By stepping outside the usual bounds prescribed by the religious authorities in Europe, Tryon developed a metaphysical rationale for vegetarianism which went hand in hand with his physical and ethical arguments. The breadth of his appeal must have been rooted in the diversity of his ideas, there being something in his philosophy for everyone, from the mundane methods of penny-pinching to the grander ideals of prelapsarianism. With remarkable cogency, Tryon treated the Hindus as his guide at every step of the way, reaching from hopeless utopianism down to serious suggestions for social and political reform. His principal accomplishment was welding the novel vegetarian philosophy attributed to the Brahmins with the familiar Neoplatonist and biblical traditions he had grown up with. He reduced this combination into a lifestyle philosophy, which would, he hoped, prevent the hellish degradation of man and nature that he had witnessed in Barbados.
*Moses.
SIX John Evelyn: Salvation in a Salad
Theophilus: There’s a superanuated Custom kept up among the Antients; that to gratify the Appetite violates the Creation …
Arnoldus: Was this the Primitive Practice of our former Ancestors?
Theophilus: I don’t say it was, I discourse the Brachmans that offer this Argument. No Man has a Commission to create Life, no Man therefore by any Law or Custom ought to take Life away; which if he do, he makes himself an Instrument of unnatural Cruelty, and his Body a Sepulchre to bury dead Carcasses in … Were this Argument approv’d of, it would, I suspect, overthrow our design of Angling.
Richard Franck, Northern Memoirs … The Contemplative and Practical Angler (1694)1
In the first comprehensive account of salmon- and trout-fishing in Scotland, Richard Franck set out the opposition between the Brahmins’ and the Christians’ value of animal life. Franck originally penned his miscellaneous work in 1658 as a republican riposte to The Compleat Angler (1653), in which the Royalist Izaak Walton had tactfully submerged his attack on Cromwellian politics in scaly similes. As an ex-Cromwellian soldier fusing Hinduism in the 1690s with his outdated political Puritanism and mysticism, Franck had much in common with (and may have been directing his dialogue at) Thomas Tryon. Franck’s character Theophilus, who takes the part of the Hindus, transposes the elements of Tryon’s nom de plume Philotheos.
Like Tryon, Franck was tempted by the dreamy similarity between Indian vegetarianism and Edenic harmony, but ultimately he overrode this by evoking the rival idea of Eden according to which animals offered themselves up willingly to man – a notion backed up by the Gospel’s eradication of food taboos. But this was a bait to hook the unwary – for the vice Franck was trying to reel in was gluttony. Franck’s most potent net was woven from the common threads of ‘Hinduism’ and Puritanism: their voices united in condemning unnecessary slaughter for the riotous gratification of excessive appetite. Under the influence of Hinduism – and particularly the account by Edward Terry – Franck shifted the Puritanical detestation of wasting God’s gifts into his specific attack on wasting beings to whom God had given the inherently valuable property of life.2 It was this absorption of Hindu vegetarianism that came to occupy the centre ground in social critiques of the late seventeenth century, espoused not just by political outsiders like Tryon and Franck, but by the most prominent thinkers of the intellectual world.
John Evelyn (1620–1706) is most famous for his diary, which, like that of his friend Samuel Pepys, records the quotidian minutiae of seventeenth-century society. A shining torch of the Enlightenment, Evelyn was one of the first members and secretary of the Royal Society, the internationally admired institution of empirical learning. He was a great friend of the eminent scientist Robert Boyle, and, as one of the trustees of the Boyle lectures, a bastion of the new orthodoxy of latitudinarian Anglicanism and Newtonian science. Though a Royalist sympathiser, Evelyn avoided active service during the Civil War by absenting himself on a Grand Tour of Europe. He made friends with the exiled royal family in Paris, and after the Restoration served in various philanthropic political posts until, dismayed by debauchery and intemperance at court,3 he retired to Sayes Court in Deptford, the private estate of his father-in-law.
During his abdication from public service in Cromwell’s era, Evelyn took up gardening, developing Sayes Court into a masterpiece of edible design. Thirty-eight beds of vegetables and a vast orchard of 300 fruit trees led into ‘the apple-tree walk’ which terminated in a moated island covered in waving swards of asparagus, raspberries, a mulberry tree and a blossoming enclosure of fruit bushes.4 Later he moved on to the garden at his own home at Wotton in Surrey, where he supplied his wife and household with freshly grown produce, and his nation with advice on everything from tree-planting to city-planning.
As old age cast shadows over the garden of his soul, Evelyn drew together a lifetime’s experience in horticulture to compose his magnum opus, the Elysium Britannicum or Paradisium Revisitum. He never completed this compendious work, and it has only recently been edited from his surviving array of manuscripts. He did publish one chapter, however, as it blossomed into the full-length book, Acetaria. A Discourse of Sallets (1699). This was filled with instructions on how to grow, pick, prepare and eat salad, from the sight-enhancing, anti-flatulent fennel to the eighteen types of pain-quelling, lust-calming lettuce. In the seventeenth century eating a dish of raw leafy vegetables was something of a novelty, out of line with the predominant valorisation of red meat. But with the increasing interest in botany and the rise of gentlemanly vegetable gardening, to which Evelyn himself contributed, salads were to enjoy a vogue. Sowing seeds no longer needed be the sole prerogative of peasants – the most noble foot could grace a spade. On the face of it, Acetaria was designed, as other commentators have pointed out, to encourage the use of salads in the English diet.5
A drawing by John Evelyn of the Evelyn family house at Wotton, Surrey, from the terrace above the gardens, 1653
But, like Thomas Tryon, Evelyn also had a theological agenda. His Preface declared that he wished to ‘recall the World, if not altogether to their Pristine Diet, yet to a much more wholsome and temperate than is now in Fashion’.6 ‘Adam, and his yet innocent Spouse,’ mused Evelyn, ‘fed on Vegetables and other Hortulan Productions before the fatal Lapse,’ and even until the Flood God did not ‘suffer them to slay the more innocent Animal’.7 In the course of his work, Evelyn was carried away by the force of his own arguments and ended up writing one of the most scholarly panegyrics of vegetarianism.8
The belief that the prelapsarian diet was healthy and virtuous appears to have become almost an established norm by the end of the seventeenth century. In common with many of his gardening contemporaries – such as Ralph Austen and John Parkinson – Evelyn’s botanical interests and lifelong practical and theoretical work on gardens aimed to recreate a garden like Eden.9 The famous gardening expert in the generation before Evelyn, William Coles, displayed this artfully in his Adam in Eden (1657) and he too regarded