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,