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

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       SIX John Evelyn: Salvation in a Salad

      Theophilus: There’s a superanuated Custom kept up among the Antients; that to gratify the Appetite violates the Creation …

      Arnoldus: Was this the Primitive Practice of our former Ancestors?

      Theophilus: I don’t say it was, I discourse the Brachmans that offer this Argument. No Man has a Commission to create Life, no Man therefore by any Law or Custom ought to take Life away; which if he do, he makes himself an Instrument of unnatural Cruelty, and his Body a Sepulchre to bury dead Carcasses in … Were this Argument approv’d of, it would, I suspect, overthrow our design of Angling.

      Richard Franck, Northern Memoirs … The Contemplative and Practical Angler (1694)¹

      In the first comprehensive account of salmon- and trout-fishing in Scotland, Richard Franck set out the opposition between the Brahmins’ and the Christians’ value of animal life. Franck originally penned his miscellaneous work in 1658 as a republican riposte to The Compleat Angler (1653), in which the Royalist Izaak Walton had tactfully submerged his attack on Cromwellian politics in scaly similes. As an ex-Cromwellian soldier fusing Hinduism in the 1690s with his outdated political Puritanism and mysticism, Franck had much in common with (and may have been directing his dialogue at) Thomas Tryon. Franck’s character Theophilus, who takes the part of the Hindus, transposes the elements of Tryon’s nom de plume Philotheos.

      Like Tryon, Franck was tempted by the dreamy similarity between Indian vegetarianism and Edenic harmony, but ultimately he overrode this by evoking the rival idea of Eden according to which animals offered themselves up willingly to man – a notion backed up by the Gospel’s eradication of food taboos. But this was a bait to hook the unwary – for the vice Franck was trying to reel in was gluttony. Franck’s most potent net was woven from the common threads of ‘Hinduism’ and Puritanism: their voices united in condemning unnecessary slaughter for the riotous gratification of excessive appetite. Under the influence of Hinduism – and particularly the account by Edward Terry – Franck shifted the Puritanical detestation of wasting God’s gifts into his specific attack on wasting beings to whom God had given the inherently valuable property of life.² It was this absorption of Hindu vegetarianism that came to occupy the centre ground in social critiques of the late seventeenth century, espoused not just by political outsiders like Tryon and Franck, but by the most prominent thinkers of the intellectual world.

      John Evelyn (1620–1706) is most famous for his diary, which, like that of his friend Samuel Pepys, records the quotidian minutiae of seventeenth-century society. A shining torch of the Enlightenment, Evelyn was one of the first members and secretary of the Royal Society, the internationally admired institution of empirical learning. He was a great friend of the eminent scientist Robert Boyle, and, as one of the trustees of the Boyle lectures, a bastion of the new orthodoxy of latitudinarian Anglicanism and Newtonian science. Though a Royalist sympathiser, Evelyn avoided active service during the Civil War by absenting himself on a Grand Tour of Europe. He made friends with the exiled royal family in Paris, and after the Restoration served in various philanthropic political posts until, dismayed by debauchery and intemperance at court,³ he retired to Sayes Court in Deptford, the private estate of his father-in-law.

      During his abdication from public service in Cromwell’s era, Evelyn took up gardening, developing Sayes Court into a masterpiece of edible design. Thirty-eight beds of vegetables and a vast orchard of 300 fruit trees led into ‘the apple-tree walk’ which terminated in a moated island covered in waving swards of asparagus, raspberries, a mulberry tree and a blossoming enclosure of fruit bushes.⁴ Later he moved on to the garden at his own home at Wotton in Surrey, where he supplied his wife and household with freshly grown produce, and his nation with advice on everything from tree-planting to city-planning.

      As old age cast shadows over the garden of his soul, Evelyn drew together a lifetime’s experience in horticulture to compose his magnum opus, the Elysium Britannicum or Paradisium Revisitum. He never completed this compendious work, and it has only recently been edited from his surviving array of manuscripts. He did publish one chapter, however, as it blossomed into the full-length book, Acetaria. A Discourse of Sallets (1699). This was filled with instructions on how to grow, pick, prepare and eat salad, from the sight-enhancing, anti-flatulent fennel to the eighteen types of pain-quelling, lust-calming lettuce. In the seventeenth century eating a dish of raw leafy vegetables was something of a novelty, out of line with the predominant valorisation of red meat. But with the increasing interest in botany and the rise of gentlemanly vegetable gardening, to which Evelyn himself contributed, salads were to enjoy a vogue. Sowing seeds no longer needed be the sole prerogative of peasants – the most noble foot could grace a spade. On the face of it, Acetaria was designed, as other commentators have pointed out, to encourage the use of salads in the English diet.⁵