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

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      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

      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 СКАЧАТЬ