The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

Like Jesus (to whom he compared himself), Robins wrote nothing down, but we do have the records of the state and of his former followers, one of whom said in a memoir that the Shakers ‘pray’d unto him, and they fell flat on their Faces and Worshipped him, calling him their Lord and their God’.4 Buoyed up by his disciples’ support, Robins’ vanity appears to have reached dizzying heights. He publicly declared that ‘the Lord Jesus was a weak and Imperfect Saviour, and afraid of Death.’ Robins himself, by contrast, ‘had no fear of Death in him at all’.5 Even Robins’ enemies did not deny his powers; rather, they accused him of witchcraft and even of being the devil himself.6

Like other radical sects, the Shakers pooled their worldly goods and lived in a primitive communism with their leader.7 Upending conventional morality, Robins encouraged his followers to swap spouses and set an example by taking the wife of his head disciple.8 Characteristically of the seventeenth-century radical sects which often gave women equal status with men, about half of the Shakers were women. It was also rumoured that they liked to gather together naked – the same was said of the Quakers and the Adamites – because covering the body was a sign of the Fall, and anyone who wanted to return to innocence had to start by stripping down to Adam and Eve’s state of shameless undress. Understandably, allegations of free-love practices abounded in the popular press.9

Decades later, Lodowicke Muggleton, who went on to lead a sect of his own, remembered wistfully that it really had seemed at the time as if Robins were Adam come again. ‘For who upon Earth did know, at that time,’ Muggleton pondered, ‘whether he was False or True: I say none, not one.’10

Having established his identity, Robins, like all cult leaders, pledged to guide his followers to a promised land, the Mount of Olives in the Holy Land of Jerusalem where he would feed them on manna from heaven.11 He elected a stand-in Moses to lead the way, and started gathering people in London to prepare for their escape. Robins vowed that once he had collected a crowd of 144,000 (the number of saints in the tribe of Israel, as prophesied by Revelation), he would part the waters of the English Channel and march them over dry land, away from the uproar of England, to safety and bliss.12 Robins was the King of Israel; following him to Jerusalem, his supporters thought, would pave the way for Christ’s return.13

A notorious wild prophet by the name of Thomas Tany (or ‘Theau-raujohn’), joined forces with Robins by erecting tents for each of the so-called tribes of Israel and declaring that his people would follow Robins to Jerusalem. Some of Robins’ followers, and Tany himself, took their enthusiasm for Judaism so seriously that they claimed to have learned Hebrew and even to have circumcised themselves.14 Tany kept up the mission – even after Robins had been clapped in jail. He claimed on his own behalf that he was the rightful King of France, England and the Jews, and was arrested for violently wielding a sword at Parliament a week after Oliver Cromwell had been offered the title of King, and for symbolically burning pistols, a sword, a horse’s saddle and the Bible. Tany perished many years later in an attempt to effect Robins’ journey to Jerusalem. The boat he built to carry him there sprang a leak during the crossing to Holland, and he and his crew were all drowned.

Ranters and Shakers from The Declaration of John Robins (1651)

A naked rout of Ranters from Strange Newes from Newgate (1650/1)

Naked Adamites from The Adamites Sermon (1641)

The claims Robins and Tany made of biblical descent probably did not seem strange to their contemporaries. Many Puritans had long envisaged the English as a lost tribe of Israel awaiting deliverance from their own Egyptian-style bondage.15 Thinkers like Jan Amos Comenius aimed to restore man’s lost perfection by converting all the Jews. Ironically, these hopes fuelled the philo-Semitism of the seventeenth century and Robins’ followers were instrumental in a successful campaign to force Parliament to allow Jews to live freely in England.16 More than a century later William Blake (who dabbled in the Muggletonian cult established by Robins’ ex-followers) was still living in hope: ‘Till we have built Jerusalem,/ In England’s green and pleasant land’.17

The first Adam had lost Paradise. The second Adam, Christ, had promised to restore everything to its former perfection. John Robins confirmed that he was none other than ‘the third Adam, that must gain that which the first lost’.18 His followers obediently declared that ‘John Robins is the same Adam that was in the Garden.’19 As John King, another disciple, put it, John Robins ‘is now come to reduce the world to its former condition, as it was before the fall of the first Adam’.20

The original Adam lived on the pure fruits of Eden, so it was logical for Robins to insist that his followers should adhere to Paradise’s strict vegetable diet.21 Thomas Bushell had taken up the vegetable diet to be like Adam before the Fall; John Robins claimed that he was Adam, and vegetable cuisine seems to have been an essential adjunct to his cult. There were other millenarian prophets at the same time proclaiming that the return to the pre-fallen state would require a revival of the original vegetarian diet, like the philo-Semite George Foster who prophesied in 1650 that animals would be involved in the universal freedom which was coming to humans.22 Like many vegetarians to come, Robins also condemned the use of alcohol: ‘it was not of Gods making: it is the drink of the Beast (said he) a poysonous liquor, and wo be unto all them that drinks it.’23 Non-radical contemporaries found Robins’ dietary antics shocking – it was hardly believable that life could be sustained on vegetable food without flesh – but they knew what he was getting at. ‘Their food is onely bread and water, although they have plenty of monies to buy other provisions,’ explained one 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, Fish and Fowle, and every green thing’.41 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 and radicals): Crab was a despicable ‘Dipper and a Preacher’, leading people astray with ‘strange doctrines against the Immortality of the soul’, and telling them ‘that it was better to have a golden Calfe or an Asse set up … then to have a King over them’.2

In 1647 Fairfax got wind of Crab’s sorry plight and was so incensed that he took the case straight to Parliament where, speaking uncompromisingly to newly empowered statesmen, he raised Crab to the status of a cause célèbre. At Crab’s trial, Fairfax complained, Justice Bacon had locked the jury up without food and water until they agreed to return a guilty verdict. Crab had been sent in chains to the White Lyon where he was to remain until he found a way of paying the inordinate sum of 100 marks.3 In being imprisoned for preaching against tyranny, Crab had proved just how tyrannous the system was. As Crab himself later added, he had nearly lost his life on the battlefield when his head was ‘cloven to the braine’; imprisoning him now was the depths of ingratitude. The case created a ripple of excitement: Fairfax’s complaint was copied down and published, and eight years later the newspapers still remembered Crab as a leading Levelling ‘Agitator in the Army’.4

Writing in his will at the end of his life, Crab still looked back on this time as the catalyst to his future self; he had nearly ‘departed this humane Life’ but God saw fit to let him be born again ‘upon which account the Lord himselfe took my Soule into his custody’.5 Disgruntled and disillusioned by parliamentary policies, Crab left the army to set up a hat shop at Chesham in Buckinghamshire. But like Gerrard Winstanley, he soon came to see commerce as con-artistry; it was the grease that oiled the system of decadent consumerism.6 He started stirring up trouble; as one satirical publication declared ‘we have amongst us a Crabbed cavelling fellow, being both a Barber, Hors-Dr. and a Hat-maker, that disturbs and jeers at Ministers that come to preach with us’.7 In 1652 he sold his hat shop, gave his estate away to the poor and rented an isolated spot in Ickenham near Uxbridge where he built a little hermitage and started digging the land.8 Thrusting himself metaphorically into the wilderness, Crab cast himself as a John the Baptist figure and proceeded to hurl abuse at the system that exploited the poor to satisfy the material pleasure of the few: ‘if John the Baptist, should come forth againe,’ he exclaimed, ‘and call himself Leveller, and take such food as the wildernesse yeelded, and such cloathing, and Preach up his former Doctrine, He that had two coats should give away one of them, and he that hath food should do likewise; How scornfully would our proud Gentlemen and Gallants look of him’.9