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

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      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 Jews 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. СКАЧАТЬ