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

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СКАЧАТЬ This idea that God was in animals as well as in man was deeply subversive, particularly because it blurred the vital distinction between the natural and divine worlds and smacked of the idolatrous practices condemned in the first commandment. It also had dangerous implications for man’s treatment of the brutes, and the State did what it could to lance the festering gangrene of heresy.

      The leader of the communist Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley, was among the most notorious advocates of such beliefs. In April 1649, Winstanley led a band of comrades to the edge of Windsor Forest to occupy the land. For too long landowning elites had exerted a monopoly over the earth and its produce; food prices had reached record highs and the poor were being deprived of the barest necessities. It was time to reclaim nature’s heritage. The Diggers illegally started to dig the soil, manure it, and plant it with crops for their own sustenance: ‘everyone that is born in the land may be fed by the earth his mother that brought him forth,’ declared Winstanley, ‘all looking upon each other as equals in the creation.’ Calling on the disaffected masses to join them, the Diggers advertised the virtues of their home-grown corn, parsnips, carrots and beans: ‘we have peace in our hearts and quiet rejoicing in our work, and filled with sweet content, though we have but a dish of roots and bread for our food.’⁴² Digging the land to grow crops, they promised, would free the poor from enforced labour and from the unreliable and inherently oppressive market economy of food.

      Much as Winstanley seized the land to return it to the people, so also he grabbed hold of God and pulled Him down to earth. The Church had always kept God closeted up in heaven where only the established priesthood could access Him. But like many radicals of his time, Winstanley insisted that God was all around us, in every thing on earth. In contrast to traditional theologians who tended to regard matter as dirty and potentially evil, Winstanley stressed that all creatures were inhabited by divinity and should therefore be treated with love and reverence, ‘as well beasts as man-kinde’.⁴³ This egalitarian spirituality upturned the traditional hierarchies between people, and it challenged mankind’s disregard for animals. Strictly speaking, Winstanley did not break the Blasphemy Act because he did not claim that God dwells in the created universe ‘and no where else’, and he did not go to the extreme of the pantheists who literally identified the world with God. But his doctrines were nevertheless radical and extremely threatening.

      Winstanley did not doubt that man was supposed to be lord of the creation, just as God was lord over man. But he took the radical step of arguing that Christ’s most important commandment – to do as you would be done by – applied not just to fellow humans, but also to animals. In order to undo the corruption of the Fall, man had to start by ‘looking upon himselfe as a fellow creature (though he be Lord of all creatures) to all other creatures of all kinds; and so doing to them, as he would have them doe to him’.⁴⁴

      It might seem logical that with such beliefs Winstanley would have to be a vegetarian. But he did not explicitly state that everyone had to stop killing or eating animals. Most contemporaries with similar beliefs were not vegetarian. If one argued that it was wrong to kill an animal because God dwelt in all living things, it could also be argued that it was wrong to kill cabbages. Indeed, if man, nature and divinity were parts of a unified whole, there would be no reason why animals should not give up their lives for humans who were just another part of that same unity.⁴⁵ Jacob Bauthumley, whose theology in this respect was very similar to Winstanley’s, explained how one could believe that animals were inhabited by God, and still happily slaughter them. He pointed out that an animal death was no death at all: men and beasts were just different parts of ‘one intire Being’, so when animals died their flesh returned to dust and their life was reabsorbed into God.⁴⁶ It is unsurprising, therefore, to find that in 1652, after the Diggers had been violently disbanded by the Government, Winstanley provocatively incited the poor to ransack butchers’ shops and steal from the common flocks for their food.⁴⁷

      However, some individuals did argue that it was wrong to take away life which came from God. This line appears to have been taken, for example, by certain English members of the Family of Love. These clandestine confederates were disciples of the sixteenth-century Dutch mystic, Hendrik Niclaes, who taught that God suffused the universe and that it was wrong to do violence of any sort because God ‘created all things, that they should have their being’.⁴⁸ He told his followers to recreate on earth a new Eden, where people ‘kill not. for they have no Nature to Destroying. But all their Desyre is, that it mought all live, whatsoever is of the Lyfe’.⁴⁹ In the 1640s, a bricklayer-preacher from Hackney called Marshall who was a soldier-turned-pacifist associated with the Family of Love, echoed Hendrik Niclaes by announcing to a teeming crowd ‘that it is unlawfull to kill any creature that hath life, because it came from God’.⁵⁰ The heretic-hunting Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards added Marshall’s vegetarian doctrine to his blacklist of blasphemies, Gangraena (1645–6), where he warned that unauthorised preachers like Marshall were teaching that ‘’Tis unlawfull to fight at all, or to kill any man, yea to kill any of the creatures for our use, as a chicken, or on any other occasion’.⁵¹

      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.

       THREE Roger Crab: Levelling the Food Chain

      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 СКАЧАТЬ