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

Surprisingly, the most enthusiastic seventeenth-century travel writer was an English clergyman, the Reverend John Ovington, who travelled to India in 1689. Ovington accepted Bernier’s utilitarian rationale: vegetarianism clearly made the Indians less cruel, just as healthy, and spiritually and mentally ‘more quick and nimble’. But Ovington even endorsed the Indians’ animal protection practices on their own terms: ‘ India of all the Regions of the Earth, is the only publick Theatre of Justice and Tenderness to Brutes, and all living Creatures,’ he said, ‘a Civil Regard … is enjoyn’d as a common Duty of Humanity’. Their innocence, said Ovington, made the Hindus comparable to ‘the original Inhabitants of the World, whom Antiquity supposes not to have been Carnivorous, nor to have tasted Flesh in those first Ages, but only to have fed upon Fruits and Herbs’. Ovington concluded by giving Hinduism a carte blanche of philosophical integrity: ‘there is not one of these Customs which are fasten’d upon them by the Rules of their Religion, but what comport very well, and highly contribute to the Health and Pleasure of their Lives.’ 89

The way was paved for Europeans to take Indian vegetarianism, if not as a lesson in philosophy and justice, then at least in medical health. The voyages of discovery and the new wave of early anthropology that followed in their wake impelled Europe towards a combination of cultural syncretism and relativism. Attempts to sustain the idea that European Christians had the best society often crumbled in the face of evident virtue and integrity in other peoples. International vegetarianism, which plugged directly into European discourses on diet and the relationship between man and nature, proved a serious challenge to Western norms. As readers back home assimilated the information in the travelogues, Indian vegetarianism started to exert influence on the course of European culture.

* For an account of deism, see chapter 9.

Thomas Tryon gazed out over the sugar plantations of Barbados. What he saw chilled his heart. With horror he watched lines of slaves labouring under the inhuman whip of their European masters. The cruelty of men claiming to be Christians surpassed all belief: the expatriated Africans were starved until they would eat putrefying horse meat; their limbs were crushed in the sugar mills; they died by thousands in the open fields. While Restoration England grew fat on their sweat and blood, Tryon complained, Barbados was perishing. The forests of the Americas were being depleted at a shocking rate; even the soil was suffering under the insatiable greed of the white man. After years of forcing the ground to produce the same cash crop, Barbados had gone from being ‘the most Fertil’st Spot of all America ’, to ‘become a kind of Rock’ which grew nothing without dung fertiliser. 1 All this destruction was committed only to supply luxury goods back in London – that stinking heap of human corruption Tryon had left behind. Everything had gone horribly awry: America was supposed to be a New World in which laws of justice between man and beast would bring about a Golden Age of peace and harmony, not the ransacked sewerage of the Old World. 2 This was the opposite of what Tryon, in his youthful dreams, had imagined.

Born on 6 September 1634 in the Gloucestershire village of Bibury, Tryon had been sent out to spin wool at the age of six without an education. Working as a shepherd in his spare time he had accumulated enough capital by the age of thirteen to buy himself two sheep, and he swapped one of them for English lessons. Tryon loved his innocent flock and the contemplative life sleeping under the stars, but by the age of eighteen he ‘began to grow weary of Shepherdizing, and had an earnest desire to travel’. Without telling his parents, he packed up his belongings, his life savings and his ideals, waved goodbye to his sheep, said good riddance to his father’s plastering trade and set out for London. 3

It was 1653 and the religious radicalism of Cromwell’s interregnum was at fever pitch. Having paid all of his £3 apprenticing himself to a hat-maker near Fleet Street, Tryon soon joined his master’s congregation of Anabaptists, attracted by their austerity, silence and periodic fasting from flesh. 4 Up in his apprentice’s lodgings, he spent all his spare time and money delving into books on alchemy, herbal medicine and natural magic. In 1657, at the age of twenty-three, he had what he was waiting for – a divine visitation of his own: ‘the Voice of Wisdom continually and most powerfully called upon me,’ he wrote years later in his Memoirs ; it told him to relinquish all luxuries and turn to vegetarianism: ‘for then I took my self to Water only for Drink, and forbore eating any kind of Flesh or Fish, and confining my self to an abstemious self-denying Life.’ 5

This was the very year that Roger Crab started calling for followers, and Tryon’s description of his conversion sounds so similar to Crab’s that it could have been lifted straight out of The English Hermite . 6 So many of their interests are the same – Behmenist mysticism, astrological dietary medicine, vegan diet and even hat-making – that it is tempting to imagine Crab was Tryon’s vegetarian guru. 7 Tryon called the Sabbath Mammon-worship, and the clergy ‘ Jockies in the Art of Wiving’; he railed against upper-class exploitation and warned that private lands were ‘the effects of Violence’. 8 Like Crab, he mastered the art of twisting the Bible into a vegetarian manifesto – enlisting Moses, Daniel, John the Baptist and Jesus as fellow vegetarians – and revealing that God’s permission to eat meat after the Flood was really an act of ‘Spite and Vengeance’ tempting people into the spirit of wrath. 9 Humans were supposed to be ‘faithful Stewards’ of God’s creatures, insisted Tryon, not murderous meat-eating tyrants. 10

He joined a group of vegetarians whose doctrines sound similar to those of Crab’s ‘Rationals’, Pordage’s followers or even Winstanley’s Diggers, for they ‘ would not eat Flesh , because it could not be procured without breaking the Harmony and Unity of Nature, and doing what one would not be done unto’. 11 When Tryon heard the rumours of Indians living in harmony with the animals he was transfixed with joy: vegetarianism was no longer relegated to the backwaters of English religious dissidence – it was the creed followed by entire nations of brother herb-eaters like himself.

Horoscope of the nativity of Thomas Tryon’s daughter (1661/1662)

Like many sectaries of the time, Tryon initially avoided persecution by keeping his head down and refraining from the provocative medium of print. Besides, he had a family to support: after marrying a childhood sweetheart who refused to give up eating meat, and fathering five children, 12 Tryon travelled to Holland and then Barbados where religious toleration was greater and commercial opportunities in the hat trade were lucrative. But after returning to London in 1669 he experienced his second epiphany. In 1682 his inner voice told him ‘to Write and Publish something … recommending to the World Temperance, Cleanness, and Innocency of Living; and admonishing Mankind against Violence, Oppression, and Cruelty, either to their own Kind, or any inferior Creatures’. 13 Tryon fell to his new allotted task with ardour and over the next twenty years, until his death in 1703, he poured a total of twenty-seven works through the press. Many of them were popular enough to go into multiple editions, his magnum opus , The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness , being reprinted five times in fifteen years. On average over the entirety of his writing career, Tryon went to press once every four months. Some of his works were circulated by the Quaker printer Andrew Sowle and his daughter Tace, and others were distributed by a dozen of England’s most successful commercial booksellers including Elizabeth Harris, Thomas Bennet and Dorman Newman, and were advertised in works as popular as Daniel Defoe’s. 14