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

Believing that God dwelt in nature provided a radical theological basis for reforming man’s relationship with animals. It was added to the growing arsenal of vegetarian arguments. It led many to egalitarian politics, to pacifism, and in some cases to believing that it was wrong to kill anything at all. Later in the century, Thomas Tryon revived beliefs like Winstanley’s and argued that God’s presence in the creatures made meat-eating a direct violence against the deity. With Robins, Winstanley and the Family of Love all preaching doctrines related to vegetarianism, a cross-party radical agenda was emerging which included dissent from mainstream society’s bloodthirsty eating habits.

In the same year that Robins retreated from London, another war veteran stepped into the breach as the arch-enemy of meat-eaters. Roger Crab had been fomenting trouble for years, and now he deployed vegetarianism as an attack on political and economic injustice. Like Robins, Crab was hardened to the severity of political censure. His first recorded run-in with the State was back in 1646 when Cromwell’s New Model Army had defeated the Royalists and King Charles I surrendered to the Scots. There would be no more fighting until 1648, when Charles escaped from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight, precipitating the country’s second civil war. During the lull between the two wars, arguments raged in Parliament between those who wished to compromise with the King and those, such as Generals Cromwell and Fairfax, who realised that the New Model Army had shed its blood for the cause and was not to be fobbed off. On the radical wing of the debate, the Levellers were stirring up mutiny, demanding the abolition of the monarchy and a massive extension of the franchise.

Even before 1647, when Leveller agitation started in earnest, the young Roger Crab was preaching a religious message of regeneration combined with the most virulent radical politics. Baptising crowds of people who had assembled to hear him speak, he incited them to join the ranks against the king. 1 Having a monarch as God’s deputy, he told them, was idolatry. Although by 1649 Parliament would come to agree with Crab, for the moment he had gone too far, and in 1646 the authorities caught up with him while he was haranguing a crowd in Southwark and slung him in jail. It was just as well, said Thomas Edwards (the heretic-basher who hated vegetarians and radicals): Crab was a despicable ‘Dipper and a Preacher’, leading people astray with ‘strange doctrines against the Immortality of the soul’, and telling them ‘that it was better to have a golden Calfe or an Asse set up … then to have a King over them’. 2

In 1647 Fairfax got wind of Crab’s sorry plight and was so incensed that he took the case straight to Parliament where, speaking uncompromisingly to newly empowered statesmen, he raised Crab to the status of a cause célèbre. At Crab’s trial, Fairfax complained, Justice Bacon had locked the jury up without food and water until they agreed to return a guilty verdict. Crab had been sent in chains to the White Lyon where he was to remain until he found a way of paying the inordinate sum of 100 marks. 3 In being imprisoned for preaching against tyranny, Crab had proved just how tyrannous the system was. As Crab himself later added, he had nearly lost his life on the battlefield when his head was ‘cloven to the braine’; imprisoning him now was the depths of ingratitude. The case created a ripple of excitement: Fairfax’s complaint was copied down and published, and eight years later the newspapers still remembered Crab as a leading Levelling ‘Agitator in the Army’. 4

Writing in his will at the end of his life, Crab still looked back on this time as the catalyst to his future self; he had nearly ‘departed this humane Life’ but God saw fit to let him be born again ‘upon which account the Lord himselfe took my Soule into his custody’. 5 Disgruntled and disillusioned by parliamentary policies, Crab left the army to set up a hat shop at Chesham in Buckinghamshire. But like Gerrard Winstanley, he soon came to see commerce as con-artistry; it was the grease that oiled the system of decadent consumerism. 6 He started stirring up trouble; as one satirical publication declared ‘we have amongst us a Crabbed cavelling fellow, being both a Barber, Hors-Dr. and a Hat-maker, that disturbs and jeers at Ministers that come to preach with us’. 7 In 1652 he sold his hat shop, gave his estate away to the poor and rented an isolated spot in Ickenham near Uxbridge where he built a little hermitage and started digging the land. 8 Thrusting himself metaphorically into the wilderness, Crab cast himself as a John the Baptist figure and proceeded to hurl abuse at the system that exploited the poor to satisfy the material pleasure of the few: ‘if John the Baptist, should come forth againe,’ he exclaimed, ‘and call himself Leveller , and take such food as the wildernesse yeelded, and such cloathing, and Preach up his former Doctrine, He that had two coats should give away one of them, and he that hath food should do likewise ; How scornfully would our proud Gentlemen and Gallants look of him’. 9

Reviling the carnal pleasures of the corrupt ‘Sodomite generation’, Crab stopped eating meat and took up the bleakest of vegetable diets. Meat was a sign of wealth; renouncing it was an act of solidarity with the oppressed. 10 Home-grown vegetables were the answer to social inequality, and the key to spiritual regeneration:

instead of strong drinks and wines, I give the old man [‘‘(meaning my body)’’] a cup of water; and instead of rost Mutton, and Rabbets, and other dainty dishes, I gave him broth thickned with bran, and pudding made with bran, & Turnep leaves chop’t together, and grass.

Crab rejected butter and cheese, and like John Robins despised alcohol as much as flesh. The production of beer used up grain which would otherwise be good as food, pushing up prices and oppressing the poorest of the poor. Luxury, Crab noticed, was not just a sign of inequality, it was a cause of it – an economic argument still being used at the end of the century by Thomas Tryon, and again a century later by radicals including Percy Bysshe Shelley. 11

Despite his puritanical asceticism, Crab insisted that the vegetable diet was perfectly suited to sustain the body. Standing in a long tradition of vegetarian doctors, Crab opened a folk medical practice, claiming to have up to 120 patients on his books at any one time. The evidence he accumulated from his patients suggested to him that meat was the cause of human ills and abstinence was their cure. ‘If my Patients were any of them wounded or feaverish, I sayd, eating flesh, or drinking strong beere would inflame their blood, venom their wounds, and encrease their disease, eating of flesh is an absolute enemy to pure nature.’ As one newspaper added in more purple prose, Crab claimed that meat made ‘the body a Dunghill , filling it with gross Humors and snakie Diseases , engenderers of Lust , Sloth and Melancholy , that so corrupt the senses & bodies of men and Women, that take aside a little reason, there is no difference between them and bruit beasts.’ 12

Keeping his body in tune with nature’s vegetarian laws, Crab soon achieved spiritual illumination and began consulting the radicals’ favourite astrologer William Lilly, about his revelations. 13 Then in 1655 Crab journeyed to London and published the first of his radical vegetarian pamphlets, The English Hermite, or, Wonder of this Age. He cut a striking figure – an ex-soldier turned bearded hermit – and his unwonted dietary habits created a sensation in the city. His publisher registered the astonishment with which ordinary folk greeted Crab ‘who counteth it a sin against his body and soule to eate any sort of Flesh, Fish, or living Creature’; ‘his dyet is onely such poore homely foode as his own Rood of ground beareth, as Corne, Bread, and bran, Hearbs, Roots, Dock-leaves, Mallowes, and grasse, his drink is water.’ 14