The Wreckage of Intentions. David Alff
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