Tulipomania (26 page)

This was very good news for the florists. Most cities implemented the States of Holland’s resolution by ordering their solicitors and magistrates to have nothing more to do with the mania. In Haarlem, for example, the regents who governed the town ordered that attorneys and notaries should cease to issue writs on behalf of tulip traders, and the messengers who normally served protests and summonses were instructed not to handle any that related to the bulb craze. Similar orders were issued in Gouda and the three West Friesan towns of Enkhuizen, Medemblik, and Hoorn.

The florists of these cities who believed they had no option but to default on their obligations could now do so without fear of retribution, and hundreds of poor artisans who had more than half-expected they would be forced into bankruptcy took full advantage of this fantastic piece of good fortune. A handful of those caught up in the mania were rich and honorable enough to meet their obligations, it is true, including the Alkmaar man who had bought seven thousand
guilders’ worth of bulbs from Henricus Munting and now exercised his right to pay just seven hundred guilders to cancel the contract and return the tulips to their original owner. But as the Haarlem lawyer Adriaen van Bosvelt cynically observed, honest florists were hard to find. Throughout Holland, van Bosvelt wrote, “a great number of persons [are] unwilling to pay or come to a compromise.” Even those who did offer to settle at least part of their debts did not come close to parting with the 10 percent the growers wanted. The handful who did pay a little offered no more than “one, two, three, four, yes, even five, which was the utmost, out of a hundred.”

The blanket ban on tulip cases quickly had the desired effect. Growers and florists were forced to settle their disagreements among themselves, and the regents ceased to be bothered by the fallout from the mania. But even now it was a long time before the last dispute was settled. We know that in Haarlem the process of liquidation dragged on through 1637 and for the whole of 1638, not least because some tulip traders proved more reluctant to settle their differences than the States of Holland hoped. It was probably the same in other cities.

Many of those caught up in the mania did seek their own solutions, as the regents had hoped. A large number of agreements were canceled with the consent, if not the approval, of all the parties concerned; in Alkmaar, in fact, all tulip contracts appear to have been nullified in this way. The growers did what they could to recover their losses by putting thousands of bulbs that had never been collected up for sale. (Not surprisingly, few people were still interested in buying them, but a handful of the rarer tulips did eventually sell to connoisseurs for decent sums.) The unfortunate Haarlem dyer Jacob de Block, who had been required to honor his guarantee to Geertruyt Schoudt, took his pound of unsalable Switsers off to Amsterdam in the hope of disposing of the bulbs there.

Some, though, were determined to fight for their lost fortunes. The most fortunate were those who had bought and sold bulbs in the
colleges of Amsterdam, which—apparently alone among the towns caught up in the mania—still allowed tulip cases to be brought before its courts, and within a few weeks a few of the growers of the city began to take advantage of this dispensation to sue their former customers.

One of the most active litigants was Abraham de Goyer, the scion of an old regent family and a grower who kept at least two gardens: one on the Cingel, just outside Amsterdam’s Regulierspoort, and the other on the Walepadt, by the city walls. On June 10 he demanded 950 guilders from one Abraham Wachtendonck for the four bulbs of Laeten Bleyenburch and the pound of Oudenaers that Wachtendonck had purchased the previous autumn. The next day de Goyer began an action against Liebert van Acxel, who had agreed on October 1 to buy the offsets of a De Beste Juri and a Bruyn Purper for eleven hundred guilders and a Purper en Wit van Quaeckel (one of old Jan Quaeckel’s Violetten creations) for 750 guilders. In order to bolster his case, the grower asked a notary named B. J. Verbeeck to accompany him to his garden on the Walepadt, where the two men lifted all the bulbs and confirmed that the Purper en Wit van Quaeckel and the Bruyn Purper had developed two offsets apiece. De Goyer seems to have expected trouble with yet another of his other customers, since he also asked Verbeeck to confirm that he had lifted an Admirael Liefkens with one offset that he had been growing in the garden of a man named Willem Willemsz.

A few other growers with business in Amsterdam also took the opportunity to assert their rights. Hans Baert of Haarlem sought 140 guilders for the two thousand aces of Groote Gepumaseerde he had sold to Hendrick van Bergom of Amsterdam. Jan Admirael, who had gone to such lengths to persuade Paulus de Hooge to buy his bulbs, changed his tune when de Hooge failed to pay the money he owed and sought the advice of his lawyer, and Willem Schonaeus of Haarlem
demanded nearly six thousand guilders from François Koster, the balance of the sum the hapless Koster owed on a substantial quantity of
vodderij
and a handful of piece goods he had ordered on February 3:

Nor did every florist accept the ban on tulip cases in cities such as Haarlem. A handful found pretexts for bringing their disputes to court in different guises. One such case got under way in November 1637: Having waited until the last possible moment before his bulbs had to be replanted in the vain hope of receiving his money, a local grower named Pieter Caluwaert knocked on the door of the merchant Jacques de Clerq and attempted to hand over the pound of Witte Croonen, two pounds of Switsers, five Oudenaers, and three Maxen that he had agreed to purchase nearly a year earlier. When de Clerq declined to accept the flowers, Caluwaert began proceedings against him, presumably on the grounds that he had refused to accept a delivery.

All in all, though, only a tiny minority of tulip cases ever found their way to court, even in Amsterdam. The reason was simple: Few of the florists possessed enough money to be worth suing. De Goyer, Admirael, and Baert sought payment from wealthy customers who possessed the means to pay their bills. The great majority of the florists who had been caught up in the mania were not so well off, though, and there would have been little point in dragging them through the courts.

Even so, there were still many who refused to tear up their tulip contracts and accept their losses. At the end of January 1638, a full
year after the crash, hundreds of cases remained to be resolved. These disputes were proving highly disruptive; they soured relations between people who had once been colleagues or friends and were a constant and embarrassing reminder of the excesses of the mania. There seemed little prospect, moreover, that they would ever be resolved unless the local authorities took some further action.

On January 30, therefore, the governors of Haarlem set up an arbitration committee to consider the remaining tulip cases. Panels of this sort already existed throughout the United Provinces; the arbitrators were commonly called “friend makers,” and as Sir William Brereton discovered on his tour through Holland in 1634, they could be found in most Dutch cities and were specially chosen for their integrity and common sense. The friend makers, Brereton discovered, “had authority to call any man before them that hath any suit or controversy; they are to mediate in a friendly manner, in a way of arbitration, and are to compose and conclude differences.” They had the additional advantage that, unlike the traditional courts, they offered their services for free.

Some of the records of a similar arbitration court in Amsterdam have survived to indicate the sort of verdicts that the friend makers handed down. In one case, contested between Jan Admirael and Wilhelmus Tyberius, the rector of the Latin School at Alkmaar, the arbitrators ordered Admirael to pay Tyberius 375 guilders to settle their differences. The terms of the arbitration, though, were fairly generous; the Amsterdam grower was given ten months to come up with the money and mildly requested to let that be an end to the matter.

At first the burgomasters of Haarlem granted their friend makers only limited powers to resolve the outstanding tulip cases. The new panel, which had five members, sat at least twice each week and could subpoena witnesses who were reluctant to appear before it. But its decisions were not binding, and many warring florists proved reluctant to accept the compromises it recommended. From the surviving
evidence it appears that little progress was made in working through the backlog of disputes in Haarlem.

It was only in May 1638 that the regents of the city finally took the matter properly in hand and issued—for the first time since the abortive growers’ meeting almost eighteen months earlier—definite guidelines for resolving all outstanding disputes. Buyers who wished to free themselves of their obligations, the city council ruled, could cancel their contracts by paying 3.5 percent of the original sale price. Ownership of the bulbs would then revert to the growers. This was the most affordable and workable compromise yet suggested, and the council backed it up by ruling that the friend makers’ verdicts should henceforth be binding in all cases.

The compromise meant that even florists with debts running to thousands of guilders could clear their obligations by paying a hundred guilders or less, a sum that even the poorest could pay off in installments. And while inherently unfair to the growers, it did guarantee them a minimal payment that in all likelihood covered their costs and left them little worse off than they had been before the mania erupted.

The tulip mania thus ended, as the Court of Holland had wished, not in a flurry of expensive legal actions but in grudging compromise. In the end it had been a craze of the poor and the ambitious that—contrary to popular belief—had virtually no impact on the Dutch economy. No general recession followed in its wake, and the vast majority of florists emerged from the liquidation shaken and chastened but little better or worse off than they had been before the mania began. Their paper profits and their paper losses effectively canceled each other out, and even the richest florists were never formally punished for defaulting on their obligations.

Indeed, by far the most striking thing about the handful of cases that did find their way into the hands of the lawyers of the province was that there were no celebrated trials, no verdicts, and no records of
any convictions. The growers and their customers invariably settled their differences out of court. Even in Amsterdam the liquidation of the mania was not a legal matter but a process of compromise and reconciliation agreed by the florists themselves.

The last known case resulting from the bulb craze was heard in Haarlem on January 24, 1639. A grower named Bruyn den Dubbleden demanded 2,100 guilders from his customer Jan Korver, of Alkmaar, payment for a pound of Gheele Croonen at 800 guilders and two pounds of Switsers worth 1,300. No verdict is recorded. Presumably this means that den Dubbleden, like other growers, was compelled to settle at 3.5 percent, and that a contract that had been worth seven years’ wages to a Haarlem artisan only a couple of years earlier was canceled for a payment of 73 guilders 10 stuivers.

Even now a tiny minority of cases remained unsettled for reasons that have been lost to history. The hapless artist Jan van Goyen was one of the unfortunate few who continued to suffer for dabbling in the bulb trade. For the rest of his life burgomaster van Ravensteyn pursued his former customer relentlessly for the whole of the money he was owed. Van Goyen handed over one of the pictures he had promised, but he had invested almost all his available capital in tulips, and with the crash in prices he no longer had any prospect of repaying his debts. Having produced little art in the three years he had devoted to speculating in the property and bulb markets, the painter was forced to return to his easel to feed his family.

The simple pressure of earning a living for his family made it impossible for van Goyen to pay off all his debts to van Ravensteyn, and when the burgomaster died in 1641, he still had not received most of his money. Even then the artist received no respite; van Raven-steyn’s heirs continued to demand payment. The pressure on van Goyen proved so unremitting that his precarious finances collapsed into disorder, and he was forced to organize public auctions of his work on at least two occasions when he needed money in a hurry.

Jan van Goyen lived on until 1656, two decades after the collapse of the bulb craze that had ruined him, and he was still insolvent when he died. He left a substantial body of brilliant landscapes, many of which would probably never have been painted had he made his fortune in the tulip trade, and a debt that still totaled 897 guilders.

He was the last known victim of the tulip mania.

T
he final liquidation of the Dutch mania at the beginning of 1639 left many Hollanders with a distinct aversion to tulips. The episode did not entirely put off the wealthiest collectors of the rarest bulbs; they had never really been involved in the tavern trade in any case and could thus afford to ignore the ridicule that the pamphleteers heaped on those who had found themselves caught up in the frenzy. These few continued to pay high prices for individual bulbs for another hundred years. But interest in tulips otherwise fell away in the United Provinces, now that there was no possibility of making a quick fortune from the flower.

Yet the world had not seen the last of tulip mania. Like bubonic plague, it was a strange and complex disease that could rage for a while and then seem to disappear when—like plague—it was really only lying dormant. And like plague, it could reappear miles away and decades later, as virulent as ever.

Thus it was in the Ottoman Empire. During the first half of the seventeenth century the tulip lost some of its luster for the Turks. The decline set in around 1595 with the accession of a womanizing sultan, Mehmed III, who was less interested in flowers than in seducing two or preferably three of the ladies of the harem each night. The rulers who followed in Mehmed’s wake—from the fantastically misogynist Mustafa I, who ended his reign locked, as a sort of punishment, in a dungeon with only two naked female slaves for company, to the unfortunate Osman II, who suffered an agonizing death “by constriction of the testicles” at the hands of his own soldiers—were on the whole either short-lived inadequates or butchers. At best they displayed only sporadic interest in the gardens of the Abode of Bliss.