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

      Crab viewed the whole of biblical history as one long saga in God’s attempt to return men to their natural diet. Moses led the Israelites into the desert, Crab claimed, to bring them away from their carnivorous Egyptian masters (perhaps this was even latent in Robins and Garment’s ideas of themselves as Moses figures). When the recalcitrant Israelites ‘murmured, and rebelled against the Lord, lusting after the flesh pots of Egypt’, God punished them: the flock of quails God sent was poisoned and they died with the flesh in their teeth.³⁴ The prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah, and Christ’s apostles, had continued the message by either living on vegetable food or practising harsh asceticism for our emulation.³⁵ The prophet Daniel had confined himself to lentils and water, a diet on which he had achieved divine epiphanies.³⁶ Just as the saints were assisted by animals, so Crab was brought bread in prison by a spaniel, and he claimed that birds came to him from God to inform him of future events.³⁷ Even Christ himself, Crab wilfully suggested, was in favour of vegetarianism: we hear of Christ eating various comestibles, he said, ‘but we never finde that ever he was drunke, or eate a bit of flesh’.³⁸ In a rare example of Crab’s concern for animal welfare, he defended Christ’s feeding of fishes to the five thousand on the grounds that the meal was ‘innocent’ because it was made ‘without hurting any creature that breathed on earth’ (excluding aquatic animals from the category of flesh was a standard division of Catholic fasting laws).³⁹ Even the Passover feast, where Christ decidedly partook of the lamb, was an irregularity which he was obliged to undertake only to fulfil the Jewish prophecies.

      Crab’s presentation of the Bible as a monolithic vegetarian manifesto became more problematic when his adversaries threw back at him passages in the New Testament that were clearly designed to abolish old Jewish food taboos. Each of the New Testament passages that Crab and his contemporaries referenced in their disputes about vegetarianism had already been used by St Augustine and St Aquinas against vegetarians such as the heretic Manicheans. The doctrinal dispute was new in England, but it had a history that reached back more than a millennium, and the English clergy were happy to rely on such authoritative texts to prove the unorthodoxy of their adversary.⁴⁰ But Crab – a Houdini of biblical exegetes – found an answer to all his detractors.

      Christ had taught that all food should be accepted with thanksgiving and none of it should be rejected as unclean. Crab retorted that this was manifestly absurd since some things were poisonous, and even if meat wasn’t unlawful it was still undesirable. Deftly perverting the sense of St Paul’s famous edict, ‘if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth,’ and his allusion to one ‘who is weak, eateth herbs’, Crab appealed for people to ‘forbear Flesh for my conscience sake, as Paul did declare he would do concerning his weak Brother’.⁴¹ Crab even challenged the passage that John Reeve had used against John Robins’ vegetarianism which warned against devilish prophets ‘commanding to abstain from meats’.⁴² Crab insisted that he commanded no one: he just wanted everyone to be enlightened enough to give up of their own accord.⁴³ By attacking him, he objected, the ignorant English priests were breaking Paul’s commandment aimed specifically at the vegetarian dispute: ‘Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not.’⁴⁴ Despite his efforts at scriptural justification, Crab was defamed by the local priests as a devil and the Puritan minister of St Margaret’s in Uxbridge, Thomas Godboult, told everyone Crab was a witch.⁴⁵ Crab retorted that he was willing to meet any of the clergy for a wrangle, and claimed they had lost the argument so many times they were scared to meet him in public. He had in any case absolutely no respect for the incumbent priesthood or the government that supported it: priests compelled the people to pay tithes, which in Crab’s eyes made the Church a whore-house and the priests its pimps and the whole idea of forcing people to go to church on Sunday turned religion into idolatry. Despite the puritanical fervour of Cromwell’s England, church-goers still saw Sunday as an excuse to dress up in fancy clothes and blow their week’s savings on a feast of roast meat. To Crab, therefore, it was the most sacrilegious day and he made a point of flouting Sabbath laws.⁴⁶

      Crab’s seditious ravings were no less threatening to the authorities than they had been back in 1646 when he was put in prison. The priests whom he attacked could criticise his vegetarianism, but there was little they could do about it. His refusal to abide by the Sabbath laws, however, and his overt encouragement to the people to skive off church provided the authorities with the opportunity they needed. By 1657 Crab had been hauled in front of the magistrates at least four times for Sabbath-breaking. He had been set in the stocks in front of Ickenham church, and locked in Clerkenwell Prison on more than one occasion. Crab even claimed that Cromwell had once sentenced him to death. In January 1655 he was locked up and tried before magistrates but managed to get off the charge of calling the government a tyranny.⁴⁷ It was always his vegetarianism that attracted controversy at these times, bringing people in flocks to gaze at him behind bars.⁴⁸

      In 1657 Crab stood unrepentantly in court listening to the judges demand that he abide by the laws of the ‘Higher Powers’. In his daring and brilliant retort we get a glimpse of Crab at his strongest: not a wizened hermit eccentrically whiling his life away on a patch of ground in the country as many represented him, but a hardened radical taking on the authorities.⁴⁹ His reply split open the paradox of revolutionary government: he had fought alongside them when they were Cromwellian rebels, he pointed out, ‘with my sword in my hand against the Highest Powers in England, namely, the King and the Bishops, upon which account ye sit here.’ How could they tell him now that rebellion was forbidden when their authority was founded on the biggest rebellion in memory? Crab made them address their own hypocrisy in trying and sentencing a rebel whom they had once championed as one of their own.

      Unpopular with the authorities, but blessed with eloquence and charisma, Crab soon attracted a band of vegetarian followers. By 1659, a year before the Restoration of the monarchy, he had converted enough people to earn his group a name – the ‘Rationals’ or ‘Rationallists’. Vegetarianism was their key policy, and it was lauded in a ballad by a publisher, one ‘J.B.’, who counted himself as one of their disciples:

      Illustrious souls more brighter than the morn,

      Oh! how dark mortals greet you still with scorn, Admiring at your homely sack-cloth dresse, Hearbs, Roots, and every vegetable mess On which you live; and are more healthy far Than Canibals, that feed on lushious fare;⁵⁰

      By this time Crab had become convinced that God was speaking through him, and wrote his pamphlets as if in the voice of God Himself. His competing claims for divine inspiration embroiled him in controversy with the Quakers. In January 1659 the Quaker Thomas Curtis wrote to George Fox with his concerns about a ‘very great and precious’ meeting in Buckinghamshire attended by ‘fish of all sorts’, ‘many of the world, some baptized, and some of Crab’s company’. Crab incited attacks from the well-known Quaker controversialists John Rance and George Salter (who would one day be arrested at a meeting with John Robins’ old rival, John Reeve). Salter derisively attacked the Rationals, calling Crab ‘a corrupt bulk of Fog, who art like a quagmire that sucks up those that comes upon thee’.⁵¹

      Crab was later said to have joined forces with the leader