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

were part of a counter-Reformation conspiracy attempting to infiltrate Protestant countries with superstitious abstinence.¹³ Even John Donne snidely equated salad-eating with madness and Papism, ‘Like Nebuchadnezar perchance with grass and flowers,/ A sallet worse than Spanish dieting’.¹⁴ In the political arena, Queen Elizabeth trod the knife-edge of compromise. Though it remained illegal to eat flesh on fast days, the Acts of Parliament insisted that this was in order to alleviate the pressure on livestock, boost the fish trade, stimulate shipbuilding and thus support the navy – and ‘not for any superstition’.¹⁵ Some Protestants thought that watering down the Lenten fast was a bad idea. Sir William Vaughan, the American colonist, felt that the Elizabethan Acts failed to bridle the appetites of libertines, and suggested that a healthy dose of vegetarianism would do them good. But like Bacon and Bushell, he was at pains to insist that his dietary convictions were not a sign of Catholic superstition.¹⁶

      While in England critics of meat-eating had to demarcate themselves from Catholicism, in France vegetarianism was often absorbed into the religious establishment. Whereas Bushell and Crab withdrew from society in order to pursue their vegetarian beliefs, across the Channel Armand-Jean de Rancé (1626–1700) used the monastic system as a means of publicly championing abstinence from flesh.

      Rancé lived a worldly existence as a youth at the Parisian court until 1657 when the lady of scandalous reputation whom he adored and with whom he probably had a passionate affair, Marie, Duchess of Montbazon, died of scarlet fever. Renouncing his former life, Rancé turned to the revival of severe asceticism, bringing the Cistercian monastic order back to the rule of St Benedict which had forbidden ‘the eating of the flesh of quadrupeds’.¹⁷