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
