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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ bemused contemporary, emphasising the Shakers’ asceticism.²⁴

      In a neater and more detailed combination of scatology and eschatology, Robins’ ex-follower and later arch-rival John Reeve condemned his dietary laws to his face: ‘thou didst deceave many People,’ he bellowed, ‘and then gavest them leave to abstain by degrees from all kind of Food, that should have preserved and strengthed their Natures: But thou didst feed them with windy things, as Aples, and other Fruit that was windy; and they drank nothing but Water.’²⁵ In the guts of his followers, said Reeve, Robins’ high-blown vegetarian doctrines turned into nothing but malodorous hot air. Most contemporaries agreed: vegetables may have been all right for Adam in Paradise, but they were hardly appropriate for the average earthly being. This common prejudice seemed to be empirically demonstrated by Robins’ experiments. Reeve narrated a woeful tale which, if true, leaves Robins guilty of irresponsibility in the extreme:

      he commanded his Disciples to abstain from Meats and Drinks, promising them that they should in a short time be fed with Manna from Heaven, until many a poor Soul was almost starved under his Diet, yea and some were absolutely starved to Death, whose Bodies could not bear his Diet.²⁶

      Reeve squarely identified Robins as a devilish false prophet of the type St Paul had warned would come and deceive the people by ‘Commanding to abstain from meats’ (1 Timothy 4:1–5).²⁷ Robins wasn’t God, or Adam: he was Satan and he had led many people astray, to their and his own perdition.²⁸

      Unperturbed, Joshuah Garment, Robins’ representative Moses, proudly called their group ‘the people that live by water and bread’. They emphasised that their bloodless diet contrasted to the bloodiness of their oppressors, and combined their vegetarianism with vehement anti-war sentiments and pacifism. Garment denounced his persecutors as ‘bloudy Prelates’ whose ‘Law is Sword’, and predicted that their ‘thirstings after the bloud’ will be punished, for God took no pleasure in ‘those that delight in bloud’. Robins, by contrast, was ‘the peaceable man’ and his followers ‘the peaceable multitude that shall never bear arms offensive or defensive’.²⁹

      These stirring words, with their imagery of blood, bloodthirstiness and bleeding, were a reaction against the violence of the Civil War. Garment, who enlisted as a soldier, witnessed murder and had probably been obliged to kill. His conversion was sudden. One day, after three years of fighting against the King, God personally commanded him to leave the army and effect instead a bloodless revolution ‘by the sword of the spirit, not by the sword of man’. God’s voice ordered him to wait ‘in love and peace, till peace and love is established in the Earth’.³⁰ Garment became convinced that violence could never achieve his idealistic aims, and his aversion to killing humans and drawing their blood appears to have spread into a repulsion towards bloodletting of all kinds. Universal peace was a prerequisite of Christ’s millennial kingdom as Isaiah had prophesied in the Bible,³¹ and this fusion of pacifism and vegetarianism would become a prevalent motif among blood-sated radicals.

      The Shakers’ strong repulsion from blood may have been reinforced by their reversion to Jewish law which forbade the eating of blood. To King James I’s amusement, groups of ‘Christian Jews’ earlier in the century had resurrected the Mosaic law, holding that it was ‘absolutely unlawful to eat any swines flesh or blacke puddings’ (i.e. pork or blood). Contemporaries likened the waywardness of the Ranters to the absurdity of the Judaist leader, John Traske, who had been brutally punished in 1618 and starved on a diet of bread and water until he agreed to break his resolve by eating pork. His wife, who was found still languishing in prison in 1639, twenty-one years after her first arrest, obstinately stuck to her scruples. ‘She has not eaten any flesh these seven years, neither drunk anything but water,’ reported an appalled commissioner; but there she remained until at least 1645 when a fellow prisoner at last persuaded her to change her diet.³²

      Ridicule from the press and mocking crowds did nothing to sway the Shakers from their course. The strong arm of the law, however, eventually did. By 1650 Parliament had reached the end of its tether with the religious radicals, and in August passed the landmark Blasphemy Act, specifically tailored to suppress John Robins and the Ranters.³³ There was a swift crackdown, and one by one the Ranters were picked off and put behind bars. Several of Robins’ followers were arrested and held in the Gatehouse Prison at Westminster, where they were pumped for information about ‘where John Robins, alias Roberts dwelleth’. Eventually, after almost a year of covert information-gathering, in spring 1651 the authorities caught up with Robins at one of his clandestine meetings in Long Alley in Moorfields and he and his supporters were interrogated and sent to the New Prison at Clerkenwell.³⁴

      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, СКАЧАТЬ