The Bloodless Revolution
Page 44
Symonds extended his portfolio of nature-loving literature by publishing A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on Horses and on the Moral Duties of Man towards the Brute Creation (1796–8) by the revolution-sympathiser John Lawrence (1753–1839). By no means a vegetarian, Lawrence held the counter-vegetarian position that it was possible to kill animals without causing suffering, but he dedicated his life to ‘zoo-ethiology’, or the prevention of ‘unnecessary’ cruelty to animals. Lawrence was keen to distinguish himself from Indophile vegetarians like Oswald: ‘I am aware of a small sect of Bramins among us who are disposed to take a step beyond me,’ he said dismissively. He tarred them with the same brush as Lord Gordon’s kosher followers who ‘were for / abolishing black-pudding / And eating nothing with blood in’.28
A woodcut from George Nicholson’s On the Conduct of Man to Inferior Animals (1797)
An important step in broadening the radical vegetarian movement across the nation occurred when Symonds linked up with the Manchester-based vegetarian pro-democracy publisher George Nicholson (1760–1825), by publishing his anthology of vegetarian writing, On Food (1803), later subtitled Cookery without Flesh. Nicholson’s many vegetarian anthologies, which he started publishing in 1797, forced unity on the disparate vegetarians in Britain – and indeed the rest of the world – by binding them all together between the covers of a single volume. Exhibiting a prodigious capacity for research, Nicholson incorporated extracts and adaptations from Franklin, Tryon, John Stewart, Rousseau, Cheyne, Gassendi, Graham, David Williams, John Wolcot (alias Peter Pindar – another Newgate inmate and author of a poetic defence of vegetarianism), and a virtually entire reprint of Oswald’s Cry of Nature, as well as scores of other animal-loving writers.29
Despite this connection with the north, it was apparently not until 1815 that the London radicals linked up with the hundreds of ‘Bible Christians’ in Salford who gave up eating meat in 1809 at the instigation of their radical Painite minister William Cowherd (1763–1816).30 Other individuals, at a distance from the metropolitan radical networks, continued to come up with variant brands of vegetarianism, like the physician Benjamin Moseley (1742–1819) who lived in Jamaica and suggested that if Europeans ate sugar instead of meat, it would sweeten their savage temperament and might fulfil Pythagoras’ dream that ‘the earth would cease to represent a grazing ground, for slaughter; and its bloody inhabitants a mass of canibals!’ (This, it seems, was his riposte to the opinion of most vegetarian radicals, that consuming slave-produced sugar was itself vicarious cannibalism).31 One such anti-slavery vegetarian was the Reverend Gilbert Wakefield (1756–1801) who was imprisoned in 1799 after claiming that the lower orders who lived on ‘cheese-parings and candles’ ends’ were so cruelly oppressed that they might welcome an invasion from the revolutionary French. He spent two years in Dorchester jail corresponding with fellow political activists, including Charles James Fox whom he encouraged to give up hunting and adopt vegetarianism, and died at the age of 45 after contracting typhus in jail.32
As the vegetarians gathered force and cohesion, there was a backlash of beef-eating among conservatives which articulated patriotic opposition to the onion-eating French and their radical allies in Britain. John Bull was represented as the British bulldog: bull-baiting was held up as a backbone of British working-class vigour and the best means of toughening men up for war against the French republicans.33 In the early 1800s when repeated attempts were made in Parliament to introduce laws banning cruelty to animals, the whiff of radicalism doomed them to initial failure. In 1794 the Hon. John Byng defended his class’s right to blood sports against the animal-rights fanaticism of the sans culottes, and in 1802 William Windham MP led the resistance against the Jacobins’ attempts to curb bull-baiting. Condemning excessive cruelty to animals had occupied the centre ground of social commentary for over a century, but when the bill enforcing this familiar ethic was put before the House it was met with guffaws of laughter. The proponents of the various bills, meanwhile, leant over backwards to dissociate themselves from the radical vegetarians. When trying to push through the bill in 1809, Thomas Lord Erskine (who had defended Horne-Tooke and others in the treason trials of 1794) quoted the counter-vegetarian passage in Cowper’s The Task to illustrate that he was only seeking to eliminate ‘wilful and wanton cruelty’ not man’s right to kill and eat animals. It was no coincidence that when Richard Martin MP was working on the bill that finally passed through Parliament in 1822, it was to John Lawrence he turned for advice – for at least Lawrence had made it abundantly clear that he was not in favour of vegetarianism and even approved of ethically conducted field sports.34
The irony was that the radical vegetarians derived many ideas from mainstream medical, agronomic and ethical theories. Indeed King George III, in whose name the suppression of the radicals took place, was himself lambasted as an enemy to roast beef. One of James Gillray’s finest caricatures, Temperance Enjoying a Frugal Meal (July 1792), showed George III and Queen Charlotte enjoying a vegetarian meal of eggs and salad or sauerkraut, flanked by numerous emblems of their frugality – including Cheyne’s ‘On the benefits of a Spare Diet’, an invented title which probably also alludes to the King’s nervous breakdown (1788), a condition for which Cheyne had always prescribed the vegetable diet.35 The King too is associated with the seventeenth century in the framed miniature hanging on the wall: the profile is of the King but it is titled The Man of Ross, the nickname of John Kyrle, a seventeenth-century ascetic philanthropist. Apart from satirising the reputed miserliness of the royal pair, Gillray was expressing national anxiety that the King was not eating his portion of patriotic roast beef, and that his German wife, with her propensity for sauerkraut, was weakening the King’s constitution. Gillray, as a great satirist, was not one for taking sides, and he was equally ruthless in his depiction of the opposite end of the gastronomic-political spectrum, represented by George’s dissolute son, the Prince of Wales (or the Prince of Whales as he was known) in A Voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion.
Gillray often worked with John Oswald and produced many prints for his works, including The Cry of Nature in the previous year, so he was well aware of the radical implications of diet. Oswald, meanwhile, in the years before the Anglo-French war, observed that the King ‘is said to delight in the story of the frugality of Spartan royalty’ and suggested that this might mean that he approved of the French Revolution and would become a noble patron of egalitarian reform in Britain.36
Richard Newton, A Blow-Up at Breakfast!, (1792)
Gillray’s theme was widely used, and Newton’s A Blow-Up at Breakfast! has the King mistaking his own flatulence – no doubt caused by his diet of vegetables and crumpets – for a bomb plot to assassinate him. In that the King’s diet seemed dangerously close to that of the radical vegetarians, the equation between eating gaseous vegetables and political terrorism was not entirely a joke. As Southey had warned, rejecting roast beef was taken as a threat to national honour.
In its lasting political anxieties, radical vegetarianism had an impact on the political vocabulary in Europe. It crystallised a widely recognisable political statement, detested by conservatives and embraced by radicals as a pre-formed mould for them to articulate their opposition to the prevailing government. The networks that arose, partly because of the crackdown in the 1790s, left a cohesive legacy of radical vegetarianism which aimed to tackle society’s flaws through a combination of dietary purification, universal benevolence and also rights-based democracy. By pooling their knowledge, they constructed a tradition of vegetarianism reaching back to the seventeenth century which gave them a sense that they had eternal truth and natural law on their side. These ideas were carried over into the fringe Victorian movements of Theosophy and the Vegetarian Society, but they also had a striking impact on mainstream social discourse.
TWENTY-FOUR
John ‘Walking’ Stewart and the Utility of Death
In the years immediately after the 1789 Revolution, t
he eccentric figure of John Stewart (1749–1822) could be seen strolling the streets of Paris. Tall, strong and fabulously dressed, he gained a reputation for his extraordinary speeches. Determined that France should heed his plans for the future organisation of the human race, he liaised with other British men involved in the Revolution, and became with John Oswald one of the eighteen ‘select few’ friends of Thomas Paine.1 He also met the young William Wordsworth who, many years later, reminisced about Stewart’s formidable eloquence, telling a friend that he ‘had been equally struck, when he had met him at Paris between the years of 1790 and 1792, during the early storms of the French Revolution’.2
Although Stewart and Oswald ended up in intractable political disagreement, their lives followed remarkably similar paths – and they were both philosophical proselytes of Indian vegetarianism. In 1767, at the age of eighteen, Stewart had travelled to India to seek his fortune. As the black sheep of an eminent Scottish family of drapers based in London, he had been a reluctant pupil at Harrow and Charterhouse, and was keen to break the shackles of European education. Through the influence of an ex-Prime Minister, his fellow Scot Lord Bute, he attained a post as a writer for the East India Company’s Presidency and, with high expectations of glory, he was despatched to Madras.3 After barely two years in the service, however, Stewart was fed up with the low pay and drudgery; he quit his post at the factory of Masulipatam and wrote a vicious letter of protest to the Madras Council – entered in their minutes as a specimen of ‘juvenile insolence and audacity’.4 As with Oswald’s disaffected anti-imperialism, it was later said that ‘suddenly, some strong scruples of conscience seized him, with regard to the tenure of the Company’s Indian empire, and to the mode in which it was administered.’5 Stewart became a rebel freebooter and set off across India to find adventure among the native kingdoms.
Treading the knife-edge of treason, Stewart made his way to the Hindu state of the infamous Muslim ruler Hyder Ali, who had recently inflicted a humiliating defeat on the British in the first Mysore war and had forced them to agree to help him crush the Marathas. In 1771 the Maratha army attacked Hyder Ali – but the British failed to help, a tacit declaration of their continued antagonism to Hyder Ali which ultimately resulted in the second Mysore war of 1780–4 (the one that Oswald fought in). On his arrival at Hyder Ali’s court, Stewart was made a captain in the army and reportedly led four battalions against the Marathas in the Battle of Chinakurali on 5 March 1771. He left a unique manuscript account of the battle that gives an unusual insight into a European’s service under an Indian ruler. He describes how, during the night, Hyder Ali’s soldiers tried to slip past the superior Maratha army to retreat to their fort at Seringapatam, but in the morning they were charged by the enemy cavalry. Faced with almost certain defeat, many of Hyder Ali’s sepoys tried to desert, and when Stewart responded with the order to execute them they ‘swore they would murder us Hat fellows (as they call’d Us)* & would have kep’d their Oath but were prevented by the Cavalry who killed 8 or 10 of the most turbulent which quieted their Mutiny’. Eventually Hyder Ali fled with his cavalry, leaving the foot soldiers to be massacred, and Stewart – depending on which account you believe – was either left for dead with a serious wound, or taken prisoner and escaped.6 Decades later when he eventually died, it was reported of Stewart that ‘his body bore marks of several desperate wounds by sword and bullet, and the crown of his head was indented nearly an inch in depth with a blow from some warlike instrument.’7
John Stewart by Henry Hoppner Meyer
With the excuse of needing medical attention – but in truth in outrage at Hyder Ali’s conduct – Stewart handed in his resignation and set off again on his travels. According to his own thrilling account, Hyder Ali sent assassins after him to prevent Stewart divulging confidential information to his enemies, but Stewart escaped by diving into a river and fleeing through the forests of south India. Arriving back in British territory, Stewart was accused of treachery, but he insisted that he had been forced on pain of death to work for Hyder Ali, and in any case had assisted the British ambassadors while he was there. He was eventually granted amnesty, but as he was on his way out of Cuddalore a band of Company sepoys under George Dawson shot and wounded him, allegedly fired his pistol to make it look like Stewart had attacked them, and imprisoned him in Madras. Stewart pressed charges against them but lost his case in court and was deported on the next ship home.8
Thriving on mishaps, Stewart appears to have either escaped or returned to India, for he apparently ended up in the service of the Nabob of Arcot, before setting off on an epic peregrination through the Middle East and North Africa and finally travelling back to Britain overland in 1783 – exactly the same year that Oswald undertook the same journey. Stewart, however, claimed to have gone the whole way on foot. In Ispahan he sent a spy-missive warning Warren Hastings that the French were secretly trying to instigate the Persians to attack the Russians, and complaining that the British hostilites with the Nabob of Oudh prevented him from travelling back to India and ‘of making such discoveries as might be useful to the Interests of the Honble Company & worthy of your Patronage’. Instead, Stewart resolved to amble through ‘Georgia & Circassia’, and he was said to be the only European other than Oswald to have visited the northern Turkish Kurds.9
For this legendary journey, along with several other pedestrian ventures in Germany, Russia, Lapland, Canada, Scotland and France, he earned the nickname ‘Walking Stewart’. In London he became a celebrity, shuffling through the streets in full Armenian costume, and peddling his bizarre ideas hammered together from a range of Eastern and Western philosophies. Contemporaries remembered him standing on Westminster Bridge, studying humanity as it passed by, dressed in a massive overcoat, his clothes and boots dusty and travel-stained, or sitting in St James’ Park inhaling the breath of the cows.10
At the time of the French Revolution, he moved to Paris where, like Oswald, he was said to have applied his Indian military experience to the revolutionary cause by supplying tactics for the arming of the people.11 But as the Revolution descended into sectarian aggression, Stewart was repulsed and later excoriated Robespierre’s ‘ephemeral and bloody despotism’ which would, he predicted, be followed by ‘a more desperate and durable anarchy’. In mid–1791, just as Robespierre was emerging as a dominant voice in the Jacobin Club against the moderate constitutional revolutionists, Stewart fled the country, leaving half his fortune behind him. In July he arrived at New York on an evangelical mission to persuade Americans to avoid the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. But they ‘refused his mental gas’, as one contemporary put it, and he returned to England embittered against Paine for his incendiary radicalism and for having ‘seduced America to a disastrous separation from its metropolitan empire, (cutting the sçion from its parent stock, before it had acquired its full sap)’.12
After years of pecuniary difficulties, Stewart won the enormous sum of between £10,000 and £16,000 in a suit against the East India Company in lieu of debts owed to him by the Nabob of Arcot.13 Freed from his dreary London lodgings, he took lavish ‘Epicurean apartments’ in Cockspur Street and had them decorated in fashionable gaudy Chinoiserie and mirrors (to match his elaborate Oriental philosophy). From 1789 to his death in 1822 (allegedly from a laudanum overdose), he produced reams of poetic and polemic work with extraordinary titles like The Apocalypse of Nature, The Revolution of Reason, and The Sophiometer; or, Regulator of Mental Power. Published in England, France and the United States, they were idiosyncratically dated according to a chronological system in which 1795 was ‘the fifth year of intellectual existence, or the publication of The Apocalypse of Nature’ and 1818 was ‘the 7000th year of Astronomical History, from the Chinese Tables’. Keen to spread his ideas far and wide, he held cultured musical soirées frequented by many of London’s literary elite: the socialist industrial reformer Robert Owen, Thomas Taylor the Platonist, the publishers Thomas ‘Clio’ Rickman and Henry George Bohn, all of whom seem t
o have tolerated Stewart’s notoriously egotistic disquisitions in which he declared himself ‘the universal self, or man-god’.14
In pragmatic terms Stewart had become convinced that the masses were debauched by commercial interests and poor education, and thus needed to be governed by an educated aristocracy whose power should be balanced by Parliament and a powerful monarchy. But he still maintained a profound Rousseauistic faith that mankind was naturally benevolent. In an ideal world, he declared to his audiences, he would abolish the nation-states and replace them with a forum of global governance embracing the entire human race. Like Oswald, he envisaged a direct democracy where the world’s populations would gather in councils of 100,000 and send out deputies to represent their views, ‘And thus succeeding take in all the globe,/ Till one vast hall collects deputed world’.15