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Chapter 1

Improvement’s Genre

Andrew Yarranton and the Rhetoric of Projection

He begins with a Petition.

—Thomas Brugis, The Discovery of a Proiector, 1641

Early modern projects began as words that formed proposals to enhance society and make money. These written attempts at imagining and inspiring better worlds exhibited an array of persuasive devices, narrative scaffolds, grammatical tics, and habits of diction that constituted the project as a distinctive genre. There was no textual formula for initiating a project. There were, however, certain rhetorical tendencies that characterized the conception of new enterprise. This chapter shows how projectors devised argumentative strategies to shape England’s future during the reign of Charles II. It concentrates on the frustrations of one man, Andrew Yarranton, who proposed projects both to modernize a late Stuart society he thought backward, and to stabilize his own position within partisan conflicts stemming from the civil wars. This story begins with Yarranton’s rousing call for national improvement. It ends with his murder in a bathtub. What this tragedy makes visible is an idea of how projection worked as a process of rhetorical persuasion. By identifying the linguistic patterns that made projects recognizable in the seventeenth century, this chapter lays the groundwork for later examinations of the print forms that carried proposals, the actions that realized them, and the responses they provoked.

When twenty of his majesty’s ships entered Dover Roads on May 25, 1660, the naval spectacle marked the end of Charles Stuart’s restless exile as well as Parliament’s tumultuous experiments in republicanism. Monarchy had returned to Britain, and with it the Anglican Church, public theater, and regal court life. The two decades following “the coming over of the king” also saw epidemic plague and devastating fire.¹ England would wage two costly wars against the States-General of the Netherlands. The slave-trading Royal African Company languished in the face of Dutch competition, and the Royal Fishery, a state-financed attempt to control the North Sea herring trade, collapsed altogether. Charles II proved a popular and dexterous leader but was so cash-strapped that he struck a secret alliance, the Treaty of Dover, with France’s Louis XIV in return for two million crowns. His brother, James, Duke of York, shocked the nation by converting to Roman Catholicism, inciting calls for his exclusion from the succession.

Despite these trials, royalists argued that the Stuart Restoration had ushered an unprecedented era of sectarian healing and commercial growth. John Dryden compared Charles to a morning star that shone through England’s “sullen Intervall of Warre” to illuminate “time’s Whiter series.”² His Annus Mirabilis (1667) interprets English victory over the Dutch fleets at the Battle of Lowestoft and London’s spirited response to the Great Fire as evidence that “now, a round of greater years begun.”³ Another royalist, Thomas Sprat, claimed that “since the Kings Return” Parliament had passed more acts for beautifying London, repairing highways, digging canals, and founding industry “than in divers Ages before.”⁴ Citing the “present prevailing Genius of the English nation,” Sprat credits the king with organizing unprecedented civic efforts to recuperate a land supposedly left to waste during the Commonwealth and Protectorate eras.⁵ Restoring monarchy, he suggests, had not merely returned England to an antebellum age but had elevated it to a new and better state.

Stirring pronouncements of rupture and return often compensated for the fact that the Restoration’s most enthusiastic acolytes and celebrated achievements first gained momentum during the Interregnum. Dryden lauded England’s rebirth after processing in Cromwell’s funeral.⁶ Sprat was the spokesman for a Royal Society that institutionalized models of knowledge production and correspondence outlined a decade earlier by Samuel Hartlib and his circle.⁷ The 1660s and 1670s were not an age of revolution. Given the compromises required to bring Charles back from the Hague, the era was actually more conducive to what Paul Slack calls “gradual, piecemeal change, not necessarily determined by any overarching theory or ambition.”⁸ The ideas belonging to the word “improvement” held that England need not behead a king, dissolve a parliament, or invoke the imminence of end times to achieve progress. Rather, it could better itself incrementally through reforms compatible with the broad political latitudes of the Stuart settlement.⁹

Forward-thinking and incremental, improvement often materialized through projects, finite ventures meant to put England’s resources to better use. A project marked an attempt at improvement in the 1600s; indeed, it served as a popular vehicle by which the abstract ideals of social uplift could translate into concrete change. But in an era when improvement ideology was gaining widespread legitimacy as “a familiar item in English public discourse,” projects bore the lingering stench of patent monopolists, quack doctors, chartered dilettantes, and courtier parasites from the Tudor and early Stuart eras.¹⁰ Improvement required projectors to implement its progressive rhetoric through discrete investments of money, time, and labor. Projectors needed “improvement” as a slogan that could make reputable their schemes by affiliating them with Restoration England’s universal desire for betterment.

One man who exemplified the tensions between the scandalizing ambition of projection and the respectable compromises of improvement was Andrew Yarranton. A native of Worcestershire, Yarranton applied his relentless energies to cutting canals, forging iron, making linens, and marketing clover as a fodder crop. He lobbied for England to establish a land registry, observed German tinplate manufacturing, and studied Dutch mercantile policy. For his innovations in industrial planning and finance, Yarranton has been credited as a pioneering navigations engineer, an early modern railroader, and even the inventor of political economy.¹¹ But when Charles Stuart stepped ashore at Dover Beach in 1660, Yarranton was also a veteran of Cromwell’s army and former sequestrator of royalist land. In 1662 he would be arrested for disobeying his lord lieutenant and later was accused of plotting to overthrow the king. Like his contemporary projector-improver Carew Reynell, who fruitlessly pursued patronage appointments, Yarranton struggled to keep pace with his age and so went about imagining a future that would vindicate his beliefs and talents.

This future found fullest expression in Yarranton’s England’s Improvement by Sea and Land (1677), a 216-page pamphlet that claimed to “chal[k] out the Way” for England to secure and strengthen itself during an “unsteady Age.”¹² Yarranton’s tract indeed charts a new direction for English society through a series of projects, though the image of a chalk line belies the work’s great length, complexity, and confusion. England’s Improvement consists of prose paragraphs, dialogues, letters, legislation, maps, and diagrams. It addresses topics ranging from land banking and forestry to firefighting, factory management, grain storage, and naval strategy, sometimes breaking off discussion of one subject to circle back to another.¹³ Yarranton’s frenetic display of knowledge makes England’s Improvement a mesmerizing but wooly case study in projection and improvement, a bricolage transformation of professional fluency into persuasive resource. England’s Improvement was one proposal “amongst others” of the 1670s as Yarranton himself noted, but its length, digressiveness, and confessed incompletion both invite and embarrass systematic explanations of how project writing worked.¹⁴

Paul Mantoux calls England’s Improvement a “curious book in which were jumbled together the observations, plans and dreams of [a] whole life with a host of new and daring ideas.”¹⁵ Sifting through this “jumble” of dreamscapes and self-promotion reveals two recurrent themes: Yarranton’s desire to ingratiate himself to the Stuart government that once made him an outlaw, and his anticipation of a world of merchant power, central banking, and land capitalization that would ultimately divert power from the crown, eventually rendering its holder inconsequential to debates over the national economy. These contradictory ambitions—to participate in and outlast Restoration society—compelled Yarranton to develop a rhetoric of persuasion that could smooth over political difference, including his own vexation with the state. Project writing provided him with a set of argumentative conventions for framing futuristic desire as disinterested advice, and for envisioning an alternative world in which the way “chalkt out” is acknowledged as the only viable path for moving society forward.

By approaching Yarranton’s schemes as acts of writing, this chapter challenges material-bound definitions of the term “project” coined by economic historians. Joan Thirsk’s much-cited formulation equates “project” with a “practical scheme for exploiting material things.”¹⁶ While some projects proved capable of moving matter, many others were completely infeasible. Daniel Defoe considered the Tower of Babel the quintessential project, “too big to be manag’d, and therefore likely enough to come to nothing.”¹⁷ Projects often originated from nothing as well. That seventeenth-century improvers like Yarranton wrote at all underscores their inability to command “material things” through illocutionary power—projectors proposed enterprise because they lacked the land, money, and muscle to execute it themselves. Their schemes manifest the “wants of some ingenious persons” according to Carew Reynell, an improver and sinecure seeker who associated projecting with desire and privation in the context of his own frustrated career.¹⁸ An anonymous author of the 1690s invited Londoners to “Reflect on the vast Number of Projectors in and about this City, how bare-bon’d they are, that is, how few of ’em are Rich?”¹⁹ This image of scarcity attributes projects not to practical knowledge but to the hunger of threadbare visionaries.

Projection, as Reynell and Yarranton understood it, was an articulation of want: a voicing of ambition and inventory of deficits. It addressed those equipped to put plans into action (monarchs, parliaments, patrons, and readers in general), even if those addressees rarely moved to execute unsolicited schemes. Even well-received proposals sometimes stimulated nothing beyond the creation of more text. The speaker of the satirical ballad The Nevv Projector; or, The Privileged Cheat (1662) boasts of his “protection,” a certificate granting him security from competing inventors and immunity from criminal charges.²⁰ Self-satisfied with his possession of this document, the projector shows no inclination to invent anything. Thomas Brugis likewise dismisses projection as the generation of “petitions” and “references” to “procure a Patent,” writing empowered to legitimate writing.²¹ Brugis and the balladeer reduce projects to their illusive textuality, a dissembling rhetoric whose point is to aggrandize the author while deferring action in the world.

England’s Improvement was no mere piece of patent graft or stockjobbing. To the contrary, its words convey the complex experiences of an author who struggled to participate in Stuart culture while imaginatively reworking that society to accommodate his ambition. How England’s Improvement conceives itself as improvement’s instrument while defying projection’s stigma is a question of language that we can answer only by examining the text itself. A close reading of Yarranton’s proposal reveals a projector more deliberative and self-questioning than the feckless opportunist Brugis implicates. His persona, moreover, reflects a world of Restoration scheming governed by a broader range of motives and attitudes than antiproject satirists were typically willing to acknowledge. However, the preponderance of skeptical attacks on new enterprise can obscure this complexity, making it difficult to retrieve the actual projector from the scandal that swirled around his title: the historical actor seems always hidden behind literary caricature.

Indeed, for all the fanciful origin myths conferred on projectors, there have been few serious attempts to explain their existence in relation to actual events and institutions. Thomas Macaulay made one such attempt. His History of England (1848) dates the rise of projection to the years 1660–88, when the growth of commercial wealth outpaced the opening of investment opportunities in land, banks, and joint-stock companies. The projector, Macaulay concluded, was the “natural effect” of “redundant capital,” someone who identified conduits for money otherwise “hidden in secret drawers and behind wainscots.”²² Adam Smith also attributed projectors to financial imbalance. He scorned them as the offspring of high interest rates, which discouraged “sober” investment while inspiring rash ventures by “prodigals and projectors” willing to borrow on usurious terms.²³ Smith cites Peruvian mines, national lotteries, and John Law’s Mississippi Company as conspicuously “unprosperous projects.”²⁴

Writing of his own age (and of himself), Daniel Defoe identified the quintessential projector as a merchant who pursued new sources of income between 1688 and 1697, when the War of the Grand Alliance disrupted trade with the Continent. He finds the projecting spirit strongest in those stymied traders who “prompted by Necessity, rack their Wits for New Contrivances, New Inventions, New Trades, Stocks, Projects, and any thing to retrieve the desperate Credit of their Fortunes.”²⁵ Defoe would subsequently broaden this finite definition to include anyone who had ever planned, promoted, built, invented, or reformed something for personal gain or society’s advantage, beginning with Noah’s ark. Defoe’s “Age of Projects” referred both to the wartime improvisations of late seventeenth-century merchants, and the recurrence of industrious behavior throughout all human history.

Macaulay and Smith conceive of projectors as the mechanism and by-product of economic forces. Defoe also circumscribes the agency of proposers by stereotyping them either as heroic pioneers or victims of circumstance—social roles rather than flesh-and-blood people. This chapter’s concentration on the career and writing of Andrew Yarranton works against the reduction of projector to placeholder by foregrounding an actual human who brought schemes to public notice. However, intensive focus on one figure begs the question of how “projector” came to name a multiplicity of people who inaugurated a self-conscious age of enterprise. It would be impossible to formulate a coherent category, “projector,” that accommodates all of early modern England’s entrepreneurs, pamphleteers, engineers, and experimenters. However, comparing the biographical details of a subset of projectors, the improvement propagandists of Yarranton’s age, takes a step in that direction by delivering a more realistic and fine-grained portrait than the one we have inherited from critics and historians.

Perhaps most formative among these shared biographical details was the fact that Yarranton’s contemporaries lived through a rapid succession of disparate political regimes between the reign of Charles I and the Hanoverian Dynasty. While some projectors, like Carew Reynell (1636–90), remained devout royalists throughout their careers, others, like Yarranton (1619–84), trimmed their sails to prevailing political winds to ensure their proposals were heard. This was no easy task. The improver Josiah Child (1631–99) served as deputy treasurer of the Protectorate navy at Portsmouth but later lost the lucrative right to sell beer and victuals to the fleets because James Stuart suspected him of supporting Shaftesbury. Hugh Chamberlen (1664–1728), author of Several Matters Relating to the Improvement of Trade (1700), lost his post as physician to Charles II under suspicions of Whig loyalties (a misgiving he would validate by later joining Monmouth’s Rebellion). The builder and insurance salesman Nicholas Barbon (1637–98) bore the infamous name of his father, Praisegod Barbon, the Millenarianist politician from whom Cromwell’s “Barebones Parliament” took its title, but he showed few signs of a radical Puritan upbringing. Projectors of Yarranton’s age sought to mitigate or capitalize on their pasts, a self-reckoning that often had the adverse effect of increasing their notoriety. Successful schemers needed to establish meaningful ties with ruling parties and monarchs without foreclosing opportunities for action under future governments.

Projectors hailed from the city and country, though most seem to have lived in southern England. Many enjoyed privileged upbringings, either as the sons of London merchants (Samuel Fortrey and John Bellers), or by inheriting rural estates (Reynell). Few seem to have been exceedingly rich or completely destitute, and therefore most showed some desire to make money. Projectors were seldom as penurious as their critics suggested, though a number, like Roger Coke and Daniel Defoe, faced the prospect of debtor’s prison in the wake of failed ventures.²⁶ Several seventeenth-century improvers attended Oxford or Cambridge, many training to become physicians or lawyers. A few, such as Barbon and Richard Weston, were educated at Leiden and Utrecht and in Flanders, and like Yarranton, drew on their experiences abroad to propose improvements in England.

Yarranton would stress his involvement with the political and economic affairs of a realm he proposed to modernize. But he was a veritable outsider compared to other projectors who were elected to Parliament (Barbon, Mackworth, Child) and fellows to the Royal Society (John Houghton, Chamberlen). A small number of projectors were knighted, including Humphrey Mackworth, Hugh Chamberlen, and, to Defoe’s lasting chagrin, the shipwreck explorer William Phips.²⁷

A projector’s proximity to power often shaped what (s)he sought through writing. Some proposed schemes in order to obtain governmental office, such as Reynell, who had designs on joining the Board of Trade, and Samuel Fortrey, who succeeded in becoming Clerk of the Deliveries of the Ordnance seven years after his England’s Interest and Improvement (1663) appeared. Others wrote pamphlets to advance business interests. Nicholas Barbon’s advocacy of free trade and house construction would complement the insurance office he opened in 1680. Mackworth wrote an improvement tract, England’s Glory (1694), before later organizing the joint-stock company Mineral Manufactures of Neath (1713). Other projectors insisted that they wrote out of a genuine interest in the public good, and there is often little evidence to refute these claims. What John Evelyn hoped to gain from his anti-air-pollution pamphlet Fumifugium (1661), or Moses Pitt sought to make from his prison reform treatise The Cry of the Oppressed (1691) is probably irreducible to profit and fame.

As a former republican official, for-hire engineer, and energetic pamphleteer, Andrew Yarranton personified all these motivations. His fraught career in projects epitomizes the difficulty of existing within a society while trying to change it. His England’s Improvement was one proposal “amongst others” but foregrounded projection’s universal need for authorial self-fashioning, whose terms and stakes we can grasp only by turning to Yarranton’s own words.

Possessing Dutch Progress

The first word of Yarranton’s title, England’s Improvement by Sea and Land (Figure 1), designates England as either an object or agent of improvement. The possessive adjective “England’s” implies that the kingdom can receive improvement, that its lands and people could be put to better use. The word alternatively endows England with the capacity to pursue improvement, to enhance itself through collective action. What England has, according to Yarranton, is a series of deficiencies and the power to remedy them. The pamphlet’s textual content belongs to one author, “Andrew Yarranton, Gent.”; but its enacted outcomes will become the entire nation’s grammatical possession. Improvement denotes both a pursuit and a destination, a program for controlling the future and an attribute of the future itself. Yarranton forges consensus support for his plans by addressing England as a single, unified entity in the style of William Carter’s England’s Interest Asserted (1669), Samuel Fortrey’s England’s Interest and Improvement (1673), and Roger Coke’s England’s Improvements (1675). Like Yarranton’s England’s Improvement, these works pledge to salvage new utility from existing assets; their titles entitle England to unreaped benefits while imagining the nation as a “seamless whole.”²⁸

Figure 1. Title page of Andrew Yarranton’s England’s Improvement by Sea and Land. RB 148563, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

England’s Improvement divides the proleptic possession of future value into discrete activities. “By Land,” improvement entails harvesting timber to build ships, making shallow rivers navigable, fireproofing cities, employing poor subjects, and supplying London with “Bread and Drink.” These measures would strengthen England “by Sea” by stimulating exports, relieving debt, and positioning the kingdom to surpass its Continental trade rival, the Dutch Republic, “without fighting.” Yarranton introduces these measures through infinitive sentence fragments—to out-do, to pay, to set at work, to prevent—phrases that seem to insist on a course of action without assigning that action an agent. The paradoxical injunction “To Pay Debts without Moneys,” for instance, arrests readers without specifying a payer or payee. Yarranton’s ambiguity is deliberate. His title evokes outcomes without specifying means to lure readers into the pages of the pamphlet, where he describes at great length concrete solutions to the kingdom’s most debilitating problems.

“People confess they are sick,” observes Yarranton in a prefatory letter; “trade is in a Consumption, and the whole Nation languishes.”²⁹ By portraying England as a victim of consumptive disease, England’s Improvement proposes itself as a bill of treatments, and its author as caregiver to the tuberculin national body politic. England’s lack of vitality stems from dysfunction at home and competition from abroad. First, Yarranton censures his readers for failing to take advantage of “our Climate, the Nature of our Soil, and the Constitution of Both our People and Government,” arguing that temperate weather and mild rule oblige industry.³⁰ The kingdom’s fortunate “our” implies an active “we” who must labor in gratitude for God’s blessings. This sentiment echoes the rhetoric of contemporary improvers whose projects claimed to uncover the “means by which the fertility hidden by God in the soil could be unlocked.”³¹ “Divine providence” endowed England with “all in the most profitable advantages,” according to Samuel Fortrey.³² Samuel Coke set out to describe “the benefits which may arise to my native Country, from those Natural Endowments wherewith God has adorn’d it above any other.”³³ “Great-Britain is acknowledged by all the world to be Queen of the Isles, and as capable to live within it self as any Nation,” argued Reynell.³⁴ Therefore, he reasons, Britons should “add to it and give some advance, by our own Art and Industry.”³⁵ Yarranton likewise portrays improvement as the distinctly English labor of realizing the “unparallel’d Advantages” of a providential birthright.³⁶

The second impetus to improve loomed across the North Sea in the form of the Dutch Republic, a state that came to dominate global trade in the seventeenth century despite lacking England’s prodigious geography. The enterprising Dutch, who built their compact republic on diked polder, fashioned fleets from Norse timber, and secured credit with astounding facility, stoked English envy and puzzlement. “Holland hath not much of its own store,” noted Fortrey, and yet by “industrious diligence” furnish themselves with “whatsoever the world affords and they want.”³⁷ How, asked an incredulous Nicholas Barbon, could such a “little tract of Ground” derive the “great Advantage and Profit that Trade brings to a Nation” at the same time that blessed England languished?³⁸ Fortrey and Barbon express astonishment at Holland’s seeming ability to create “wealth out of nothing” by attracting “goods with the new power of quick sales, easy exchanges, and ready cash.”³⁹

By 1677, Anglo-Dutch rivalry had triggered three “bloody Wars,” in Yarranton’s words, draining conflicts that made English merchants “g[o] by the worst,” while occasioning moments of national humiliation, like the “sad news” of the “Dutch burning our Ships at Chattam.”⁴⁰ After “spending some time” studying the Dutch Republic’s “Laws, Customs, publick Banks, Cut Rivers, Havens, Sands, Policies in Government and Trade,” Yarranton arrives at the unrousing conclusion that England “could not beat the Dutch with fighting.”⁴¹ Holland’s perceived invincibility was partially the result of marine topography: the shoal-lined Frisian archipelago blocked English fleets from pursuing Dutch ships. Where the Dutch Republic’s shallow-bottomed fluyboats could navigate to port during sieges, English ships were forced to anchor in the channel, exposed to “all Storms and accidents that the seas and our Ships are lyable to.”⁴²

Even when the Commonwealth navy smashed the Netherlands during the first Anglo-Dutch War (1652–54) on the strength of superior fleets and a crippling blockade, the English victory proved short-lived. The resilient Dutch economy, supported by banks that issued low-interest loans and a land registry that enabled citizens to efficiently assess and collateralize their land, soon regained the upper hand. Rejecting military aggression as futile, even catastrophic, as demonstrated by Michiel de Ruyter’s 1667 raid on the English fleets docked in the Medway, Yarranton plotted to transpose Anglo-Dutch conflict from an arena of war to one of trade, scheming ways for England to “out-do” a country that had enshrined commercial knowledge as a national virtue.

England’s Improvement’s major intervention was to understand the Dutch Republic not simply as a menacing threat, but as a model for economic reform. Yarranton attempts to demystify Dutch power so that England could emulate its practices and match its wealth, to “write by their Copies and do the great things they now do.”⁴³ To this end, he criticizes those improvers who commit the “common mistake of the world” in attributing Holland’s prosperity to vague notions of “a great cash in Bank,” and thereby misidentify the particular mechanisms that made such accumulation possible. According to Yarranton, these devices included social institutions (“laws, customs, publick banks”) and topographical features, both natural (“havens, sands”) and man-made (“cut rivers”). With few natural advantages of its own, the Dutch Republic molded its land and culture to accommodate the circulation of goods and capital, from the financial infrastructure of banks to the public works of canals and harbors.⁴⁴

Yarranton’s report of Dutch innovation holds England accountable for its failure to achieve lasting prosperity, for not converting its tillage, timber forests, mineral deposits, and people into advantage “at Sea.” Yarranton proposes “peeping abroad” to locate the means by which England could access the wealth lodged in its soil and subjects to become “great, beyond any Nation in the World.”⁴⁵ The title’s injunction to “To Out-do the Dutch without Fighting” begets a counterintuitive mandate for England to imitate its rival and thereby capitalize on long-neglected natural assets. Holland provided Yarranton with a shining example of what England could become, a place where the futuristic projects he was proposing had already been profitably realized (often to England’s detriment). England’s Improvement would teach readers how to apply Dutch practices to “our own Climate and Constitution,” and in so doing, to learn from foreign merchants and officials how to become better at being English.⁴⁶

The Projector’s Persona

No project could be more credible than was its projector. This is why writers like Andrew Yarranton took extraordinary measures to portray themselves as trustworthy handlers of land, labor, and money. Projectors often legitimated themselves by impugning rival schemers. Walter Blith lamented that pamphleteers with “pretences of great abilities” had brought a “scandall upon Ingenuity” in the Commonwealth era.⁴⁷ His English Improver Improved (1652) outlines several schemes for increasing the value of rural land, while vindicating ingenuity itself as a virtue despite its corruption by talentless braggarts. Self-legitimation would prove especially hard for Andrew Yarranton, whose career included a stint in the parliamentary army, a sinecure in the Protectorate, the oversight of several aborted river navigation projects in Worcestershire, and multiple arrests for treason after the Restoration. England’s Improvement therefore excerpts select moments from Yarranton’s checkered career to frame his Dutch-styled improvement program as an expression of “love to my Country.”⁴⁸

Yarranton concentrates these biographical details within four dedicatory letters that preface England’s Improvement and an “account of my education,” which comes at the end of the tract. He begins to establish a prudent and public-minded authorial persona in his letter addressed to Arthur Annesley, the Earl of Anglessey and Lord Privy Seal, and Thomas Player, Chamberlain of the City of London. That Yarranton chose two addressees for this letter reflects his desire to promote England’s Improvement both in the court of Charles II and among the merchants of the City. He suggests that Annesley could “advocate for it to the Prince,” while Player could procure the pamphlet “a favourable Reception among those honourable Gentlemen of the City, whose Wealth and Grandeur are the chief support of Trade, and consequently of England.”⁴⁹

This selection of emissaries showcases Yarranton’s proximity to court and commercial power, as well as his mindfulness to the disparate interests of urban traders and royal courtiers. When the Text Acts (1661, 1673) made Anglican oaths compulsory for holding clerical appointments and public office, capable nonconformists assembled in the commercial world of London’s ports and exchanges. Yarranton’s own delegate to the “Gentlemen of the City,” Thomas Player, held office under Cromwell and later became an outspoken Whig. The Anglo-Irish Annesley, by contrast, was a staunch Stuart loyalist and future Treasurer of the Navy. Yarranton entrusts England’s Improvement to men who had taken opposite sides during the civil wars and would later become factional opponents. He models in letters an act of political compromise that serviced both sides of a debate in the hopes of offending no one.⁵⁰

Projectors routinely tried to surmount (or hedge) partisan conflict during the seventeenth century, especially in periods when it was unclear who held what power. In 1652, the year before the Commonwealth became a Protectorate, Blith dedicated his English Improver Improved to Lord General Oliver Cromwell, nobles and gentry, the courts and universities, soldiers, husband-men, and the “Cottager, Labourer, or, meanest Commoner.” This panoply of dedicatees reflects the inscrutable political terrain of the early Commonwealth, and Blith’s aversion to offending potential stakeholders. Blith’s “English,” like Yarranton’s “England’s,” incorporates an array of figures to make its ideas sound like popular consensus among readers who might otherwise share no common political ground. In an example from the late Stuart era, John Evelyn dedicated his Fumifugium (1661) both to Charles II and the parliament that restored him, perhaps uncertain which institution was better equipped to execute his project to cleanse the capital of air pollution. Demonstrating respect for king and commons appeared to be a prerequisite for convincing either entity to consider the proposal.

Yarranton’s first dedicatory letter, to Annesley and Player, and his second, to Thomas Hickman-Windsor, Baron Windsor and later the first Earl of Plymouth, place him in imagined dialogue with powerful political operatives who were also titled elites. Printed at the front of England’s Improvement, this correspondence was meant to impress readers with the author’s epistolary connections. Projectors flaunted their attachments whenever possible by imagining influential public figures as readers and patrons. For instance, Fortrey addressed England’s Interest and Improvement to Charles II and bragged of his intimacy with the monarch in his capacity as gentleman “of his Majesties most Honourable Privy Chamber.”⁵¹ John Smith allied himself with experimental science when he dedicated England’s Improvement Reviv’d to William Brouncker, president of the Royal Society.⁵² Samuel Coke curried royalist favor by devoting his England’s Improvements (1675) to Prince Rupert of the Rhine.⁵³

Yarranton’s dedicatory epistles do more than drop names; they imply that their author has established relationships with men capable of enacting his proposals. Yarranton addresses Windsor because the baron had once employed him as an engineer to render navigable a segment of the River Avon, an enterprise that supposedly delivered “general Advantage” to the public.⁵⁴ Yarranton thanks Windsor for “the great Incouragement your Lordship hath been pleasure to afford me, in those indefatigable Pains you have taken in the Survey of several Rivers” and uses the occasion of thanksgiving to boast of past accomplishment.⁵⁵ By addressing a satisfied patron, England’s Improvement legitimates itself as a trustworthy reform vehicle born of credentialed experience. Yarranton invokes Windsor to draft himself a letter of commendation.

The third prefatory letter addresses another one of Yarranton’s former employers: a commission of Worcestershire metal makers who sent him to Dresden in 1667 to report on the Saxon manufacture of tinplate. Yarranton recalls that this assignment required “studious prying into the curious intreagues of Trade and thriving Politicks of our Neighbour Nations.”⁵⁶ The plural form of “nations” and the mention of intriguing “trade” and “thriving Politicks” alludes to the fact that after investigating German forges, Yarranton proceeded on through Flanders and Holland, where he marveled at the United Provinces’ extensive inland canals, vigorous commerce, and prosperous citizens. Where the Worcestershire iron mongers tasked Yarranton with importing industrial knowledge, England’s Improvement conveys his greater ambition to “make practicable here at home” the policies and institutions that made Dutch society so prosperous. Yarranton acquired not only German trade secrets in 1667, but the conviction that cultural advancement required “finding out abroad.”⁵⁷

In the middle of this letter, Yarranton apologizes to his readers for telling a “long story, that little or nothing concerns them.”⁵⁸ The insertion of an unconcerned “them” confirms that this message was intended for audiences beyond its ostensible recipients, the members of the Worcestershire syndicate. Yarranton imagines that his correspondence will be heard and overheard: that his former colleagues will support his improvement agenda, and that the reader at large will be impressed that the author completed an industrial fact-finding mission out of “pure love to your Country.”⁵⁹ Perhaps to make up for this gratuitous self-promotion, Yarranton addresses his final dedicatory letter to that same general reader. In it, he pledges to “drive away the great fears and complaints rooted in the hearts of the People, as the decay of Trade, the growing Power of the French, and much more.”⁶⁰ The credibility of this promise depends on Yarranton’s reputation as fashioned through his epistolary appeals to power.

The letters offer a flattering but incomplete depiction of their author’s adventures. Yarranton touches briefly on his experiences as a traveler and consultant throughout England’s Improvement, but it is not until the pamphlet’s final pages that he inhabits completely the biographical mode in the form of a “short Account of my Education and Improvement.”⁶¹ The postscript suggests that Yarranton advocates improvement because he was himself its product. This narrative of experience is meant to distinguish England’s Improvement from the “notions of a hot Brain” as a work of reasoned counsel rather than baseless enthusiasm.⁶² “I was an Apprentice to a Linnen Draper when the King was born,” he begins, recollecting an adolescence spent in the village of Astley, Worcestershire, during the 1630s. Yarranton locates in his youth the origins of the current Stuart regime, identifying as “King” an infant who would not take the throne for another thirty years. Finding the cloth trade “too narrow and short for my large mind,” Yarranton abandoned the shop to pursue what he calls a “Country-Life.”⁶³ This rustic interlude ended with the English Civil Wars, which brought heavy fighting to the West Midlands, capped off by Cromwell’s victory at Worcester in 1651. Yarranton recalls that “I was a soldier,” but he omits the fact that it was the New Model Army in which he enlisted (and through whose ranks he rose to become a captain), probably out of fear that old republican allegiances could undermine his pamphlet’s consensus-building efforts.⁶⁴ While England’s Improvement forgets its author’s allegiance, its critics would be quick to remind “Captain Y” of his commission in Cromwell’s forces.⁶⁵

We learn that Yarranton built an iron forge and surveyed several major rivers after the war.⁶⁶ But the account is again most illuminating for what it excludes. England’s Improvement does not mention that between 1651 and 1653 Yarranton served as a commissioner of sequestration in Worcester, in charge of confiscating and reapportioning lands owned by Charles I and his supporters. In an undated letter, he identifies twenty Caroline loyalists in Hereford and Gloucester whose lands were “sequestrable,” the kind of assessment that conceivably earned Yarranton powerful enemies following the Restoration.⁶⁷ These seizures transferred the estates of Stuart loyalists into new hands, often New Model Army veterans and London merchants eager to experiment with innovative forms of husbandry. The new corps of “rational and often progressive land managers” discarded the ornamental and recreational vestiges of the bygone Caroline era in order to make the land return greater profits, whether by testing new crops or harvesting game parks for timber.⁶⁸ As commissioner, Yarranton toured former royalist strongholds that had become some of England’s most “economically backward” regions.⁶⁹ Like Blith, another sequestration commissioner, Yarranton witnessed with his own eyes the rise of a new landowning regime, a motley crew of traders and soldiers that strove to become new model agrarians.

Yarranton also took a progressive hand to his own affairs. He purchased confiscated land in the Wyre Forest in 1651 and built an iron forge there. He oversaw an unfinished project to expand the slender River Salwarpe into a navigable channel between Worcester and the Severn River. Yarranton applied himself to studying “the great weakness of the Rye-lands,” a region in Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire whose soil was exhausted by overcultivation, and proposed planting clover there to feed cattle and replenish the land.⁷⁰ Yarranton initially promoted clover through an earlier pamphlet, Yarranton’s Improvement by Clover. No copy of this work survives, but Yarranton composed a revised edition in 1663, fittingly titled The Improvement Improved, by a Second Edition of the Great Improvement of Lands by Clover, and had it published by the local bookseller Francis Rea. Yarranton credits himself with discovering concrete methods to enrich land in a period he knew that many Restoration readers had come to associate with the vast social ambitions and broken promises of Commonwealth.

Here the account cuts off with terse insistence that “what I have been doing since, my Book tells you at large.”⁷¹ This abrupt conclusion charges England’s Improvement with delivering a biographical account of Yarranton’s last twenty years. This deferral relieves Yarranton from having to explain how the Stuart Restoration stalled his varied and energetic career. The Calendar of State Papers fills in some of these gaps, documenting Yarranton’s arrest in 1662 and subsequent jailing under suspicion of plotting a Presbyterian uprising.⁷² Yarranton would at one point face charges of treasonous speech, but a jury trial exonerated him of all charges. This verdict appeared to put Yarranton’s legal troubles behind him, but as demonstrated in later critical responses to England’s Improvement, criminal exculpation could not silence insinuations that he was a dangerous radical and unrepentant regicide.

England’s Improvement sets out to mend many bridges. It reconciles Yarranton to the Stuart settlement through its call for incremental reform, even claiming that it is the “Wealth, Strength, and Honour” of Charles II that are “the chief things aimed at in this Undertaking.”⁷³ The pamphlet makes a dedicatee of the same Baron Windsor by whose authority the Lord Lieutenant of Worcestershire arrested Yarranton for insubordination in 1662. It invokes the Worcestershire metal makers who dispatched Yarranton to Dresden in 1667 and in so doing gave the former parliamentarian a chance to resuscitate his embattled reputation. England’s Improvement remembers (and strategically forgets) Yarranton’s life to characterize him as a loyal subject who associated with respectable moderates. Conversely, the dedicatory letters and “short Account” make personal experience the basis for civic action, showing how Yarranton derived his powers of authorship from being a participant in history. It is England’s Improvement’s enfolding of biographical account into public exposition—its positioning of Yarranton within the society he sought to reform—that permits a Presbyterian dissenter and onetime republican fugitive to voice an Anglican kingdom’s future interest.

Storied Ventures

Yarranton eases readers into the fraught business of imitating Dutch society by making his recommendations appear self-evident and inoffensive. Having taken part in some of country’s most divisive conflicts and having suffered through decades of personal turmoil, he maintains that England’s Improvement manifests universal values through uncontroversial means. Among Yarranton’s strategies for making projects seem widely appealing is the telling of stories that portray societal reform through digestible plots. England’s Improvement incorporates several narrative fragments that render compelling the causal links between present action and the future it creates. For instance, Yarranton likens his country’s quest for commercial gain to a romantic contest between England and the Netherlands for the hand of trade: “To beat the Dutch with fighting, so as to force them from their beloved Mistress and delight (which is trade and Riches thereby) hath been the design of the most of their Neighbours for this forty years last past.”⁷⁴ By personifying trade as a fickle paramour, England’s Improvement converts recondite social problems into the matter of an amorous tale. Yarranton depicts war as the use of force to abscond with “Trade” to “better Ports, and healthfuller Air,” a tactic pursued without success by Spain during the Eighty Years War (1568–1648), France during the Franco-Dutch War (1672–78), and England during the first and second Anglo-Dutch Wars. But violent kidnapping provides only a temporary advantage, claims Yarranton, because trade always returns to the venue of most vigorous exchange, even the “dull and flegmatick Air” of Holland.⁷⁵

England can possess trade only by furnishing her with “all that she can desire.” These conjugal comforts included a property register, navigable rivers, a bank, a “Court of Merchants,” and the construction of “lumberhouses” (i.e., pawn shops) where “poor people may have Moneys lent upon Goods at very easie interest.”⁷⁶ These institutions would entice trade to abandon the Netherlands and “come and settle her self with us,” predicts Yarranton, who emplots improvement as noncoercive seduction, an expenditure of civilian labor preferable to the ravages of war.⁷⁷ Yarranton’s story of Anglo-Dutch conflict treats commerce not simply as an object to be seized, but as an independent agent capable of denial and consent. His courtship allegory reframes commercial rivalry as a contest of hospitality.

Yarranton dedicates his longest tale to lobbying for the establishment of a land registry, a national office that would keep track of who owned what lands under what terms. England’s Improvement identifies land registration as the cornerstone of Dutch prosperity, a long-standing tradition of centralized record keeping that enabled Hollanders to verify property claims, and thereby borrow against their estates.⁷⁸ In England, by contrast, “no man can know a Title by his writings” and therefore must resort to cobbling together parish-held deeds and liens to certify property rights. Yarranton suggests that starting a registry would encourage the pursuit of land-backed loans, which would, in turn, transform England’s rural acreage into exchangeable value, injecting “riches, strength, and trade” into a countryside that held so much of its wealth and wealth-creating potential in the soil. Registration would be the mechanism by which English subjects could obtain credit to improve their estates and parishes could amass the funds necessary to commission Dutch-styled public works. Registration would, according to Yarranton, unleash “all delightful Golden Streams of Banks, Lumber-houses, Honour, Honesty, Riches, Strength and Trade.”⁷⁹

Yarranton dramatizes the consequences of England’s lack of a registry through the story of a fictitious family ruined by its pursuit of a loan. The protagonist is the family father, who owns an ancestral estate worth “a Thousand pounds a year” and owes “Four thousand pounds” in costs associated with outfitting his son in business and paying his daughters’ dowries.⁸⁰ The high value of the land and modest balance of debt suggest that this man should have no trouble obtaining and repaying a loan. But without clear title to his property of the sort registration would provide, the landholder cannot submit his property as security, even though “the Estate hath been in the Family Two hundred years.”⁸¹ He is forced to consult a “scrivener” to acquire a mortgage and to cosign that bond with “coventers,” a process that often failed according to Yarranton, leaving the mortgager unable to repay his debt and without means to set his sons and daughters “into the World.”⁸²

This particular landholder does manage to secure a loan, but the terms are harsh. Yarranton interjects his own voice in this narrative frame to ask the reader to ponder the dire repercussions of scarce credit and predatory creditors: what would happen if the estate were to fall on “bad Times, or decay of Tenants, great Taxes, or the Eldest Son matching contrary to his Father’s will, or oftentimes it is worse, he is so debaucht no one will match with him?”⁸³ In these unhappy cases, the mortgager stands no chance of satisfying his coventers, despite residing on lands worth significantly more than the original debt. “Sheriff, Bayliffs, Solicitors, and Lawyers” inevitably descend on the estate and it is “torn to pieces.”⁸⁴ The former owner, now an unlanded debtor, must plead before “the Fleet or Bench” and suffer the humiliation of debtor’s prison.⁸⁵

This upsetting tale transforms a proposal for clerical transparency into familial tragedy, complete with the confiscation of homestead, fractured paternal-filial relations, and incarceration. “O Pity, and Sin,” Yarranton exclaims, “that it should be so in brave England!”⁸⁶ Outside England, the same transaction is less harrowing. A loan seeker in Dutch Friesland, Yarranton explains, can call on his sons trading in Venice, Hamburg, Nuremberg, and Danzig to acquire credit because “every Acre of Land in the Seven Provinces trades all the world over, and it is as good as ready Money; but in England a poor Gentlemen cannot take up Four thousand pounds upon his Land at six in the hundred interest although he would Mortgage a Thousand pounds a year of it.”⁸⁷ Although this particular Friesland merchant’s holdings command only £100 a year (one-tenth the annual returns earned by his English counterpart), he is able to borrow at a lower interest rate and at less personal hazard. Land registration, according to Yarranton, made Dutch soil an internationally exchangeable commodity in an era when English estate holders could not prove titles to the satisfaction of parish justices.

Yarranton presents Anglo-Dutch commercial rivalry through the experience of individual economic actors, characters endowed with human hope, judgment, and emotion. His storytelling recasts diplomacy as romance, and malfunctioning debt instruments into a crisis of familial integrity—fictions that enabled even those readers who did not understand Yarranton’s proposals to support them. Another writer who invested macroeconomic phenomena with affective resonance was Blith, who campaigned for timber cultivation in Commonwealth England by telling the story of an aged widow: “I have heard of a poor woman that had two or three ash-trees in her Garden hedge, & a strong wind came and blew the Ash Keys all over the Garden, that at the Spring, her Garden was turned from that to a hopfull plantation of Ashes as green as a leek above the ground, the woman was at a great debat, to loose her Garden she was loth, and to destroy so hopefull a crop she was unwilling.”⁸⁸ The germination of ash seeds presents a gripping dilemma: the “heard of” woman must decide whether to maintain her garden, a crucial chore given her poverty, or cultivate the accidental nursery, which might return greater sustenance, but only after the trees came to maturity and someone purchased their timber. The woman recognizes that over time the trees would prove more lucrative than vegetables, but she is hesitant to risk her livelihood in pursuit of future gain. Blith distinguishes between the conservation of private uses and the exchange of commodities, in this case through a timber trade that would likely dispose of the ash trees in London’s shipyards. The woman, in other words, must decide whether to maintain her austere existence or become the “English Improver” that Blith heralded: “at last she resolved to let them grow, and now her garden is turned into a nurcery, and she is turned a planter, and hath ever since maintained it to that use, and made many times more profit than she did before.”⁸⁹ The parable of the ash keys rewards public-minded plantation. Remitting the fruits of the land to a national economy yields “profit,” an exchangeable surplus unavailable in the subsistence paradigm. Blith’s triumphant conversion of garden plot to literary plot furthermore suggests that even the most precarious members of society, here a “poor woman,” can contribute to the Commonwealth, helping to furnish England’s navy at a time when war with the Netherlands first loomed on the horizon.

Projectors like Blith and Yarranton recognized the power of allegories and anecdotes to make improvement concrete and personal. The ruined mortgager and reluctant orcharder solicit pity and admiration, even when the economic impasses they personify do not pertain to individual readers. Their narratives also stand in for explicit argumentation, limiting the instances in which Yarranton needed to make bald claims about the future, claims that would tip off his audience to the fact that they were reading a work in the disreputable project mode. Whenever possible, Yarranton tries to appear as if he is describing rather than disputing, composing narrative rather than building polemic. These performances reflect Yarranton’s anxieties over the usefulness of language for enlisting readers to his cause, anxieties he processes paradoxically by renouncing rhetoric altogether. A signature of project writing, I will now show, was a disavowal of projects and writing. Inspection of England’s Improvement reveals a text at war with its medium.

Writing Against Language

England’s Improvement derives legitimacy from its imagined interlocutors, who range from connected elites to the general reader. This unrequited correspondence liberates Yarranton to discuss his own improvement agenda with affable modesty: “I here not only present with these my weak Endeavors, for the vigorous Improvements of those unparalel’d Advantages, which the situation of our Climate, the Nature of our Soil, and the Constitution of both our People and Government affords us, in order to the making us every way great, beyond any Nation in the World.”⁹⁰ Yarranton contrasts the “weak endeavors” of his prose with the possibility of “vigorous” improvement and “unparalel’d” advantage that the proposal raises. He confesses to feeble exposition through the possessive adjective “my,” while insisting that this scheming could make the entire realm “great.” Yarranton characterizes England’s Improvement as the unassuming vehicle for momentous change. It is a “humble Petition” meant to give rise to “so Glorious a Work.”⁹¹ The topos of modesty was an essential tool for projectors, who downplayed their rhetorical acumen to forestall skeptics who would portray them as cunning wordsmiths brandishing empty ideas. Many authors found that the most direct way to refute charges of rhetorical deceit was to disclaim persuasive advantage altogether.

Yarranton discounts his writerly talents by calling England’s Improvement a “humble petition” and “weak endeavors.” At one point, he breezily reduces his 216-page manifesto to “these few Sheets.”⁹² Fortrey likewise characterizes his England’s Interest and Improvement as an “unworthy Treatise,” claiming he felt “ashamed” that King Charles (his dedicatee) might waste time reading such an “undeserving paper.”⁹³ Barbon calls his Discourse on Trade a “rough sketch.” John Blanch brushes off his Interest of England Considered (1694) as “this little Essay,” diminishing the proposal’s supposedly paltry substance to the status of mere attempt.⁹⁴ Mary Astell claims that her Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) needs not “the set-off’s of Rhetorick to recommend it, were I capable, which yet I am not, of applying them.”⁹⁵ Humphrey Mackworth performs a particularly jarring devaluation of his work when he likens England’s Glory, by a Royal Bank to “this little Brat.”⁹⁶ These self-deprecating authors attempt to shift the reader’s attention from the rhetorical instrument of the proposal to the action it foresees, and in so doing to disown the act of proposing itself.⁹⁷

Yarranton rejects the artifice of writing to assert the underlying value of his ideas. The purpose of his rhetoric was to remove the semblance of persuasion, and thereby return readers to the unmediated object Thirsk calls a “practical scheme for exploiting material things.”⁹⁸ Yarranton’s professions of verbal inelegance actually exhibit deft understatement—he disclaims an argumentative mode to reinforce arguments, suggesting that there was substance to his proposals beyond the words they contained. Modesty functions as a mode of self-authorizing performance in England’s Improvement, as Yarranton’s “humble petition” refashions itself into the “unanimous Prayer of the Nation in General.”⁹⁹ The generic transposition of “petition,” an individual plea to the state, to “prayer,” a request of God made on behalf of the nation, demonstrates how claims to plain speech facilitate the acquisition of political power.

A purported plain style could also distinguish new proposals from projection’s history of misspent eloquence, a notorious legacy personified by Elizabethan monopolists, Jacobean and Caroline patentees, and Commonwealth social planners. Yarranton understood it was crucial for England’s Improvement to appear not to belong to the degraded project tradition and therefore solicits “shelter” of Annesley and Player so that they could shield him from “the Arrows of Obloquy and Envy, that are usually shot at the Projector, be the Undertaking never so noble.”¹⁰⁰ Yarranton confesses that others will call him a projector and denounce his ideas out of prejudice or jealousy. The archery metaphor implies that these obligatory assaults relied on tonal bluster and specious clichés, and often missed their mark, injuring some of England’s most capable and public-minded improvers.

Yarranton decries the perfunctory malice shown toward new enterprise and denounces those who rail against “my Project, as most will call it” despite its potential benefits.¹⁰¹ He nonetheless capitulates to this hostile readership by spurning project terminology. With the exception of one reference to an earlier river navigation scheme as “my projection,” Yarranton always substitutes less insidious synonyms like “Design” and “Undertaking,” terms that imply the possibility of action beyond proposal language without conjuring projecting’s incriminating historical associations.¹⁰² Yarranton’s denial of projects reflects the influence of writers like Blith, who wanted to be accounted a “poor and faithful Servant to his Generation” and not be “Scandalized as a Projector.”¹⁰³ His self-conception also anticipates a distinction later drawn by Aaron Hill, the eighteenth-century poet and beech oil inventor, who claimed “the Business we are now upon, is no Project, ’tis a Discovery.”¹⁰⁴ To escape its own wordy realm of projection, England’s Improvement organizes its diction and syntax to renounce fine rhetoric and proposing both.

Projection’s Passive Voice

Trepidation over language manifested at the level of syntax. For example, later in the pamphlet, Yarranton proposes to increase England’s power at sea by establishing a navigable waterway in Ireland. Turning his attention to the Shalela Wood of Leinster, Yarranton decries the “great shame it was that such quantities of Timber should ly rotting in these Woods, and could not be come at, the Mountains and Boggs having so lockt them up.”¹⁰⁵ These were not any old trees, but sturdy oaks, some mast worthy, that could boost the English navy’s ship-building efforts. It was no coincidence that this timber stood on land in the County of Wexford that Charles II had granted to his loyalist supporters, including Yarranton’s dedicatee, the Earl of Anglessey. When Yarranton predicts that the unimproved land “will never bring the Owners Twenty thousand pounds,” he laments both the nation’s forfeiture of ship timber and his patron’s loss of revenue. The solution, he perceived, was in deepening the River Slane (today called the Slaney), which meandered through southeastern Ireland on its way to the sea at Wexford: “But if the Slane were made Navigable and the Rivulets running into it, these great quantities of Timber might be employed in building Ships for the Royal Navy.”¹⁰⁶ The conditional statement exemplifies Yarranton’s dedicatory pledge to exploit “our Climate, the Nature of our soil, and the Constitution of our People and Government,” in this case by making “our” encompass the colonized County of Wexford. England’s Improvement implies an Ireland that is also England’s, and hence improvable. From early in his career, Yarranton recognized the value of traversable rivers, likening them in England’s Improvement to veins: “let them be stopt, there will then be great danger either of death” or injury.¹⁰⁷ He was so confident in his project to make the Stour River navigable through part of Worcestershire that he purchased adjoining mines in the hopes that barges would one day carry his coal to forges downstream. Making the Slane navigable, he argued, would allow England to build ships at “three fifths of what the King now pays,” and these ships would be well positioned to “preserve the West India Trade” or sail into the Mediterranean and thereby give “great comfort to all Trade that is used in those seas.”¹⁰⁸ It was all a matter of getting to those oaks.

Yarranton summarizes the project through a single sentence that transforms a natural substance (“Timber”) into a manmade product (“Ships”) through an act of industry (“building”). This rough grammatical formula for projection transforms a direct object into an indirect object through the use of a gerund. What’s missing is a subject, an entity responsible for this foretold action. Passive voice construction permits England’s Improvement to extol a complex work of river engineering without calling on anyone in particular to discharge its labor. Perhaps Yarranton feared that such an act of naming would divert the reader’s attention from England, the ostensible beneficiary of improvement, to an individual undertaker who might stand to profit (especially if that undertaker wound up being the polarizing surveyor and engineer Andrew Yarranton). Passive voice enables the projector to talk about improvement without hazarding to assign it a grammatical agent or human face.

Modern writing pedagogy discourages use of the passive voice on the grounds that it conveys diffidence, inaction, even deception. In England’s Improvement, passive construction propels Yarranton’s schemes forward by attributing them a sense of inevitability. His grammar helps create the conditions for believing in his project, which derives plausibility from the fact that it at first obliges nobody to do anything. Yarranton’s sentence is in the conditional mode, but no one is responsible for satisfying any conditions—things simply will “be.” Yarranton evinces similar passive certainty in his later proposal to forge metal in Hampshire using iron stone buried at the mouth of the Stour River and timber from the New Forest: “If two Furnaces be built around Ringwood to cast Guns, and two Forges to make Iron, and the Iron Stone to be brought from the Harbour mouth out of the Sea up the River to the Furnaces, and the Charcole out of New Forest to the works, there being sufficient of decayed Woods to supply four Iron-works for ever; by these means the King makes the best of everything, and builds with his Timber being near and convenient.”¹⁰⁹ Furnace construction appears straightforward in this syntax. Forges will “be built” and raw iron “brought” through actions that later solidify into “means” of instrumental value. The omission of subjects makes Yarranton sound authoritative, not evasive. Eventually he attributes action to Charles II, a sovereign who “makes the best of everything,” but in reality makes nothing.

Yarranton proposes to establish linen manufacturing in Warwick, Leicester, Northampton, and Oxfordshire through yet another passively voiced future-conditional sentence, except here, England’s Improvement transmutes the lack of specified agency into a positive gain: the creation of jobs. “And so it will be,” proclaims Yarranton: “There the Flax will grow, and be manufactured easily and cheap; part whitened there, and the Thread and part of the Flax sent down the Navigable Rivers to the several Towns to be woven and spun. And so there will be employ for the great part of the Poor of England. In such Towns where it meets with a settled voluntary Register, thence never will it depart.”¹¹⁰ The cloth spinning project presumes the execution of Yarranton’s other schemes for navigations and land registration. Once in place, these enterprises enable the linen industry to run itself: flax “will grow,” “be Manufactured,” “be sent down” rivers. A former draper’s apprentice, Yarranton predicts that central England would one day surpass Germany as Europe’s largest producer of cloth. He suggests that nimble-fingered children would make the best linens workers, following the example of German industrial schools that taught youngsters how to spin flax, weave bone lace, and make toys. “There the Children enrich the Father,” Yarranton lamented, “but here begger him.”¹¹¹ In the world of England’s Improvement, “employ” is improvement’s product rather than its animating force. Yarranton transforms children from cost burdens into wage earners, a measure that would stimulate population growth in the region.

Given its capacity to make a speculative future feel like an inevitable extension of the present, passive syntax appears frequently in project writing. The subtitle of Coke’s England’s Improvements promises to disclose “How the Kingdom of England May be Improved.” Fortrey professes “no doubt but the people, and riches of the kingdom might be greatly increased and multiplied” if land were enclosed, mines expanded, and a fishery established.¹¹² “England, may be enriched,” declares William Carter, by banning the exportation of raw wool.¹¹³ His England’s Interest Asserted declares that “Cloathing must be purged from its Corruption,” in a syntactical construction that identifies neither what qualified as “Corruption” nor who would take responsibility for decontaminating the trade.¹¹⁴ Reynell treats England as a passive object in his assertion that “this Nation might be greatly advantaged by cutting of Rivers, and making them Navigable.”¹¹⁵ The kingdom, according to Reynell, possesses the means of advancing itself, so there is no need to identify the agents who would actually carry out the work.

After denying the efficacy of its words, England’s Improvement appears also to refuse the agency of its author. This maneuver permits Yarranton to invert the means and ends of his project, imagining labor not as a prerequisite for projects but as projection’s salutary outcome. Passive voice also makes it possible for England’s Improvement to synchronize projects of industry, engineering, and policy reform within a single sentence, producing a momentary sense of coherent organization within a long and varied pamphlet.

Schemes and Schemas

England’s Improvement sprawls across two hundred pages and several fields of professional knowledge, from Irish forestry to London fire prevention. Incorporating such dissimilar material into a single piece of writing challenged Yarranton to make “improvement” encompass many actions and yet remain a legible ideal. He conceived of England’s Improvement not as a miscellany of separate proposals, but a methodical plan for concerted action. This was the goal at least. In its published form, Yarranton’s pamphlet feels neither methodical nor self-contained. To the contrary, England’s Improvement tries readers through its lengthy digressions and deadening repetition. The text speeds through some proposals—particularly those having to do with London—while lavishing minute detail on others. Yarranton defers to knowledgeable experts in some passages, addresses uninformed readers in others, snipes at known enemies and imagined critics elsewhere. While the pamphlet resists front-to-back reading, it nonetheless establishes a kind of order between the projects it unveils. When, for instance, England’s Improvement presents linen as the product of synchronized efforts to register land and cut rivers, it suggests that projects create their own conditions of possibility. This idea of reciprocity enables Yarranton to depict momentous changes in society as the result of incremental measures. Yarranton links one scheme to the proliferation of others in his description of how a land registry would reshape rural England: “the free Lands of England being put under a Voluntary Register by Act of Parliament: From the Credit whereof spring Banks, Lumberhouses, with all Credits necessary to drive Trade, Cut Rivers, the Fishery, and all things else that Moneys are capable of; and it will drive away the great fears and complaints rooted in the hearts of the People, as the decay of Trade, the growing power of the French, and much more.”¹¹⁶ The prepositions “by,” “from,” and “with” establish causal bonds between each measure. Appropriately enough, the former navigations engineer employs a hydrographical metaphor to liken the land registry to a spring that feeds the streams of lumber mills, river embankments, trade, and a fishery. The metaphor breaks off with the more literal suggestion that new institutions will enhance England’s global stature, neutralize the threat of French invasion, cheer a fearful and quarrelsome populace, and “much more.” Improvement is imagined as the outflow of interdependent enterprises whose benefits exceed articulation. The land registry will do much good, and through its tributary schemes, “much more.”

Yarranton’s prepositions and water imagery establish spatial relations between projects to imply their harmonious interworking. Other projectors asserted improvement’s reciprocal nature more directly. Samuel Fortrey observed with aphoristic brevity that “people and plenty are commonly the begetters of the one of the other, if rightly ordered.”¹¹⁷ Carter identifies a “Connexion of Trades one to another,” predicting that England’s short-sighted exportation of raw wool would bring the poor to “desperate straits” and make them “uncapable of paying rent.”¹¹⁸ The cloth maker Joseph Trevers incorporates English commerce through the trope of the “body politique,” in which “one member depends upon another, and is serviceable to the other” producing “natural Harmony and Correspondence, even so doth one Trade, or occupation closely, and necessarily depend upon another.”¹¹⁹

Thirsk traces a similar course of mutual causation in the writings of fen improvers. She observes that a growing market for coleseed oil in the early seventeenth century “was linked with drainage projects, which gave fresh encouragement to yet another group of inventors and projectors—those who were commending their designs for windmills and drainage engines.”¹²⁰ A hunger for oil drives the mechanical inventions that would eventually turn the fens into plantable land. One oil projector, John Taylor, employs the same logic of “fresh encouragement” in his Praise of Hemp-Seed (1620), which recounts how hemp cultivation both demanded and returned “labour, profit, cloathing, pleasure, food, Navigation: Divinity, poetry, the liberall Arts, Armes, Vertues defence, Vices offence, a true mans protection, a thiefs execution. Here is mirth and matter all beaten out of this small seede.”¹²¹ An entire civil society congeals in the kernels of this crop, claims Taylor, who reasons that hemp could nourish commoners, inspire artists, and punish criminals. Likewise, Richard Weston’s A Discours of Husbandrie Used in Brabant and Flanders (1650) argues that implementing horticultural methods “not practised in England” would catalyze trade and create new employment opportunities.¹²² Weston advises Commonwealth cultivators to plant the signature crops of the continent’s lowlands, including flax, turnip, and clover. Then these planters could “send for som Workmen out of Flanders, that understand the Manufacture of Linnen Cloth, and make your own Flax into Linnen Cloth.”¹²³ The profits derived from finishing textiles would return “publick benefit to the Kingdom” in the form of profits that would subsidize the repair of highways and the construction of canals. Weston’s Discours promises to make English subjects better farmers, then industrialists, and finally, sponsors of public works. His agricultural projects pledge to capitalize on English land and expand the range of lives that the countryside could sustain.

Yarranton often makes the culmination of one project the impetus for another, though he does not always do this. For instance, England’s Improvement employs a paragraph break to mark the shift between his discussion of the registry and plan to log Irish and English forests:

And if this doth not convince the Reader, that hereby we shall beat the Dutch without fighting, and pay our Debts without Moneys, I have no more to say.

Besides the Advantages aforesaid, let me tell you that I have found out two places, one in Ireland, the other in England: In that in Ireland are great strange quantities of Timber to build Ships, and places to build them.¹²⁴

Language and typography place the logging proposals “besides” the purported benefits of the property register, rendering these two ideas adjacent but apart from one another. The new timber scheme nonetheless abides by its own internal logic of self-necessitation: “great and strange quantities of wood” become accessible only when workers make the Slane and Avon Rivers passable to ships. A cache of fleet-ready timber needs reengineered rivers to become boats. Conversely, the future navigability of the Slane and Avon depend on their proximity to forests, whose wood motivates the moving of land and water.

Yarranton depicts the project through a crude map (see Figure 2). The top of the map displays forest groves owned by English aristocrats, including Anglesey, who would stand to profit from the extraction of Irish timber. The bottom shows a finished ship under English ensign sailing out the broad-mouthed Slane River past Wexford into the open sea. The forest’s status as ships in potential could not be more obvious. The absence of dockyards, logging camps, and any other traces of labor implies that Irish forests, like Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest, might simply “rush into [the] Floods” on their own accord.¹²⁵ Yarranton’s syntax lacks the prosodic compression of Pope’s later scene, but it relies on a similar animating conceit: “those Woods may with ease and at very cheap Rates be brought down the Slane to Wexford.”¹²⁶ Cartography and grammar conspire to reduce rural wilderness to its industrial possibilities, possibilities that the single outbound ship implies are already being exploited.

Yarranton’s chain of projects stretches beyond the text of England’s Improvement. The multitude of benefits (and beneficial projects) signaled by the phrase “much more” would eventually motivate him to compose a “Second Part” to England’s Improvement, published in 1681. This continuation contained, among several additional proposals, “advice” for employing “Six thousand young Lawyers, and Three thousand Priests … who now have neither practice nor cure of Souls.”¹²⁷ Yarranton recognizes that the institution of a land registry would clear parochial court dockets, deny lawyers lucrative casework, and make England sufficiently prosperous and self-content to repel the enticements of Roman Catholicism.¹²⁸ Despite his tongue-in-cheek concern for jobless lawyers and papists, Yarranton nonetheless demonstrates his willingness to deal with the repercussions of his scheming and to solve, even fancifully, problems of his own making. The patterns of causation that drew together Yarranton’s projects outstretch the document that originally called them into being.

Universal Interest

Yarranton purports to voice collective values through the first word of his title, “England’s,” his strategically addressed dedicatory letters, and passively voiced predictions. He advances schemes that benefit broad constituencies, transforming the need for labor into a beneficial occasion of “employ.” A desire to employ the poor, to make enterprise serve its undertakers, was “one of the axioms of project writing,” according to Samantha Heller, who demonstrates how economic planners of the sixteenth century promised to make use of England’s idle and destitute subjects.¹²⁹ The inventor Hugh Plat (1552–1608) typifies this caring rhetoric when he sets out to “procure great loue and securitie to the rich, sufficient maintenaunce and reliefe to the poor, some credit to the Author and no small benefite to the whole realm of England.”¹³⁰

Figure 2. Map of Slane River from Andrew Yarranton’s England’s Improvement by Sea and Land. RB 148563, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Poor relief remained a central concern of projectors a century later. Reynell was one of several improvers who proposed a herring fishery on the grounds it would employ a staggering half million subjects.¹³¹ The fishery, he explained, was just one example of public enterprise that England could profitably undertake if “the Rich hoard not up their Money, but employ the poor people in general works, as building of Houses, Colledges, Bridges or the like.”¹³² Nicholas Hawksmoor goes so far as to suggest that his proposal for a hospital in Greenwich would prove advantageous even if it never served a patient, because even “vain Projects” like Egypt’s pyramids and Trajan’s pillar were useful in that they “employed vast Numbers of the Poor, in Building.”¹³³

Reynell and Hawksmoor exploit images of poverty to promote their schemes. They make a persuasive resource of scarcity. Similarly, Yarranton’s proposal to establish a network of granary banks, seven-story brick buildings that would protect corn from vermin, aligns poor relief with industrial growth.¹³⁴ Granaries, he predicts, would benefit “all the people that are imployed in these Manufactures,” by supplying them with “bread sufficient, without a charge to the Publick, and thereby the Commodities will be manufactured cheap.”¹³⁵ A reason to feed the hungry is that it cheapens goods, argues Yarranton, who charges his project to “cheat the Rats and Mice, to feed the Poor, to preserve the Tenant, to pay the Landlord, to bring us several Manufactures, to prevent Law-Suits, to fetch out all Moneys now unimployed into Trade; and it will be, if done, as the Blood in the Body, it will so circulate in a few years, that Corn will be to England better than ready Moneys; and to have this so, is undoubtedly every Mans interest in the Kingdom.”¹³⁶ This procession of infinitive statements explains how the erection of storehouses would monetize grain into currency “better than ready Moneys.” Yarranton predicts that corn, when secured from pests and freely distributed, would function as a unit of exchange similar to registered lands. The circulation of grain as money would ensure the availability of bread while stabilizing tenant-landlord relations, serving “undoubtedly every Mans interest in the Kingdom.” All men hold “interest” in this project because they belong to the same body, Yarranton’s simile suggests, and depend on the same flow of blood.

Virtually all improvers aligned their proposals with some notion of the public good. But only certain works, like Yarranton’s, were comprehensive enough to claim “every mans interest.” Projects “should be made as Universal as possible,” declares the like-minded Reynell, “and that it be universal, all particular Parishes ought to be employ’d in it.”¹³⁷ Both Reynell and Yarranton solicit readers who are poor and rich, rural and urban, Anglican and nonconforming to fashion their proposals as expressions of universal interest. Though the bulk of his proposals belong to the countryside, Yarranton maintains the importance of cities as centers of trade, showing how the fruits of the fields busied the ports of London. Yarranton addresses the dangers of urban life most explicitly through a proposal to fight conflagrations, like the Great Fire of 1666, by constructing a system of semaphores and roping water cisterns to sleighs.¹³⁸ The publication details of England’s Improvement themselves imply the reciprocity of capital and country: the colophon indicates that the work was composed by a Worcestershire native, Yarranton, published by a freeman in the London Company of Stationers, Robert Everingham, and sold in bookstalls in Cheapside and St. Paul’s Churchyard.

England’s Improvement stages unanimity across vocation and region in a fictive “Dialogue betwixt a Clothier, a Woollen-draper, and a Country-Yeoman at Supper upon the Road.” This didactic conversation opens when the draper (a rural wool supplier) asks the urban clothier, “what News from London, old friend?”¹³⁹ “A bad Trade still,” laments the clothier, who blames the decline of his business on the rise of factors, drawers, and packers, an ambitious class of functionaries who allegedly seized control of England’s textile industry by setting themselves up as merchants and creditors. A third party, the yeoman, soon enters the conversation, interjecting that the health of his estate relied on the unfettered trade of drapers and clothiers, because “every Acre of my Land rises price, according as the Woollen Manufacture flourishes.”¹⁴⁰ The draper, in turn, salutes the yeoman for his “fellow-feeling in our misery,” an expression of solidarity through shared financial hardship.

The decline of clothiers, drapers, and yeomen recalls the sorrow of Yarranton’s benighted mortgager. Their dialogue foregrounds the mutual dependence of pastoral labor and port markets, suggesting in this particular case that the traffic between Salisbury and London sustains both places. “Fellow-feeling” expresses a collective desire to restore England’s wool trade to its rightful directors.

Yarranton’s discovery of universal interest finds an urban-focused counterpart in Nicholas Barbon’s 1685 pamphlet, Apology for the Builder. Barbon, a London-based insurance purveyor, calls for the construction of houses in London, a project that would stimulate tax revenue (and policy sales). His proposal addresses rural landholders who feared that a larger metropolis would drain the countryside of workers and raise the cost of labor. Like Yarranton, Barbon shows how urban trade consumes rural outputs, “Stones, Bricks, Lime, Iron, Lead, Timber … the Commodities of the Country.”¹⁴¹ The city vents and constitutes the matter of quarries, forests, pastures, and tillage, claims Barbon, who observes that new buildings would provide “habitations and livelihood for the Supernumerary and useless Inhabitants of the Country,” specifically, the younger sons of gentry and the children of peasants.¹⁴² A growing city, Apology concludes, puts surplus goods and bodies to work.

Barbon characterizes building as an ancient vocation derived from the paternal obligation to shelter family. It is, he claims, the fundamental chore of a society committed to growing its population humanely: “New Buildings are advantageous to the King and Government. They are instrumental to the preserving and increasing of the number of the Subjects; And numbers of Subjects is the strength of a Prince: for Houses are Hives for the People to breed and swarm in, without which they cannot increase.”¹⁴³ Barbon compares London houses to teeming hives, colonies “instrumental” to the growth and maintenance of society. This trope, perhaps drawn from Virgil’s depiction of communally industrious bees in The Georgics, draws together city and country respectively as the tenor and vehicle of a metaphor. Apology uses the figure of the hive to unearth the city’s rural roots.

Barbon invents his own metaphors while neutralizing others. He addresses a particularly nefarious “simile from those that have the Rickets, fansying the City to be the Head of the Nation, and that it will grow too big for the Body,” accusing that simile’s authors of themselves being rickets victims deluded by their search for companionable forms.¹⁴⁴ Barbon refuses this comparison and installs his own in its place: London is not the head of England, but rather “the heart of a Nation, through which the Trade and Commodities of it circulate, like the blood through the heart, which by its motions giveth life and growth to the rest of the Body.”¹⁴⁵ London, in this comparison, is no longer a peripheral bulging but a central pump that propels goods throughout England. The heart metaphor accommodates urban and rural interests, reconstituting the capital within a functional body politic. Barbon himself acknowledges the impact of his tropes, remarking “this simile is the best.”¹⁴⁶

Yarranton’s dialogue and Barbon’s metaphoric surrogation authorize their proposals to voice universal interest. Both projectors endeavor to comfort readers by addressing them as improvement’s beneficiaries rather than its bystanders or victims. Recitations of shared values simultaneously marginalize detractors by depicting them as contrarian outsiders contriving to “shake their Interests.”¹⁴⁷ Yarranton imagines his future critics as improvement’s enemies, civic outlaws rather than reasonable opponents. England’s Improvement attempts to manage its own reception. This rhetorical self-fashioning would unravel in 1677, when Popish plots, Titus Oates, and possibility of exclusion made universal interest appear to be Yarranton’s most risible idea.

Improvement’s Readers

In 1679, there appeared an anonymous pamphlet mocking Yarranton and his ideas. A Coffee-House Dialogue; or, A Discourse Between Captain Y——and a Young Barrester of the Middle Temple stages a conversation between Yarranton (“Captain Y,” rewritten into his republican past) and a lawyer skeptical that “so good an Effect might be so easily wrought” from projects.¹⁴⁸ Captain Y badgers the attorney with outlandish claims that resemble but also exaggerate Yarranton’s original proposals: “we may beat the Dutch without fighting, pay Debts without Money, make all the Streets in London Navigable Rivers, harbour all the King’s Great Ships upon the top of an Hill, where they shall be secured from Wind and Weather, and from an hundred other Accidents, they are else obnoxious to.”¹⁴⁹ The fast-talking captain hands the barrister a sheet of paper calling for the establishment of a new club called “the Improvers of England” with a budget for “a pennyworth of Cheese, Bread, Beer and Mustard.”¹⁵⁰

The barrister sees through Captain Y’s banter, exclaiming, “I say you have out stripp’d all the Poets that ever wrote.”¹⁵¹ Poetry here connotes quixotic imagination detached from material constraint. To “out strip” poetry would be to exceed all bounds of credibility. Captain Y surpasses the impracticality of poets, and shares with them the medium of writing. Coffee-house Dialogue exposes and makes farcical the tactics Yarranton employed to make England’s Improvement an actionable reform instrument. Where Yarranton characterizes himself as a dutiful subject of Charles II, the dialogue reminds readers of his rank in Cromwell’s army. Where Yarranton alleged to speak with plain candor, Captain Y relies on insinuations, “a little push, a wink, a nod, a smile, or Finger held up to the Nose,” suggesting that England’s Improvement mystified its contents to circumvent conflict.¹⁵² Where Yarranton touted the logical continuity between his proposals, the lawyer fails to see how Captain Y’s club proposal “is pertinent to our former Discourse.”¹⁵³ The barrister proceeds to degrade the credentialed engineer and savvy consensus builder into an aged buffoon, who vacantly charges his sharper conversant of being a “young man [who] cannot see so far as I do.”¹⁵⁴