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

The garden, according to Evelyn, was ‘A place of all terrestrial enjoyments the most resembling Heaven, and the best representation of our lost felicitie.’¹¹ Gardens were also like encyclopaedias. Knowing all about plants – and Evelyn’s contemporaries did try to make their botanical knowledge as comprehensive as possible – was like knowing God’s creation as Adam had known it in Paradise. Gardening was Adam’s occupation before the Fall; therefore to garden was to relive the life of Adam. Gardening, said Evelyn, was ‘the most innocent, laudable, and purest of earthly felicities, and such as does certainly make the neerest approaches to that Blessed state’,¹² and he extended this common project into the realm of diet. Adam lived on raw vegetables and fruit in Eden, so if one wanted to live like Adam in Paradise, there was only one diet for it. Many herbs grew wild (‘every hedge affords a Sallet’), and were therefore obtainable without labour, just like food before the Fall.¹³ Composing salad was the original culinary art form: it was ‘clean, innocent, sweet, and Natural … compar’d with the Shambles Filth and Nidor, Blood and Cruelty’.¹⁴

      Evelyn complemented this dietary idealism by trying to establish a more harmonious relationship with animals. Just like collecting all plants together in one place, gathering animals to live in harmony was a potent symbol of primeval harmony. Like Pepys he condemned bear-, bull- and badger-baiting as ‘butcherly sports or rather barbarous cruelties’,¹⁵ and he even tried to recreate Eden by setting up a zoo. Evelyn had been inspired by the big-cat menageries of the Turks, but he settled for a more modest collection of tortoises, squirrels and birds.¹⁶ In an emblematic representation of his desire to live in harmony with nature, he personally commissioned an elaborate ebony cabinet, now held the Victoria and Albert Museum, decorated with hard stone and gilt-bronze plaques depicting the mythical Greek vegetarian, Orpheus, taming the animals with his music.¹⁷

      As a Royalist, Evelyn was a long way from the republican vegetarians who retreated into hermetic solitude, but his retreat into gardening was no less political. He visited Thomas Bushell in his vegetarian cave, and wrote in 1658 – 9 to Sir Thomas Browne and Sir Robert Boyle (who had also written a paper on salads¹⁸) that he thought gardening was an ideal around which the defeated Royalists could rally.¹⁹ There in their little Edens, Englishmen could recreate the monarchy Adam enjoyed over the creation, living as ‘a society of the paradisi cultores, persons of antient simplicity, Paradisean and Hortulan saints’.²⁰ As a collective community, Evelyn imagined they would live like the abstinent Carthusian friars, sheltered from the malign political world, but spearheading scientific investigation and progress. Although a naïve ideal, it was just such ideas, in line with Francis Bacon’s Solomon’s House, that led to the formation of the Royal Society.²¹

      Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), the famous Royalist physician and historian of gardens, was a particularly appropriate person for Evelyn to write to. In 1650, when vegetarianism was all the rage among the radicals, Browne reflected on its theological and medical implications in his famously witty collection of essays, Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors. He hinted that God might have sent the Flood to punish people for eating flesh (a view he extrapolated from the natural-rights philosopher, Hugo Grotius) and suggested that God permitted flesh because the Flood ‘had destroyed or infirmed the nature of vegetables’. The virtuous continued to abstain, however, and the Pythagoreans and the ‘Bannyans’ still did. All this showed that ‘there is no absolute necessity to feed on any [animals]’; returning to the vegetarian diet, he concluded, might even ‘prolong our days’.²²

      Evelyn was a respected gentleman and a family man; his position in the Royal Society ensured his adherence to social norms; even in his diary – in stark contrast to Pepys’ frank confessions of fondling women’s breasts and committing all sorts of peccadilloes – he maintained perpetual decorum, and ‘never used its pages to reveal the secrets of the heart’, as Virginia Woolf once complained.²³ So he avoided anything unseemly in his advocacy of vegetarianism, keeping his distance from mystic counterparts like Thomas Tryon by air-brushing them out of his anthology of herbivores. (Tryon requited this with mutual silence, either ignorant of Evelyn, or too much of an egotist to acknowledge his rival, except perhaps once in a miscellaneous work he might have edited.)²⁴ Evelyn’s vegetarian idealism was a nostalgic grasp at human perfection, but it was always laced with stern-faced pragmatism. His lasting influence was inspiring a country-wide delight in gardening, and encouraging unrepentant carnivores, such as Pepys, to experiment more extensively with the bounty of fruit and vegetables.²⁵

      For most of his life at least, Evelyn relished good dishes of flesh; about a third of the recipes in a manuscript cookbook he wrote for his wife contain meat products, and even some recipes in Acetaria acknowledge that the salad is to serve as an accompaniment to mutton broth or minced beef. His diary entries – recording his delectation of oysters and especially home-caught game – reveal that he did not worry too much about what he actually ate; indeed he insisted that there was ‘no positive prohibition’ on eating flesh.²⁶ Perhaps he considered himself vegetarian – indeed a vegetable! – even when he ate meat, for he observed that meat and men were made out of digested vegetation, so man ‘becoming an Incarnate Herb, and Innocent Cannibal, may truly be said to devour himself’.²⁷ Only when he was staving off death in old age did Evelyn subject himself to a strict diet (which made his wife deeply anxious); this was apparently for the sake of his health, but perhaps the experience of writing Acetaria finally determined him to purify himself for the world that was to come.²⁸

      Beneath Evelyn’s polite compromising surface, however, lay a true passion. With a literal-mindedness that it is difficult to comprehend today, Evelyn, like many of his contemporaries, fervently believed that Christ’s second coming was on its way. His desire to reform the world to the conditions of Paradise was bound up with his preparation for Judgement Day. The idea of an establishment figure such as Evelyn espousing a religious theme usually associated with the radical mid-century may appear surprising, but many of his colleagues at the Royal Society were following Bacon’s lead, trying to recover the universal knowledge enjoyed by Adam in preparation for the millennium.²⁹ Evelyn strove to differentiate himself from the radical Fifth Monarchy Men and other millenarian groups,³⁰ but his impulses have much in common with Tryon’s yearning to recreate Paradise. Like Tryon, he quoted Isaiah’s prophecy of the millennium and claimed that Christ’s kingdom would be vegetarian: ‘the Hortulan Provision of the Golden Age,’ he said, ‘fitted all Places, Times and Persons; and when Man is restor’d to that State again, it will be as it was in the Beginning.’³¹

      Like Tryon also, though the other way round, Evelyn transformed into a truth of immediate relevance the old legend that religious knowledge had been passed down from Adam to the nephews of Noah, through the British Druids, to the Brahmins and thence to Pythagoras and Plato. The pagans, he said, retained ‘some opinions, agreeable to the primitive truth’. Evelyn did not regard the Brahmins as a superior authority to Christian priests, as Tryon did, but the genealogy he gave them illuminated them with