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

Tryon loved his innocent flock and the contemplative life sleeping under the stars, but by the age of eighteen he ‘began to grow weary of Shepherdizing, and had an earnest desire to travel’. Without telling his parents, he packed up his belongings, his life savings and his ideals, waved goodbye to his sheep, said good riddance to his father’s plastering trade and set out for London.³

      It was 1653 and the religious radicalism of Cromwell’s interregnum was at fever pitch. Having paid all of his £3 apprenticing himself to a hat-maker near Fleet Street, Tryon soon joined his master’s congregation of Anabaptists, attracted by their austerity, silence and periodic fasting from flesh.⁴ Up in his apprentice’s lodgings, he spent all his spare time and money delving into books on alchemy, herbal medicine and natural magic. In 1657, at the age of twenty-three, he had what he was waiting for – a divine visitation of his own: ‘the Voice of Wisdom continually and most powerfully called upon me,’ he wrote years later in his Memoirs; it told him to relinquish all luxuries and turn to vegetarianism: ‘for then I took my self to Water only for Drink, and forbore eating any kind of Flesh or Fish, and confining my self to an abstemious self-denying Life.’⁵

      This was the very year that Roger Crab started calling for followers, and Tryon’s description of his conversion sounds so similar to Crab’s that it could have been lifted straight out of The English Hermite.⁶ So many of their interests are the same – Behmenist mysticism, astrological dietary medicine, vegan diet and even hat-making – that it is tempting to imagine Crab was Tryon’s vegetarian guru.⁷ Tryon called the Sabbath Mammon-worship, and the clergy ‘Jockies in the Art of Wiving’; he railed against upper-class exploitation and warned that private lands were ‘the effects of Violence’.⁸ Like Crab, he mastered the art of twisting the Bible into a vegetarian manifesto – enlisting Moses, Daniel, John the Baptist and Jesus as fellow vegetarians – and revealing that God’s permission to eat meat after the Flood was really an act of ‘Spite and Vengeance’ tempting people into the spirit of wrath.⁹ Humans were supposed to be ‘faithful Stewards’ of God’s creatures, insisted Tryon, not murderous meat-eating tyrants.¹⁰

      He joined a group of vegetarians whose doctrines sound similar to those of Crab’s ‘Rationals’, Pordage’s followers or even Winstanley’s Diggers, for they ‘would not eat Flesh, because it could not be procured without breaking the Harmony and Unity of Nature, and doing what one would not be done unto’.¹¹ When Tryon heard the rumours of Indians living in harmony with the animals he was transfixed with joy: vegetarianism was no longer relegated to the backwaters of English religious dissidence – it was the creed followed by entire nations of brother herb-eaters like himself.

      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