497.

This was an act borne out of the sheer hunger of the Church of England,

to cling to power in the face of a Catholic King.

-Ah.

-Here we are. Here's the Act of Toleration.

-It's quite small.

-Compared with some of them, yes.

-Compared with some.

-Yes, it's not one of our bigger ones.

-Let's have a look at it.

-OK.

But while the motives behind the act were decidedly mixed...

I'll just take the tie off for you.

..It's always been hailed as a defining moment in the story of English tolerance.

-OK, I'll leave you to have a look at that then.

-Thank you,

so we've got the title straight away, "An Act

"for Exempting their Majesties' Protestant subjects

"dissenting from the Church of England,

"from the penalties of certain laws."

Now, we open it up...

Ah, now here you see the phrase, lovely phrase,

"Some ease to scrupulous consciences in the exercise of religion."

What this act is saying is that dissenting bodies,

like Quakers or Baptists were no longer in any danger

of going to prison for their beliefs and better than that,

if they signed up to certain specified Christian beliefs,

then they could worship freely in their own buildings.

So this really does look like a very significant act of toleration.

But looks can be deceiving.

Many dissenters had wanted much more from the Anglicans.

To be welcomed into a broad national church.

All they got was grudging toleration.

The right to their own places of worship.

And there were many groups the Act failed to acknowledge at all.

At the start of the 18th century,

atheists, heretics and Catholics in England

all still faced imprisonment for their beliefs.

So what drove England's next move towards tolerance?

Well, it was a tangle of motives. Greed, power and religion.

God was still making the English.

In 1707, Protestant England and Scotland

united to create Great Britain.

Together, they forged a world wide empire.

And nothing brings back the memory of colonial expansion

more than this, the trooping of the colour.

This is extraordinary. Here I am on a cold, wet, June morning,

watching some of the greatest pageantry that we do in this country.

English, Imperial. What more could you want?

The Empire's often seen as a symbol of intolerance

of other cultures and beliefs.

But, in fact, it was this Imperial expansion

that saw the British embrace the idea of full scale religious freedom

for the first time.

For many British Christians, these newly conquered lands were the ideal hunting ground for conversions.

When the British Empire expanded, the Church of England expected to expand too.

There were lots of people ready to convert the world to Anglicanism.

But it didn't work out like that.

In fact, this mission to convert other nations to the Protestant faith was doomed to failure.

And the British were forced yet further on the road

to becoming a more tolerant nation.

And the first to benefit, were those traitors to the state,

the Catholics.

There's no house that better encapsulates

the fortunes of English Catholics than this one.

Since 1409, it's been the home of the Throckmortons,

one of the oldest Catholic families in England.

And it's through this one family history that you can trace

how Catholicism was re-integrated into English society.

Before the Reformation, the Throckmortons were landed gentry,

friends of kings. Then, in the Tudor age, many of them they refused to give up their Catholic faith

and suddenly they were outcasts,

frequent visitors to the Tower of London with some conspiracy or another,

fatally involved with the Gunpowder plot.

But in the 18th and 19th century, this family who'd been seen

as religious terrorists were to be welcomed back

into the English establishment.

And here in the saloon is the evidence of that transformation

and how it came about.

Now here's a happy story. It's from the Times of 1831.

And it's the result of the Berkshire election.

And sir Robert Throckmorton, 8th Baronet, has just been elected MP.

Now, for 250 years, no Roman Catholics had been allowed to take public office.

But now Sir Robert took the oath of allegiance,

and took his seat in the House of Commons, the First Roman Catholic since the Reformation.

The family had gone from violent subversives

back to members of the ruling elite.

It was a remarkable turnaround.

And the Throckmortons themselves had done much to make it happen.

From the late 1700s, they'd lobbied to change the perceptions

of the powers that be.

They reassured anxious Protestant politicians

that although Catholics listened to the Pope on matters of faith,

there was no question that they were anything less than loyal subjects of the crown.

So there was gentle political pressure at home,

but just as important was the plain fact of the growth of the British Empire.

First the British conquered Menorca in the Mediterranean, then Canada.

Now the population of these places was solidly Roman Catholic

but, more to the point, the ruling classes were Roman Catholic

and they were not going to give up their religion without a fight.

So the British had a plain choice.

Either lose their conquests or tolerate Roman Catholicism.

And, hey presto, they tolerated Roman Catholicism

and religious freedom came to the British dominions

for the first time.

The Government might be happy to tolerate Catholics

but what about the people?

They'd been fiercely anti-Rome for as long as they could remember.

It was the French Revolution that finally tipped the balance.

Catholic refugees flooded into England to escape the guillotine.

Pity replaced terror.

The English now feared foreign revolution more than Catholic uprising.

In 1792, Catholics were finally allowed to worship freely.

And from 1829, they were once again able to take

a full role in public life.

Priest holes like this were at last redundant.

Coughton Court, which had been a safe house

for illegal Catholic missionaries in the time of Elizabeth,

commandeered by Roundhead armies in the civil war,

sacked by anti-Catholic rioters in the glorious revolution,

could finally relax.

It was a milestone.

By the mid 19th century,

the British could proudly claim to be tolerant of religious diversity.

Well, Christian diversity anyway.

The expansion of the British Empire didn't only challenge British ideas

about toleration of Catholics.

As the Protestant Brits arrived in India,

they were greeted by an explosion of different religions.

Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims seemed ripe for conversion.

So in the early 19th century,

missionaries descended on India in droves.

The Honourable East India Company, the ruling British body in India,

was the focus for much of this missionary activity.

So we just take a sip?

Nothing so vulgar as lifting it to your lips.

'I met up with William Dalrymple for a tea tasting

'from the sub-Continent, to discuss the effect of this clash of religions in India.'

Well, the background to this is that by the early 19th century

you were beginning to get missionaries turn up.

And alongside that comes the notion that God has given

the British their Empire in order that they can spread the one true religion,

which, in their minds, is Protestant Anglicanism.

So you're actually going to get something really rather disastrous

happening out of this?

Indeed something very disastrous does happen very quickly.

It's this that angers Indians

who are worried about forcible conversion,

which is indeed being discussed

among a small minority of extreme evangelicals.

And you have the great explosion against that happening

in 1857 at the uprising that we call here, in Britain, still,

the Indian Mutiny, but which in India has long been known as the First War of Independence.

So this is a religious war?

Certainly in the main centres such as Delhi, the rhetoric is almost entirely religious.

And what's most astonishing when you read the accounts of the padres and the regimental Chaplains,

in 1857, is this astonishingly violent language they use.

We, today, are brought to think Christianity as being a language of reconciliation

and peace and brotherhood. In the 19th century, there's not a whiff of that.

In 1857, Christianity's all about blood for blood

And General Neil, who's this evangelical general,

who's organising wholesale Christian genocide,

saying that we must be God's avenging angels.

And so Christianity's seen as a militant force

and reflects a genuinely bloody

Al-Qaeda/Old Testament vengeful God.

The uprising of 1857 was a wake up call for the British.

And the disastrous Christian mission to India

had a huge and unexpected impact on the nation's official attitude

to religious toleration.

The government in India was instructed by Queen Victoria

to abstain from any interference

with the belief or worship of any of our subjects.

And back home, it ushered in a new era

of much greater acceptance of other faiths.

Here at Brighton Pavilion,

there's evidence of just how far-reaching that change was.

The Pavilion is the famously silly

and deliciously extravagant Georgian seaside retreat,

created by the Prince Regent.

But a century later it played a much more serious

and rather admirable role in the First World War.

The Pavilion was converted into a hospital.

And between 1914 and 1916, it was used for troops from the Indian Army

who'd been injured while fighting for the British.

Recruits came from across India's religious divides.

And Britain saw in this hospital a way of showing it had learnt

the lessons from the excesses of its missionary activities.

The army went to incredible lengths

to respect religious and caste sensibilities.

In sanitation, food preparation.

So there were separate water supplies for Muslims and Hindus on the wards.

Separate latrines, bathrooms,

and no fewer than nine kitchens for Muslims,

meat eating Hindus, vegetarian Hindus.

Everything intended to keep all the faiths happy.

The meat for Hindu and Muslim meals was scrupulously prepared.

Just down the road was Brighton's first halal butcher.

But perhaps the biggest change was in the attitude of the authorities

to Christian missionaries who tried to storm the Pavilion with their Evangelism.

In a report to the War Office,

the King's Commissioner for the welfare of Indian troops

wrote that he had seen "translations of the gospels at the Pavilion"

but that he had "orders that they should be strictly excluded."

He also said that he had daily requests from clergy or missionaries

to gain admittance to the hospital, to which he replied that,

"If it were abroad that any attempt had been made to proselytise

"men who are sick or wounded, there would be great trouble".

The British Government knew that success in the war

was dependant on Indian support.

And the hospital, heavily promoted in the media,

showed that the British were now treating Indians with respect.

Ironically, you could say that the change was the work of fanatical Christian missionaries.

The very fact that they called Hindus and Muslims "reptiles"

and "demons" in the Great Indian Rebellion,

and advocated indiscriminate slaughter, triggered a backlash

in the form of greater respect for other faiths.

Just as with every other push towards English toleration,

these 20th century roots of our multi-faith society

were inextricably tangled up with religion.

Today, a commitment to toleration

has become one of the defining characteristics of the English.

The nation prides itself on being a global trailblazer

in the fight for individual freedom of expression.

But it's sobering to realise that the journey to achieve it

was motivated not by good intentions,

but by fear.

Whatever happened to be the prevailing paranoia of the times,

that was what forced tolerance or intolerance onto the English psyche.

The medieval fear of Hell,

the Protestant terror of Catholics,

the Imperial nightmare of losing a grip on power.

These were the elements that fuelled change.

The English may have quite a few illusions

about their history as a tolerant people,

but they've got there anyway.

And whatever they think about their past,

let's hope that toleration, indifference to difference,

remains as part of their future.

In the final episode, is there an ethnic core to Englishness?

In this series I've been arguing that God made the English.

But did he also make them white and Christian?