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

By now political radicalism had been stifled by its own failures and, with the accession of Charles II in 1660, Cromwell’s interregnum had given way to the polite culture of Restoration England. In 1688 the Glorious Revolution (also called the Bloodless Revolution) saw an end to James II’s whimsical reign and Parliament gave the crown to his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange, ushering in a new era of constitutional democracy and relative social tolerance. 15 Tryon accordingly tempered his vegetarian philosophy with an element of compromise. His homely books with titles like The Way to Make All People Rich, The Good Housewife made a Doctor and Healths Grand Preservative were aimed at frugal householders. He encouraged people to forage for wild plants such as watercress, sorrel and dandelion, and lauded local, naturally produced vegetables from the ‘brave noble’ potato to the ‘lively’ leek. He helpfully furnished his readers with step-by-step guides on how best to cook cabbages, as well as his favourite meat-free recipes like ‘Bonniclabber’ which, he explained, ‘is nothing else but Milk that has stood till it is sower, and become of a thick slippery substance’ (try this at your own risk). 16

He also cautioned against over-indulgence, especially in fatty meat, cream and fried foods, which, combined with lack of exercise, he repeatedly warned, cause obesity, obstruct the circulation of the blood and ‘fur the Passages’. 17 But recognising that despite his warnings ‘People will still gorge themselves with the Flesh of their Fellow-Animals ’, he deigned to supply his readers with instructions on how to prepare it (boiling rather than frying) so as to avoid the worst of its harmful qualities. 18

In his lifetime Tryon was appreciated by a wide range of people, from recondite astrologers to the famous proto-feminist playwright, poet and novelist Aphra Behn. It is possible that Tryon met Behn in Barbados where his liberal attitudes appear to have influenced her slave-novel Oronooko. Behn described herself as Tryon’s follower, claiming to have tried his vegetarian regime, and in 1685 wrote a laudatory poem about him which is so hyperbolic that it is hard to believe it was not penned with a hint of irony: 19

Hail Learned Bard! who dost thy power dispence

And show’st us the first State of Innocence …

Not he that bore th’Almighty Wand * cou’d give Diviner Dictates, how to eat, and live. And so essential was this cleanly Food, For Man’s eternal health, eternal good, That God did for his first-lov’d Race provide, What thou, by God’s example, hast prescrib’d: 20

But any exaggeration would have been less evident then: by the end of his life, Tryon had accumulated such wealth from trading and writing that he purchased some land, bought the title of ‘Gentleman’ (as Roger Crab had done), and even took to wearing a long curly wig. 21 To some, this seemed like sheer hypocrisy – even the hats he sold were made from beaver-pelts (a fact he later came to regret) – but Tryon no doubt felt he had adapted his politics to fit in with the changing times. 22

Tryon’s works – forerunners of the modern self-help genre – continued to be anthologised for decades. He may not compare in intellectual rigour with his contemporaries John Locke and Isaac Newton, but he sold far more books than Newton did, appealing to a wide lay audience. Tryon’s vegetarian philosophy – an eclectic concoction of notions culled from all over the world – was still being admired years after his death by the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was thus an important conduit, and the most powerful catalyst for Tryon’s revamping of vegetarianism in the late seventeenth century, when radical vegetarians had dwindled, was the discovery of the Indian Brahmins. Having witnessed the challenge to man’s rights over nature made by the radical pantheism of Winstanley and the Ranters, Tryon noticed the common ground with Hindu vegetarianism, and he embraced it with open arms. Above all, the Indians inspired Tryon with new conviction that a Golden Age of vegetarianism could still be achieved.

Eager to dispossess Western Europe of its monopoly over truth, Tryon argued that the Indian wise men had devised their own ‘natural religion’ by studying nature and receiving divine revelations. 23 In addition, following the speculations of the travel writers (and some erroneous Renaissance translations of Philostratus), Tryon held that Pythagoras had travelled to India and taught the Brahmins his vegetarian philosophy. This contact with Pythagoras plugged the Brahmins into the network of ancient pagan philosophers, known to the Renaissance Neoplatonists as the prisci theologi , who were believed to have passed a pristine sacred theology between themselves and even, some thought, inherited doctrines from Moses. 24 Tryon intimated that Pythagoras had inherited his vegetarian philosophy from the antediluvians, so the Brahmins, who had inherited it from him, were the purest remnants of the paradisal tradition left on earth. 25

Thomas Tryon by Robert White (1703)

He thought that the Brahmins and Moses essentially followed the one ‘true Religion’, which is ‘the same in all places, and at all times’. 26 But whereas the Jews and Christians had corrupted their creed with schisms and wrathful appetites, the Brahmin priesthood – which stretched back millennia in a pure uninterrupted tradition – had preserved their sacred knowledge in its original form. Unenamoured of the malevolent Christian clergy of his own country, Tryon turned to the Brahmins and bowed down to them as the pre-eminent guardians of divine law.

Among the very first works Tryon published was the extraordinary pamphlet, A Dialogue Between An East-Indian Brackmanny or Heathen-Philosopher, and a French Gentleman (1683). 27 Reversing the stereotype of civilised Europeans and barbaric Indians, Tryon’s Brahmin greets the Frenchman with ironic allusions to his acquisitive motives for venturing into India and questions him on the tenets and practices of Christians. The Brahmin’s enlightened philosophy, his virtuous temperance, and his unassailable respect for animal life win a moral victory over the depraved and murderous European. 28

Merging his voice entirely with the Brahmin’s, Tryon rebuffs the arguments that had hitherto been used by others to denigrate Hinduism. He even defends the Indian practice of saving lice, for, as the Brahmin explains, if people were allowed to kill some animals they would soon believe they could go on to kill others ‘and so by degrees come to kill men’. 29 The ‘East-Indian Brackmanny’ was Tryon’s alter ego. 30 Although Tryon was trying to reconcile Indian vegetarianism to Judaeo-Christian beliefs, his ranking of Hindus above Christians was shocking and his anti-vegetarian enemy the Quaker controversialist John Field attacked him for having ‘at once Unchristianed (as much as he can) all Christendom ’. 31

Abandoning some of the basic precepts of Christianity, Tryon espoused what he imagined to be the way of the Brahmins. Fusing the vegetarianism of his radical forebears with the Brahmins’ concrete example, he announced with excitement that they have for ‘many Ages … led peaceable and harmless Lives, in Unity and Amity with the whole Creation; shewing all kind of Friendship and Equality , not only to those of their own Species , but to all other Creatures’. 32 They had achieved the very state that Robins, Crab, Winstanley and all the prelapsarians had dreamed of.

The travel literature about India emphasised that the Hindu diet was based on an ethical treatment of animals (indeed, the establishment of fearless harmony between man and the animals through the practice of non-violence was an ideal lauded in Sanskrit scriptures). 33 As George Sandys had commented in his translation of Pythagoras’ speech in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1632), which Tryon read and quoted, the Indians had earned the trust of the animals by treating them with respect. Living in a social order reminiscent of the Golden Age, Sandys wrote excitedly, the Indians ‘are so farre from eating of what ever had life, that they will not kill so much as a flea; so that the birds of the aire, and beasts of the Forrest, without feare frequent their habitations, as their fellow Cittisens’. 34 Tryon came to see the fair treatment of animals as the key to the restoration of Paradise. Tryon’s Brahmin affirms that ‘we hurt not any thing, therefore nothing hurts us, but live in perfect Unity and Amity with all the numberless Inhabitants of the four Worlds.’ 35 By relinquishing flesh the vegetarian Hindus had attained physical and mental vigour and undone the Fall: ‘We all drink Water, and the fragrant Herbs, wholsom Seeds, Fruits and Grains suffice us abundantly for Food,’ declares Tryon’s Brahmin, ‘so we in the midst of a tempestuous troublesom World live Calm, and as it were in Paradise. ’ 36