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

PART ONE Grass Roots

       ONE Bushell’s Bushel, Bacon’s Bacon and The Great Instauration

      Driving out of London over Highgate Hill on a cold March day in 1626, Sir Francis Bacon noticed spring snow still lying on the ground and seized the opportunity to test whether ‘flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt’. Bacon descended from his carriage in a flourish of compulsive inquisitiveness, purchased a hen from a poor woman, made her gut it, and then stuffed it with snow himself. Before he could publish the results of this, his last experiment, the snow chilled Bacon’s own flesh, and he was struck by a coughing fit so severe he could not return home. As he lay in the damp bed in the nearby house of his friend the Earl of Arundel, his condition worsened, and within days Bacon, one of England’s greatest philosophers, was dead.¹

      Born in 1561, Bacon had struggled to the very top of the political ladder; he had been a member of Queen Elizabeth’s council and Lord Chancellor to King James VI and I. Despite his relatively modest background as the grandson of a sheep-reeve, he had been knighted and ennobled with the titles of Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans. Above all, he was respected throughout Europe for philosophical works in which he envisaged an intellectual project of limit-defying scale. By gaining comprehensive knowledge of the natural world, Bacon believed that people could improve their control over the environment until eventually they would reinstate the felicity that Adam enjoyed in Eden. In the title of his unfinished work, The Great Instauration (from the Latin Instauratio – restoration, inauguration), he signified that his vision was the beginning of the restitution of mankind’s lost power. His audacious optimism fired the imagination of the keenest minds of the ensuing centuries, and his name became the touchstone of the Enlightenment. When King James first read Bacon’s writings he proclaimed that ‘yt is like the peace of God, that passeth all understanding’.²

      Bacon’s escapade with the frozen chicken was not an isolated whim. He had been studying the properties of food for years and in 1623 published in Latin The Great Instauration’s third part: The History Naturall and Experimentall, Of Life and Death. Or the Prolongation of Life. The quest to discover the secret to long life had been an obsession since ancient times, and Bacon himself considered it the ‘most noble’ part of medicine.³ For Bacon, no less than people today, diet took centre-stage. Though ironically his investigations into the ‘preservation of flesh’ actually caused his own flesh to perish, Bacon hoped that discovering the ideal food would help lead men back to their original perfection.

      Bacon noticed that it was healthy to eat plenty of fruit and vegetables on a daily basis. But if it was longevity you were after, he advised his readers to ignore the usual chatter about the Golden Mean and go for either of the extremes. Strengthen your constitution by undergoing a ‘strict Emaciating Dyet’ of biscuit and guaiacum tree resin: this would weaken you in the short term, but set you up for a long life. Going to the other extreme, Bacon agreed with Celsus, the first-century AD medical encyclopaedist, that gastronomic excess could also be good for you. This amusing mandate for indulgence – which eighteenth-century medics rallied around when their appetites came under fire from the vegetarian doctors – no doubt informed the approving tone of the contemporaneous biographer, John Aubrey, when he wrote that Bacon’s one-time assistant, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, periodically over-indulged, getting himself blind drunk at least once a year. Dying at the age of ninety-two, Hobbes was later wilfully enrolled by eighteenth-century vegetarians as a fine example of the benefits of temperance.⁴

      ‘Man, and Creatures feeding upon Flesh, are scarcely nourished with Plants alone,’ wrote Bacon in 1623. ‘Perhaps, Fruits, or Graines, baked, or boyled, may, with long use, nourish them;’ he added. ‘But Leaves, of Plants, or Herbs, will not doe it.’ Surviving exclusively on leaves and greens (‘herbs’ meant herbaceous plants including things like cabbage) had already been attempted with catastrophic effects by the Foliatanes, a convent of ascetic nuns who fed on nothing but foliage. But Bacon did allow that humans and carnivores could survive on vegetables if the ingredients were well chosen, and his Latin original shows him to have been even more open to the vegetarian diet than his disconcerted posthumous translators made it sound.⁵ Bacon noticed that there was substantial statistical evidence that vegetarianism was one of the extremes that could aid longevity: Pythagoras, the sixth-century BC Greek philosopher renowned for his theorem on right-angled triangles, also taught his disciples to abstain from meat, and Pythagoreans such as Apollonius of Tyana ‘exceeded an hundred yeares; His Face bewraying no such Age’. Indeed, Bacon catalogued numerous vegetarians recorded in history who had lived unusually long lives: the desert-dwelling Jewish sect of vegetarian Essenes, the Spartans, the Indians and plenty of Christian ascetics. ‘A Pythagoricall, or Monasticall Diet, according to strict rules,’ concluded Bacon, ‘seemeth to be very effectual for long life.’

      So while Hobbes swallowed whole Bacon’s aphorisms about indulgence, another flamboyant young male acolyte, Thomas Bushell (1594–1674), was ruminating over his master’s approbation of the vegetarian way. Thomas Aubrey described both Hobbes and Bushell scurrying along behind Bacon transcribing his thoughts during strolls in his garden – each preparing to carry Bacon’s legacy forward in their own divergent ways.

      In 1621 Bacon’s glittering political career came to an abrupt end. He was made the scapegoat in a political tussle about monopolies and the victim of a personal attack by his rival Edward Coke. Left to the mercy of Parliament by the King, Bacon was accused of taking bribes; he was fined £40,000, briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London and banished from court in disgrace. In the wake of this scandal there followed more severe allegations: that Bacon was a sodomite and paid his young male servants, Bushell among them, for sex. Satirical verses circulated, laughing at the matching of their names: Bacon was ‘A pig, a hog, a boar, a bacon/ Whom God hath left, and the devil hath taken’, while his servant pecked at his bushel of grain, but ‘Bushell wants by half a peck the measure of such tears/ Because his lord’s posteriors makes the buttons that he wears’. (The buttons refer to the garish fashion of embellishing suits with buttons, leading to the double-entendre nickname ‘buttoned Bushell’.)⁶

      Taking his fate stoically, Bacon devoted himself to philosophical enquiries, but Bushell – who had joined Bacon’s household at the age of fifteen, risen to be his seal-bearer and was entirely dependent on his patron – faced despair. Following Bacon’s fall from grace and subsequent death, Bushell was plunged into dejected remorse. Lurching from a life of wanton profligacy, in which his greatest achievement had been running up enormous debts and attracting the attention of James I for the gorgeousness of his attire, he left behind him London’s gaming houses, bawdy Shakespearean plays and buxom whores of Eastcheap, and dramatically refashioned himself as the ‘Superlative Prodigall’.

      ‘Thomas Bushell, the Superlative Prodigal’ from Thomas Bushell, The First Part of Youths Errors (1628)

      The young man took his penitence to anchoritic extremes. In his later writings, Bushell described how he first retired to the Isle of Wight disguised as a fisherman, and afterwards to the Calf of Man (an islet just off the Isle of Man) where he took up residence on the desolate summit of a cliff 470 feet above the Irish Sea. There, he said, ‘in obedience to my dead Lord [Bacon’s] philosophical advice, I resolved to make a perfect experiment upon myself, for the obtaining of a long and healthy life.’ He shunned meat and alcohol, living instead on a ‘parsimonious diet of herbs, oil, mustard and honey, with water sufficient, most