Tristram Stuart - The Bloodless Revolution - Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

During the trials it was alleged by the prosecution that Robins had encouraged his followers to believe that he was God, for which the Blasphemy Act prescribed a six-month imprisonment on the first offence (with probable whipping and hard labour, the inconvenience of unpalatable lodgings and disease, and the inevitable accumulation of debt from prison charges). In order to encourage the Shakers to recant, it was clearly stated that a second offence would bring banishment, a sentence that, if flouted, would be punished by death ‘without benefit of Clergy’ (a quick route to eternal damnation). 35 Government sources claimed that in court Robins’ followers fell down at Robins’ feet, chanting, clapping, screaming, and calling on him for deliverance. 36

Though Robins and some of his followers strenuously argued that he had never claimed to be more than a prophet, Robins was sentenced. 37 The arrests and trials broke the communalism of the Shakers. Their detractors jeered that their leader couldn’t even part the waters of the Thames to save them from jail – let alone whisk them off to Paradise. Eventually most of them got off with a plea bargain by signing a document forswearing their faith in Robins and agreeing that they had been led astray by the devil. Only one recalcitrant follower, Thomas Kearby, remained loyal. He ‘cursed and reviled the Justices in open Court’, refused to recant, and was condemned to six months in the Westminster House of Correction with corporal punishment and hard labour. 38

During his initial weeks of imprisonment, Robins continued to preach from the open window of his prison cell. In February of the following year he was either still in jail, or had been re-sentenced. But one ex-disciple claimed that, soon afterwards, Robins wrote Cromwell an apology which secured his release. Thanks to the profits he had made from his followers, he was able to repurchase his old estate and retired to the country. 39 Whether or not this is true, Robins disappeared from view. But his blend of political radicalism, divine inspiration and vegetarianism lasted for decades.

Robins was condemned for flouting the Blasphemy Act’s criminalisation of anyone maintaining ‘him or her self, or any other meer Creature, to be very God … or that the true God, or the Eternal Majesty dwells in the Creature [i.e. the created universe] and no where else’. 40 Robins was not the only one preaching such blasphemies. The Act was designed to suppress a rash of dissidents, such as the Leicester shoe-maker-turned-soldier-preacher, Jacob Bauthumley, who were proclaiming that ‘God is in all Creatures, Man and Beast, Fish and Fowle, and every green thing’. 41 This idea that God was in animals as well as in man was deeply subversive, particularly because it blurred the vital distinction between the natural and divine worlds and smacked of the idolatrous practices condemned in the first commandment. It also had dangerous implications for man’s treatment of the brutes, and the State did what it could to lance the festering gangrene of heresy.

The leader of the communist Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley, was among the most notorious advocates of such beliefs. In April 1649, Winstanley led a band of comrades to the edge of Windsor Forest to occupy the land. For too long landowning elites had exerted a monopoly over the earth and its produce; food prices had reached record highs and the poor were being deprived of the barest necessities. It was time to reclaim nature’s heritage. The Diggers illegally started to dig the soil, manure it, and plant it with crops for their own sustenance: ‘everyone that is born in the land may be fed by the earth his mother that brought him forth,’ declared Winstanley, ‘all looking upon each other as equals in the creation.’ Calling on the disaffected masses to join them, the Diggers advertised the virtues of their home-grown corn, parsnips, carrots and beans: ‘we have peace in our hearts and quiet rejoicing in our work, and filled with sweet content, though we have but a dish of roots and bread for our food.’ 42 Digging the land to grow crops, they promised, would free the poor from enforced labour and from the unreliable and inherently oppressive market economy of food.

Much as Winstanley seized the land to return it to the people, so also he grabbed hold of God and pulled Him down to earth. The Church had always kept God closeted up in heaven where only the established priesthood could access Him. But like many radicals of his time, Winstanley insisted that God was all around us, in every thing on earth. In contrast to traditional theologians who tended to regard matter as dirty and potentially evil, Winstanley stressed that all creatures were inhabited by divinity and should therefore be treated with love and reverence, ‘as well beasts as man-kinde’. 43 This egalitarian spirituality upturned the traditional hierarchies between people, and it challenged mankind’s disregard for animals. Strictly speaking, Winstanley did not break the Blasphemy Act because he did not claim that God dwells in the created universe ‘ and no where else ’, and he did not go to the extreme of the pantheists who literally identified the world with God. But his doctrines were nevertheless radical and extremely threatening.

Winstanley did not doubt that man was supposed to be lord of the creation, just as God was lord over man. But he took the radical step of arguing that Christ’s most important commandment – to do as you would be done by – applied not just to fellow humans, but also to animals. In order to undo the corruption of the Fall, man had to start by ‘looking upon himselfe as a fellow creature (though he be Lord of all creatures) to all other creatures of all kinds; and so doing to them, as he would have them doe to him’. 44

It might seem logical that with such beliefs Winstanley would have to be a vegetarian. But he did not explicitly state that everyone had to stop killing or eating animals. Most contemporaries with similar beliefs were not vegetarian. If one argued that it was wrong to kill an animal because God dwelt in all living things, it could also be argued that it was wrong to kill cabbages. Indeed, if man, nature and divinity were parts of a unified whole, there would be no reason why animals should not give up their lives for humans who were just another part of that same unity. 45 Jacob Bauthumley, whose theology in this respect was very similar to Winstanley’s, explained how one could believe that animals were inhabited by God, and still happily slaughter them. He pointed out that an animal death was no death at all: men and beasts were just different parts of ‘one intire Being’, so when animals died their flesh returned to dust and their life was reabsorbed into God. 46 It is unsurprising, therefore, to find that in 1652, after the Diggers had been violently disbanded by the Government, Winstanley provocatively incited the poor to ransack butchers’ shops and steal from the common flocks for their food. 47

However, some individuals did argue that it was wrong to take away life which came from God. This line appears to have been taken, for example, by certain English members of the Family of Love. These clandestine confederates were disciples of the sixteenth-century Dutch mystic, Hendrik Niclaes, who taught that God suffused the universe and that it was wrong to do violence of any sort because God ‘created all things, that they should have their being’. 48 He told his followers to recreate on earth a new Eden, where people ‘kill not. for they have no Nature to Destroying. But all their Desyre is, that it mought all live, whatsoever is of the Lyfe’. 49 In the 1640s, a bricklayer-preacher from Hackney called Marshall who was a soldier-turned-pacifist associated with the Family of Love, echoed Hendrik Niclaes by announcing to a teeming crowd ‘that it is unlawfull to kill any creature that hath life, because it came from God’. 50 The heretic-hunting Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards added Marshall’s vegetarian doctrine to his blacklist of blasphemies, Gangraena (1645–6), where he warned that unauthorised preachers like Marshall were teaching that ‘’Tis unlawfull to fight at all, or to kill any man, yea to kill any of the creatures for our use, as a chicken, or on any other occasion’. 51