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

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      ‘Thomas Bushell, the Superlative Prodigal’ from Thomas Bushell, The First Part of Youths Errors (1628)

      The young man took his penitence to anchoritic extremes. In his later writings, Bushell described how he first retired to the Isle of Wight disguised as a fisherman, and afterwards to the Calf of Man (an islet just off the Isle of Man) where he took up residence on the desolate summit of a cliff 470 feet above the Irish Sea. There, he said, ‘in obedience to my dead Lord [Bacon’s] philosophical advice, I resolved to make a perfect experiment upon myself, for the obtaining of a long and healthy life.’ He shunned meat and alcohol, living instead on a ‘parsimonious diet of herbs, oil, mustard and honey, with water sufficient, most like to that [of] our long liv’d fathers before the flood, as was conceiv’d by that lord, which I most strictly observed, as if obliged by a religious vow’.

      The austerity of Bushell’s diet was clearly rooted in the Christian (and pre-Christian) tradition of abstinence from meat and monastic penitence. By imposing strictures on the body, it was believed, the soul would be regenerated and cleansed of sin. And it was meat and alcohol, above all, that were identified as the principal items of luxury. The problem for Bushell was that in Protestant England ascetic fasting was seen as a superstitious vestige of Catholicism. By giving up meat and living like a monk he risked being accused of having secret Catholic sympathies. In his confessions, The First Part of Youths Errors (1628), Bushell vigorously defended himself: if all the saints – Anthony, Augustine, Jerome, Paul the hermit and the Apostles themselves – had been ascetics, he demanded, then why shouldn’t he, a terrible sinner, be one as well?⁷

      Bacon too was aware of how suspicious his predilection for vegetables could seem. Regardless of being called a Catholic, Bacon was afraid he would be accused of sympathising with the medieval vegetarian heretics, the Manicheans and Cathars, whom the Inquisition had genocidally suppressed with fire and sword. Anxious to avoid such a fate, Bacon issued repeated disclaimers: ‘Neither would we be thought to favour the Manichees, or their diet, though wee commend the frequent use of all kindes of seedes, and kernels, and roots … neither let any Man reckon us amongst those Hereticks, which were called Cathari.’ Bacon was trying to shift discussions of diet away from its old heretical connotations into the new idiom of enlightened philosophy. His opinions, he insisted, were based on empirical facts and not on religious dietary taboos.⁸

      Happily, Bacon’s healthy vegetable diet appears to have done Bushell a world of good. By the time he was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey in 1674 at the fine old age of eighty, Bushell had become a legendary figure, and is still remembered today as the Calf of Man’s most famous inhabitant. For a while, he was also rich. Having come down from his cliff, he pursued Bacon’s practical tip on reclaiming silver and lead mines in Wales and established his own mint in Aberystwyth. God was so pleased with his vegetarian penitence, he claimed, that He gave Bushell power to subdue the ‘Subteranean Spirits’ which usually hindered mining projects. With the profits that flowed from the earth, he proclaimed his intention to realise Bacon’s plans for a ‘Solomon’s House’ – the utopian establishment depicted in Bacon’s unfinished work, New Atlantis. Bacon had imagined an ideal colony where scientific endeavour (including a primitive form of genetic engineering) was enhanced by the inhabitants’ rigorous lifestyle, some of them purifying their bodies by living in three-mile-deep caves below the mountains. Bushell’s institution was not quite what Bacon had imagined. It was more like a philanthropic dining facility for his miners, where instead of being fed the complete meal Bacon had devised – a fermented-meat drink – they were fed on Bushell’s own meagre diet of penitential bread and water.

      Bushell himself retreated, meanwhile, to his estate at Road Enstone, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire, where he created a ‘kind of paradise’ in a grotto garden around a cave which became famous for a natural spring generating a series of spectacular hydraulic contraptions. He was no doubt inspired by Bacon’s cave-dwelling multi-centenarian wise men and by the ‘paradise’ garden at Bacon’s mansion in Gorhambury where the pair used to spend hours in meditation. In his new abode Bushell kept up his old dietary resolve, writing that he still ‘observ’d my Lords prescription, to satisifie nature with a Diet of Oyle, Honey, Mustard, Herbs and Bisket’. King Charles I and Queen Henrietta visited Bushell in his grotto in 1636, and for their pleasure he organised the performance of a masque about a vegetarian prodigal hermit. The Queen expressed her appreciation by installing an extremely rare Egyptian mummy in Bushell’s damp grotto home (where it slowly went mouldy and was lost to posterity).

      When civil war broke out in 1642, Bushell roused himself from his tranquil retreat. As political affiliations polarised those who questioned and those who believed subjects had no right to question, Bushell remained fervently loyal to King Charles. Bacon had foreseen the political turmoil and spent his career defending the royal prerogative; faithful to Bacon as always, Bushell became a mainstay of the Cavaliers’ military campaign against the Roundheads. He turned his miners into the King’s lifeguard, bankrolled the Royalist army with silver and a hundred tons of lead-shot from his mines, put down a mutiny in Shropshire, and defended (yet another island) Lundy in the Bristol Channel. Eventually surrendering to the onslaught of the Parliamentary army, he was arrested and seriously wounded in the head, but then attained the protection of Lord Fairfax. With many of his loans unsettled other than by a quaint but otherwise worthless thank-you letter from King Charles, Bushell went back to his garden, as Horace to his Sabine Farm and the poet Andrew Marvell to Nun Appleton, rejecting the anarchy of Cromwell’s interregnum in preference for his own private Eden.⁹

      Bushell’s СКАЧАТЬ