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
