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