Tulipomania (10 page)

But the tulip was not popular just among immigrants; many Dutchmen were also becoming passionate about the flower. In the United Provinces, unlike the rest of Europe, tulip connoisseurs were rarely aristocrats; the nobility of the northern Netherlands, which had controlled the country for hundreds of years, had been largely wiped out in the Spanish wars. They were, rather, members of the new ruling class of the republic—a group of rich and influential private citizens whom the Dutch called “regents.”

The regents of a Dutch city typically included particularly well-to-do second-or third-generation businessmen, some lawyers, and perhaps a physician. As a rule they were wealthy enough to live by investing their money in bonds, foreign trade, or closer to home, one of the many profitable schemes for reclaiming land from the sea or draining lakes and marshes to create new farmland. They were thus freed from the day-to-day cares of earning a living and formed a self-perpetuating ruling class whose members filled the principal posts in the provincial parliaments and town councils.

The few Dutch connoisseurs who were not regents were rich merchants, some of whom were at least as wealthy as their compatriots, but who nevertheless earned their living by taking an active part in the running of some business or other. The men of this class were generally accorded an honorific title that recognized their particular calling—so that a man named, for example, de Jonge who was involved in the fisheries would be known as “Seigneur de Jonge in Herring”—and they tended to reinvest the profits they made in their own businesses. They had less time for their gardens than did the regents, but even so, a number of the richest merchants did become noted tulip lovers.

The flower was, in fact, perfectly suited to the United Provinces. It was not only fashionable and far more delicately colored than other garden plants; it was also unusually hardy, which meant that novices as well as expert horticulturalists could grow it successfully. The bulbs, moreover, flourished best in poor, sandy soils of the sort found in several parts of the republic and particularly in Holland, where a belt of dry, white earth ran parallel with the coast all the way from Leiden up to the city of Haarlem, just to the west of Amsterdam, and then on to Alkmaar, at the northern tip of the province.

What mattered most, however, was the tulip’s new status as a symbol of wealth and good taste. Beginning in about 1600 the United Provinces became, quite unexpectedly, by far the richest country in Europe. For more than half a century enormous sums of money poured into the country, greatly expanding the ranks of wealthy merchants. These men could afford to spend lavishly on things of beauty.

A number of contemporary writers have preserved the names of some of the wealthy Dutch connoisseurs who collected tulips in the first decades of the seventeenth century. They include several of the richest and most influential people in Holland—men such as Paulus van Beresteyn of Haarlem, who was once the regent of the local leper house, and who grew tulips within the city walls; and Jacques
de Gheyn, a wealthy painter from The Hague. De Gheyn was a well-known patrician and an acquaintance of Clusius’s who was sufficiently passionate about gardening to complete a volume of flower paintings, twenty-two pages long, that he sold to the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II. He was one of the few well-off connoisseurs whose real wealth is known with some accuracy, since he had his capital formally assessed in 1627, two years before his death. This audit showed he was then worth no less than forty thousand guilders.

Another tulipophile whose name figures in old records was far wealthier than van Beresteyn and de Gheyn together. Indeed, Guillelmo Bartolotti van de Heuvel (who was actually thoroughly Dutch and owed his bizarre name to the fact that he had been adopted by a childless uncle from Bologna) was one of the two richest men in all Amsterdam, and with assets worth a staggering 400,000 guilders in total, he was quite probably the wealthiest private individual ever to participate in the tulip trade. Having built his fortune in trade, van de Heuvel could afford to devote his leisure time to cultivating a celebrated garden right in the center of Amsterdam. From the scant descriptions that have survived, it appears it was laid out to a highly symmetrical and fiercely formal plan. Almost certainly it would have been the garden of a true connoisseur, following the contemporary fashion for flowers to be planted one to a bed so they could be admired in splendid isolation.

The vast influx of wealth that made a rich man of Guillelmo van de Heuvel was primarily a consequence of the Dutch Revolt. In the previous century, the republic’s largest town, Amsterdam, had been a city of only modest importance, while Antwerp, in the southern part of the Netherlands, was both the largest port and the wealthiest town in Europe. Huge quantities of goods from the Baltic, Spain, and the Americas passed through the city on their way to the Holy Roman Empire and the other states of northern Europe. But with the seizure of Flushing by the Sea Beggars in the first days of the rebellion, the
Dutch were able to cut off much of the city’s commerce by blocking the mouth of the river Scheldt, which gave Antwerp its access to the sea. The blockade was a catastrophe for the Flemish town. Much of its considerable trade was diverted north to Holland, where Amsterdam became the principal beneficiary.

At about the same time the Dutch broke what had previously been a Spanish monopoly by opening trading links with the East Indies. To Europeans of the seventeenth century, the Indies were a source of almost unimaginable wealth. They overflowed with luxury goods, from spices to Chinese porcelain, which could not be obtained elsewhere. These goods could be purchased relatively cheaply in the East and were hardly bulky, yet they could earn a fortune at home. A single cargo of spices was worth many times more than the same tonnage of timber, grain, or salt—the commodities on which the Netherlands had long depended—and could be turned into spectacular profits if brought safely home.

Dutch merchants were quick to recognize the potential of trading with the East. By 1610 they had established outposts on a number of Indonesian islands, and despite the constant threat of Spanish attack, fleets laden with peppercorns and nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, sugar, silks, and dyestuffs were sailing regularly to the United Provinces. The merchants of Amsterdam called these new commodities the “rich trades,” and with good reason.

The surplus of wealth that now surged into the republic—a single voyage to the Indies could yield profits of up to 400 percent—touched the lives of thousands of Netherlanders. By 1631 fully five-sixths of Amsterdam’s richest three hundred citizens had a stake in the rich trades, and both the Dutch merchant class and the regents who backed them and invested in their enterprises were enormously better off, on average, than their contemporaries in England, France, or the empire.

By the standards of the time the most successful Dutch merchants were astonishingly wealthy. In the first half of the seventeenth
century, a trader of the middle rank might have thought himself comfortable if his income reached 1,500 guilders a year and well off if it topped 3,000, while those below him in the social scale—clerks, shop owners, and others with some claim to the title “gentleman”—earned on average a third or a fifth as much: perhaps 500 to 1,000 guilders a year. But for men such as van de Heuvel, who had substantial stakes in the rich trades, incomes of 10,000, 20,000, even 30,000 guilders a year were possible. The richest of the lot was Jacob Poppen, the son of a German immigrant who had built his fortune trading with the Indies and with Russia. He was worth 500,000 guilders when he died in 1624. Adriaen Pauw, a regent who became burgomaster of Amsterdam and eventually one of the most prominent politicians of the United Provinces, amassed a fortune of 350,000 guilders from his successful investments, and by the 1630s another ten Amsterdammers possessed 300,000 guilders or more.

Today men of comparable wealth dress in the finest clothes and travel by private jet and limousine. But even at the height of the Dutch Golden Age, visitors to the republic found it hard to distinguish the wealthiest members of the regent and merchant classes from their countrymen. Even the richest of them dressed in clothes of the most severely unadorned variety, following the national fashion for large, wide-brimmed hats, tight trousers, and a heavy jacket. Underneath they sported a doublet, resembling a waistcoat—all in black—with substantial white ruffs at the throat and wrist, knee stockings, and tight black shoes, while their wives and daughters dressed in drab bodices and floor-length dresses, over which a lace apron often appeared. In winter, to keep out the pervasive Low Countries chill, men and women alike donned elegant fur-lined dressing gowns that were worn over all the other clothing at home and at the place of work, but otherwise it was customary to avoid any sort of display of wealth. Women rarely even displayed their hair, preferring
to hide it under a tight white cap, and though Dutch men did style theirs in something approaching Cavalier fashion—long and curled at the shoulders, with mustaches and a small triangle of neatly trimmed beard—on the whole the national dress sense was resoundingly Puritan.

But however modest their dress, Dutch regents and merchants were not immune to the temptation to display their wealth. The riches that came in with the tides and flowed into the coffers of these immensely wealthy merchants and their backers had to find outlets of some sort. Some of the money, spent on food and wine or used to import produce to the towns from the countryside, trickled down to the lower levels of society and helped to raise standards of living throughout the republic. Much was saved, or reinvested. Still, there is no question that the profits of the rich trades also fueled consumption of all manner of luxuries, from great houses to paintings to tulips, making possible the remarkable variety and richness of the Golden Age that the United Provinces enjoyed between 1600 and 1670.

It was a time of tremendous cultural progress. The arts flourished as never before, fueled not only by the establishment of Leiden and other universities and schools but also by the arrival of many painters and writers from the south. So many artists, indeed, were looking for work that it became possible to commission a new painting or a play for a fraction of the usual cost. Many towns and private citizens took advantage of this fact, and visitors to the United Provinces were always greatly impressed by the variety and magnificence of the canvases, the tapestries, and the statuary that turned up in the most surprising places. At the same time several of the most brilliant artists were developing new techniques of realistic portraiture, creating the styles that men of the stature of Rembrandt (a Leiden miller’s son) and Frans Hals (a refugee from Antwerp) perfected. Architecture, too, enjoyed a renaissance as the new republic commissioned many
imposing public buildings, and there were more books, more pamphlets, and more schools.

Individual Dutchmen, too, acquired a taste for building work. One of the principal reasons for the ever-increasing popularity of the tulip was the newfound passion among Dutch merchants and gentry for building grand country houses where they could enjoy—and indeed show off—their burgeoning wealth. Substantial mansions sprang up in clusters outside the richest Dutch towns: at Leiderdorp, a village on the outskirts of Leiden, among the rolling sand dunes on the coast west of Haarlem, and on the river Vecht, where it flowed from Utrecht to Amsterdam. They were typically built in the Classical style, fully staffed, amply proportioned, and set in extensive grounds that generally included formal gardens as well as parkland. For busy and successful merchants and for the hardworking members of the regent class, they acted as retreats from the hasty world of the city.

Social historians have found in this passion for house building an indicator of changing moods among the ruling classes of the United Provinces. During their Golden Age the once sober, God-fearing Dutch—so Calvinist that their society frowned on ostentation in all its forms and ministers were fined for venturing the merest semblance of a joke in church—slowly acquired something of a taste for display. From this point of view, perhaps the most interesting product of the building craze was Zorghvliet (“Fly from Care”), the country home of a prominent regent named Jacob Cats. Cats was one of the most famous Dutchmen of his day—a mild-mannered and extremely religious man who pursued dual careers as a politician and a popular writer and became without question the most widely respected Dutchman of the age. His fortune rested on his immense success as the author of popular moralistic verse, which sold in staggering quantities throughout the republic. A typical Cats stanza, in which the poet
rather savored the opportunity to warn a beautiful young girl not to trade on her good looks, went like this:

Father Cats, as he was universally known, turned out more than a dozen books filled with this sort of verse, and something like fifty thousand copies of his complete poems found their way into Dutch homes; often a volume of Cats would be the only book in the house apart from a Bible. Many Dutch families regarded him fondly as an honest source of wisdom and saw his verses as a reliable guide to the moral problems of the day. If Jacob the poet thought there was nothing wrong with owning a country retreat, it was difficult to argue that there was.

This fashion for sumptuous country houses led naturally to the planting of many extensive country gardens. Dutch interest in horticulture had begun to flourish in the previous century and still showed no signs of abating. The grounds of Lord Offerbeake’s residence in Allofein, near Leiden (which an English member of Parliament, Sir William Brereton, visited in 1634), contained “spacious gardens and mighty great orchards, and a store of fish-ponds,” as well as twelve different varieties of hedgerow, a maze, long wooded walks, and of course a good number of flower beds. To be sure, Offerbeake’s was one of the grander plots in the United Provinces, but other wealthy
men followed his example as best they could. Such gardens were regarded less as places of relaxation than as means of displaying the proprietor’s collection of plants.