The Bloodless Revolution Page 4
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 ass
istant 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
Like other radical sects, the Shakers pooled their worldly goods and lived in a primitive communism with their leader.7 Upending conventional morality, Robins encouraged his followers to swap spouses and set an example by taking the wife of his head disciple.8 Characteristically of the seventeenth-century radical sects which often gave women equal status with men, about half of the Shakers were women. It was also rumoured that they liked to gather together naked – the same was said of the Quakers and the Adamites – because covering the body was a sign of the Fall, and anyone who wanted to return to innocence had to start by stripping down to Adam and Eve’s state of shameless undress. Understandably, allegations of free-love practices abounded in the popular press.9
Decades later, Lodowicke Muggleton, who went on to lead a sect of his own, remembered wistfully that it really had seemed at the time as if Robins were Adam come again. ‘For who upon Earth did know, at that time,’ Muggleton pondered, ‘whether he was False or True: I say none, not one.’10
Having established his identity, Robins, like all cult leaders, pledged to guide his followers to a promised land, the Mount of Olives in the Holy Land of Jerusalem where he would feed them on manna from heaven.11 He elected a stand-in Moses to lead the way, and started gathering people in London to prepare for their escape. Robins vowed that once he had collected a crowd of 144,000 (the number of saints in the tribe of Israel, as prophesied by Revelation), he would part the waters of the English Channel and march them over dry land, away from the uproar of England, to safety and bliss.12 Robins was the King of Israel; following him to Jerusalem, his supporters thought, would pave the way for Christ’s return.13
A notorious wild prophet by the name of Thomas Tany (or ‘Theau-raujohn’), joined forces with Robins by erecting tents for each of the so-called tribes of Israel and declaring that his people would follow Robins to Jerusalem. Some of Robins’ followers, and Tany himself, took their enthusiasm for Judaism so seriously that they claimed to have learned Hebrew and even to have circumcised themselves.14 Tany kept up the mission – even after Robins had been clapped in jail. He claimed on his own behalf that he was the rightful King of France, England and the Jews, and was arrested for violently wielding a sword at Parliament a week after Oliver Cromwell had been offered the title of King, and for symbolically burning pistols, a sword, a horse’s saddle and the Bible. Tany perished many years later in an attempt to effect Robins’ journey to Jerusalem. The boat he built to carry him there sprang a leak during the crossing to Holland, and he and his crew were all drowned.
Ranters and Shakers from The Declaration of John Robins (1651)
A naked rout of Ranters from Strange Newes from Newgate (1650/1)
Naked Adamites from The Adamites Sermon (1641)
The claims Robins and Tany made of biblical descent probably did not seem strange to their contemporaries. Many Puritans had long envisaged the English as a lost tribe of Israel awaiting deliverance from their own Egyptian-style bondage.15 Thinkers like Jan Amos Comenius aimed to restore man’s lost perfection by converting all the Jews. Ironically, these hopes fuelled the philo-Semitism of the seventeenth century and Robins’ followers were instrumental in a successful campaign to force Parliament to allow Je
ws to live freely in England.16 More than a century later William Blake (who dabbled in the Muggletonian cult established by Robins’ ex-followers) was still living in hope: ‘Till we have built Jerusalem,/ In England’s green and pleasant land’.17
The first Adam had lost Paradise. The second Adam, Christ, had promised to restore everything to its former perfection. John Robins confirmed that he was none other than ‘the third Adam, that must gain that which the first lost’.18 His followers obediently declared that ‘John Robins is the same Adam that was in the Garden.’19 As John King, another disciple, put it, John Robins ‘is now come to reduce the world to its former condition, as it was before the fall of the first Adam’.20
The original Adam lived on the pure fruits of Eden, so it was logical for Robins to insist that his followers should adhere to Paradise’s strict vegetable diet.21 Thomas Bushell had taken up the vegetable diet to be like Adam before the Fall; John Robins claimed that he was Adam, and vegetable cuisine seems to have been an essential adjunct to his cult. There were other millenarian prophets at the same time proclaiming that the return to the pre-fallen state would require a revival of the original vegetarian diet, like the philo-Semite George Foster who prophesied in 1650 that animals would be involved in the universal freedom which was coming to humans.22 Like many vegetarians to come, Robins also condemned the use of alcohol: ‘it was not of Gods making: it is the drink of the Beast (said he) a poysonous liquor, and wo be unto all them that drinks it.’23 Non-radical contemporaries found Robins’ dietary antics shocking – it was hardly believable that life could be sustained on vegetable food without flesh – but they knew what he was getting at. ‘Their food is onely bread and water, although they have plenty of monies to buy other provisions,’ explained one bemused contemporary, emphasising the Shakers’ asceticism.24