The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

‘Thomas Bushell, the Superlative Prodigal’ from Thomas Bushell, The First Part of Youths Errors (1628)

The young man took his penitence to anchoritic extremes. In his later writings, Bushell described how he first retired to the Isle of Wight disguised as a fisherman, and afterwards to the Calf of Man (an islet just off the Isle of Man) where he took up residence on the desolate summit of a cliff 470 feet above the Irish Sea. There, he said, ‘in obedience to my dead Lord [Bacon’s] philosophical advice, I resolved to make a perfect experiment upon myself, for the obtaining of a long and healthy life.’ He shunned meat and alcohol, living instead on a ‘parsimonious diet of herbs, oil, mustard and honey, with water sufficient, most like to that [of] our long liv’d fathers before the flood, as was conceiv’d by that lord, which I most strictly observed, as if obliged by a religious vow’.

The austerity of Bushell’s diet was clearly rooted in the Christian (and pre-Christian) tradition of abstinence from meat and monastic penitence. By imposing strictures on the body, it was believed, the soul would be regenerated and cleansed of sin. And it was meat and alcohol, above all, that were identified as the principal items of luxury. The problem for Bushell was that in Protestant England ascetic fasting was seen as a superstitious vestige of Catholicism. By giving up meat and living like a monk he risked being accused of having secret Catholic sympathies. In his confessions, The First Part of Youths Errors (1628), Bushell vigorously defended himself: if all the saints – Anthony, Augustine, Jerome, Paul the hermit and the Apostles themselves – had been ascetics, he demanded, then why shouldn’t he, a terrible sinner, be one as well?7

Bacon too was aware of how suspicious his predilection for vegetables could seem. Regardless of being called a Catholic, Bacon was afraid he would be accused of sympathising with the medieval vegetarian heretics, the Manicheans and Cathars, whom the Inquisition had genocidally suppressed with fire and sword. Anxious to avoid such a fate, Bacon issued repeated disclaimers: ‘Neither would we be thought to favour the Manichees, or their diet, though wee commend the frequent use of all kindes of seedes, and kernels, and roots … neither let any Man reckon us amongst those Hereticks, which were called Cathari.’ Bacon was trying to shift discussions of diet away from its old heretical connotations into the new idiom of enlightened philosophy. His opinions, he insisted, were based on empirical facts and not on religious dietary taboos.8

Happily, Bacon’s healthy vegetable diet appears to have done Bushell a world of good. By the time he was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey in 1674 at the fine old age of eighty, Bushell had become a legendary figure, and is still remembered today as the Calf of Man’s most famous inhabitant. For a while, he was also rich. Having come down from his cliff, he pursued Bacon’s practical tip on reclaiming silver and lead mines in Wales and established his own mint in Aberystwyth. God was so pleased with his vegetarian penitence, he claimed, that He gave Bushell power to subdue the ‘Subteranean Spirits’ which usually hindered mining projects. With the profits that flowed from the earth, he proclaimed his intention to realise Bacon’s plans for a ‘Solomon’s House’ – the utopian establishment depicted in Bacon’s unfinished work, New Atlantis. Bacon had imagined an ideal colony where scientific endeavour (including a primitive form of genetic engineering) was enhanced by the inhabitants’ rigorous lifestyle, some of them purifying their bodies by living in three-mile-deep caves below the mountains. Bushell’s institution was not quite what Bacon had imagined. It was more like a philanthropic dining facility for his miners, where instead of being fed the complete meal Bacon had devised – a fermented-meat drink – they were fed on Bushell’s own meagre diet of penitential bread and water.

Bushell himself retreated, meanwhile, to his estate at Road Enstone, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire, where he created a ‘kind of paradise’ in a grotto garden around a cave which became famous for a natural spring generating a series of spectacular hydraulic contraptions. He was no doubt inspired by Bacon’s cave-dwelling multi-centenarian wise men and by the ‘paradise’ garden at Bacon’s mansion in Gorhambury where the pair used to spend hours in meditation. In his new abode Bushell kept up his old dietary resolve, writing that he still ‘observ’d my Lords prescription, to satisifie nature with a Diet of Oyle, Honey, Mustard, Herbs and Bisket’. King Charles I and Queen Henrietta visited Bushell in his grotto in 1636, and for their pleasure he organised the performance of a masque about a vegetarian prodigal hermit. The Queen expressed her appreciation by installing an extremely rare Egyptian mummy in Bushell’s damp grotto home (where it slowly went mouldy and was lost to posterity).

When civil war broke out in 1642, Bushell roused himself from his tranquil retreat. As political affiliations polarised those who questioned and those who believed subjects had no right to question, Bushell remained fervently loyal to King Charles. Bacon had foreseen the political turmoil and spent his career defending the royal prerogative; faithful to Bacon as always, Bushell became a mainstay of the Cavaliers’ military campaign against the Roundheads. He turned his miners into the King’s lifeguard, bankrolled the Royalist army with silver and a hundred tons of lead-shot from his mines, put down a mutiny in Shropshire, and defended (yet another island) Lundy in the Bristol Channel. Eventually surrendering to the onslaught of the Parliamentary army, he was arrested and seriously wounded in the head, but then attained the protection of Lord Fairfax. With many of his loans unsettled other than by a quaint but otherwise worthless thank-you letter from King Charles, Bushell went back to his garden, as Horace to his Sabine Farm and the poet Andrew Marvell to Nun Appleton, rejecting the anarchy of Cromwell’s interregnum in preference for his own private Eden.9

Bushell’s dietary strictures followed an ancient Christian tradition which conceived of vegetarianism as a back door to regaining paradisal perfection. Like several Church fathers, the ascetic St Jerome (AD c.347– 420) – revered for plucking a painful thorn from a lion’s paw and composing the Latin Bible in his penitential cave – associated the gluttony of flesh-eating with Adam’s intemperate eating of the forbidden fruit. If people wanted to undo the curse of the Fall, they would have to start by abstaining from flesh: ‘by fasting we can return to paradise, whence, through fullness, we have been expelled.’ ‘At the beginning of the human race we neither ate flesh, nor gave bills of divorce, nor suffered circumcision,’ said Jerome. These were concessions granted after the Flood, ‘But once Christ has come in the end of time,’ he said, ‘we are no longer allowed divorce, nor are we circumcised, nor do we eat flesh’.10 This provided a theological rationale for relinquishing meat which lasted for centuries. As Sir John Pettus suggested in 1674, we ‘multiply Adams transgression by our continued eating of other creatures, which were not then allowed to us’.11

This tradition had come under fire ever since the Protestants had split from the Roman Church. John Calvin (1509–64), co-founder of the Reformation, had tried to untangle such literal-minded dietary loopholes. He cast doubt over the vegetarianism of the early patriarchs by pointing out that God gave Adam and Eve animal skins to wear when he ejected them from Eden’s balmy realm, and that ever since the time of Cain and Abel people had sacrificed animals. But even if they didn’t eat the animals they sacrificed, he stressed, the important point was that God did eventually give ‘to man the free use of flesh, so that we might not eat it with a doubtful and trembling conscience’. Anyone who thought mankind should be vegetarian was being blasphemously ungrateful for God’s generosity. He had one message for such hyper-scrupulous quibblers: shut up and eat up.12 But this was not enough to stem the longing for perfection, even in Protestant countries, and Bushell was one of many who still hoped to reclaim his lost innocence by abstaining from flesh.

In the masque he laid on for the King and Queen, Bushell depicted (and perhaps played) the part of the vegetarian hermit – clearly modelled on himself – who claims to have lived in the same Oxfordshire cave and subsisted on the same vegetable diet ever since the time of Noah. The hermit tells his audience he lives in a reconstructed Golden Age, ‘In which no injuries are meant or done’. The masque ended with the hermit inviting the King to join his world (and forget for a while the looming political crisis) by sharing in the feast of home-grown fruit.13

The Golden Age, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Bushell was indulging in the common feeling that the biblical story of original harmony was analogous to the classical Greek and Roman myth of the Golden Age, when justice reigned, iron was yet to be invented and no animals were slaughtered. In 1632, just before Bushell’s masque, the travelling poet George Sandys had published his extremely influential translation and commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Sandys portrayed the Golden Age menu of wild blackberries, strawberries, acorns and ‘all sorts of fruit’ in a much more appetising light than translators hitherto, and added enthusiastically that ‘this happy estate abounding with all felicities, assuredly represented that which man injoyed in his innocency: under the raigne of Saturne, more truly of Adam.’14 Eating meat, he added, was ‘a priviledge granted after to Noah; because [‘hearbes and fruits’] then had lost much of their nourishing vertue’. Meat-eating, according to this reasoning, was an unfortunate consequence of the Flood. In the climactic finale of Metamorphoses, Pythagoras comes forward and delivers a lengthy diatribe against eating animals – ‘How horrible a Sin, / That entrailes bleeding entrailes should intomb! / That greedie flesh, by flesh should fat become!’ Sandys noted that Pythagoras’ vegetarianism was an attempt to reinstate the peacefulness of the Golden Age because killing animals proceeded ‘from injustice, cruelty, and corruption of manners; not knowne in that innocent age’.15 Pythagoras’ example was an inspiration to early vegetarians like Bushell.

Giving up meat altogether may have been rather quirky in early seventeenth-century England, and Bushell was well aware that his notions could be mistaken for ‘the Chymera of a phanatick brain’.16 He further risked his reputation by successfully lobbying the government to release from prison several members of religious groups who were also trying to reinstate the conditions and even the diet of Eden, such as the Rosicrucians, the Family of Love and the Adamites (who took the Adamic lifestyle to its extreme by shedding their clothes and living in the naked purity of Eden before the figleaves).17

It may seem as if Bushell had by this time descended into a religious dream world, but his extreme diet was endorsed by scientific rigour. Bushell’s immersion into vegetarianism was an act of religious fervour, but it was simultaneously the realisation of a Baconian project: he presented himself as a human guinea-pig in Bacon’s ‘perfect experiment’ for lengthening human life on a vegetarian diet. As Bushell said, his dietary attempt to gain a long and healthy life was based on that of ‘our long liv’d fathers before the flood’. It was statistically evident that the average age of the ‘antediluvian’ patriarchs was in excess of 900 years, topped by Adam’s descendant, Methuselah, who lived to 969 (Genesis 5). What – everyone wanted to know – was the secret of their longevity?18 Once permission to eat meat was granted after the Flood, human life expectancy plummeted from 900 to the current average of around 70. It seemed at least plausible to the enquiring mind that it was eating meat that had curtailed human life so dramatically;19 perhaps by relinquishing it one could regain some of those lost years. This may sound like it competes in crankiness with today’s diet-doctors, but few then dared doubt the basic facts set out in the Bible. Even the philosopher René Descartes seems to have believed it. It may seem surprising that religious extremes and experimental philosophy coincided in such a spectacular way, but it was a trend that would continue for at least two centuries. Bacon and Bushell raised many of the questions about vegetarianism that dominated the ensuing debate.

Far from being the exclusive territory of extremists, undoing certain effects of the Fall was also the basis of Bacon’s intellectual endeavour. Bacon’s idea of the reclamation of Adamic knowledge became the manifesto for the seventeenth-century advancement of learning. The utopian reformers of the Civil War period Jan Amos Comenius and Samuel Hartlib hoped that their new system for universal education, or pansophism, would restore ‘Light, Peace, Health … and that golden age which has ever been longed for’. Their contemporary, the radical doctor Nicholas Culpeper, promised that his brand of the regulated temperate diet could mitigate malign celestial influences and make life on earth ‘a terrestiall Paradise to him that useth it’.20 The kabbalists Knorr von Rosenroth and Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont believed that reclaiming knowledge would reinstate the harmony ‘which so many thousands of Christians have wished and groaned for, for such a long time’.21 Even members of the Royal Society – the pinnacle of British scientific exploration chartered by Charles II in 1662 – thought that they were gradually working mankind back to the universal knowledge enjoyed in Paradise.22

Bushell’s idealistic vegetarianism fitted hand in glove with the intellectual project inaugurated by his master Francis Bacon. Bacon’s experimental philosophy would restore mankind to the universal knowledge lost in Adam’s Fall and discover the secret to longevity. Vegetarians would join forces by testing the dietary hypotheses and simultaneously restoring mankind to lost innocence and perfection. The dietary means to returning to antediluvian health was also a route to spiritual restoration. In Bushell’s ‘perfect experiment’, the spiritual and the ‘scientific’ marched side by side.

Bacon did not challenge the universally accepted doctrine that man had rightful dominion over nature; indeed, he held this as his philosophical paradigm. But Bacon did argue that man’s power over creation carried an important caveat: ‘There is implanted in man by nature,’ he wrote in The Advancement and Proficience of Learning (1605), ‘a noble and excellent Affection of Piety [pity] and compassion, which extends it selfe even to bruit creatures’. God had given man dominion, but He had also encoded him with a sentiment of compassion which moderated his behaviour to animals. Only ‘contracted & degenerate minds’, said Bacon, failed to heed the edict encapsulated in the biblical book of Proverbs, ‘A Just man is mercifull to the life of his Beast’ (Proverbs 12:10).

Bacon’s translation of this Proverb took the compassionate treatment of animals further than most Christians were comfortable with. The 1611 King James version rendered it ambiguously, ‘A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast’, and the Latin Vulgate simply says novit (‘recognises’), while in the original Hebrew the righteous man’s concern for his domestic animals may well be purely self-interested. Bacon was partaking in the pervasive, though often frowned-upon, tradition of seeking in the Bible laws that endorsed kindness to animals.

His motive for doing so was partly fuelled by the desire to find an equivalent in Judaeo-Christianity of the laws of humanity that he identified in other cultures. In doing this, he pushed forward one final major philosophical development which was to transform thinking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: that Western and Eastern cultures shared close moral affinities regardless of their religious differences. This had roots in the medieval and Renaissance idea of the ‘virtuous gentile’, but it took on greater prominence and complexity as travellers had increasing opportunities to observe foreign cultures first hand. Bacon dubiously claimed that the Mosaic law against eating blood, found in Genesis, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, was Moses’ counterpart of laws found all over the world that enforced mercy to animals: ‘even in the sect of the Esseans and Pythagoreans, they altogither abstain’d from eating Flesh; which to this day is observed by an inviolate superstition, by many of the Easterne people under the Mogol.’ The law of pity, Bacon concluded, was not just a Jewish law, it was embedded in human nature, so it was little surprise to find that diverse religions enforced it. When other cultures could provide such useful comparisons that helped to prove his views on the properties of human nature, no wonder Bacon regarded the voyages of discovery as an important aspect of restoring man’s universal understanding. The Indians and the Pythagoreans took their opinions to superstitious extremes, but their vegetarianism, Bacon said, was the realisation of a true and noble principle. Misguided as they perhaps were, they nevertheless exemplified natural human mercy more than the ‘contracted & degenerate minds’ of his own society. This was a daring valorisation of a foreign ethical code, and Bacon later moderated it by comparing their superstitions with the Muslim taboos on pork and bacon.23 This idea of instinctive sympathy added still more force to the scientific dietary reasons for becoming vegetarian. Richard Baxter (1615–91), one of the chief Puritan ministers in the Civil War, clearly exemplified how the medical and the moral motives propelled each other. When he was told to give up meat to save his ailing health, he consoled himself by reflecting that God had ‘put into all good men that tender compassion to the bruites as will keep them from a senseless royoting in their blood’; ‘all my daies’, he wrote, eating meat ‘hath gone, as against my nature, with some regret; which hath made me the more contented that God hath made me long renounce it’.24

Bacon’s cultural analysis found a common cause in Christian and Indian teaching; as usual Bushell went a step further and cultivated the comparison in himself. In 1664 – more than forty years after Bushell first adopted the vegetable diet – the like-minded advocate of Indian vegetarianism and fellow Royalist John Evelyn called on Bushell in his cave. He was mightily impressed by the hermit’s way of life as well as the Edenic garden layout: ‘It is an extraordinary solitude,’ Evelyn wrote. ‘There he had two mummies; [and] a grott where he lay in a hammock like an Indian.’ Although he was probably thinking of American Indians not East Indians, in Evelyn’s eyes Bushell had taken on the identity of another culture, removed from the turbulent society around him.

Bacon and his assistant Bushell glimpsed many of the philosophical and spiritual developments of the ensuing two centuries – with regard to vegetarianism as much as any other field. Their combination of religion, science and morality forecast the religious debates of the seventeenth century, the medical enquiries of the Enlightenment, and even the Eastern philosophy that forced itself on the conscience of Europe. Bacon and Bushell’s ‘perfect experiment’ would be recast, retested and reformed time and time again.

TWO John Robins: The Shakers’ God

In the middle 1600s Adam – father of mankind – rose from the dead, brushed away over 5,000 years of subterranean dust, and came to deliver his descendants from the sin he had brought into the world. Quickly acquiring himself a new Eve – whom he also called ‘Virgin Mary’ – and impregnating her with a child called Abel who was also Jesus reincarnated, Adam set about accumulating disciples. He entranced all who happened to hear him by raising the dead and speaking in the original language of mankind, and convinced witnesses that they had seen visions of him miraculously riding on the wind like a flame, flanked by dragons and heavenly beasts. Before long, Adam’s biblical coterie accompanied him everywhere he went. His faithful associates included Judas the betrayer, the prophet Jeremiah, and the ill-fated Cain. To all these, Adam promised that he would reinstate Paradise on earth as it was before the Fall. Records show that a sizeable number of Londoners believed him.1

Adam – otherwise known as John Robins, the radical seventeenth-century prophet – was a classic product of the English Civil War. Were it not for the political, religious and social mayhem the Civil War brought in its wake, Robins would never have gained such a following nor such fame. Seven years of bloodshed had shaken even the strongest nerves. From 1642 to 1649, the nation had turned on itself with such violence that hardly a family escaped unscathed, and in that unsettling environment Robins’ fervent preaching appealed to many confused and disillusioned minds.

The worst of war had ended with the execution of Charles I and the establishment of Oliver Cromwell’s republic, but in the early days of Cromwell’s rule lack of religious state control and the first ever free press combined to foment a plethora of extreme religious and political movements. Royalists all over Europe looked on aghast as God’s deputy on earth was overcome by a furious rabble. Parliamentarians, on the other hand, saw the world opening into a new era of justice and purity. But radicals soon became frustrated by the comparative moderation of Cromwell’s parliamentary settlement. They had been fighting for liberty against what they saw as monarchical and episcopal tyranny, and had pinned their hopes on a new era of equality in which justice would no longer be stifled and corrupted by a callous and indiscriminate elite. They had staked their lives, belongings and loved ones against a system in which the blood and sweat of the poor paid for the excesses of a frivolous court life – against the right of one man to treat millions as the objects of whim and fancy. To their horror, Cromwell’s republic began to look like the same tyranny all over again.

Disillusioned radicals turned for solace to the Bible. The Church had always promised that the Messiah would come again to establish a new heavenly kingdom after a period of violence and turmoil. Millenarian groups began to predict that Jesus’ second coming was nigh. Even most ministers of the established Church instructed their parishioners to prepare for Judgement Day.2

The time was ripe for Robins’ religious debut. When he came forward and declared himself the saviour they had been waiting for, dozens of disciples rallied to his cause. Twenty-three people were eventually charged in court for worshipping Robins, and there were clearly many more. They were mockingly dubbed the Shakers for their quaking fits of divine inspiration, and startled onlookers lumped them together into a larger heterogeneous movement known as the Ranters – those revolutionary fanatics noted for wild preaching, radical politics and stripping naked in public. Some of Robins’ contemporaries believed he was also responsible for founding movements that would prove as long-lasting as the Quakers and as important as the Levellers, whose activism in the army had been partly responsible for bringing down the monarchy.3

Like Jesus (to whom he compared himself), Robins wrote nothing down, but we do have the records of the state and of his former followers, one of whom said in a memoir that the Shakers ‘pray’d unto him, and they fell flat on their Faces and Worshipped him, calling him their Lord and their God’.4 Buoyed up by his disciples’ support, Robins’ vanity appears to have reached dizzying heights. He publicly declared that ‘the Lord Jesus was a weak and Imperfect Saviour, and afraid of Death.’ Robins himself, by contrast, ‘had no fear of Death in him at all’.5 Even Robins’ enemies did not deny his powers; rather, they accused him of witchcraft and even of being the devil himself.6