Tulipomania

by Mike Dash

  The reasons why the growers of Amsterdam declined to ratify this agreement are not known, but it is quite conceivable that they were shocked by the sheer scale of the surrender that their fellow growers were proposing. After all, the bulb farmers had every right, in the eyes of the law, to pursue claims to full payment for their produce. Only sheer pragmatism, the knowledge that it would be a sheer waste of time to pursue hundreds of insolvent debtors through the courts, can have persuaded the majority to voluntarily sign away their right to what must, in many cases, have been thousands of guilders. Ten percent—by which they meant one-tenth of the original sale price, not the final value of the tulips when the mania reached its peak—must have been all most bulb farmers believed they had a chance of recovering from the disaster.

  The growers’ problem was that even this modest demand for part payment lacked the force of law. They could ask their customers to consider the compromise, but they could not require them to accept it. And since most florists could not hope to find enough money to cover even one-tenth of their liabilities unless they were paid for the bulbs they in turn had sold to others, there was little prospect of many of them coming to terms with the growers unless they had to. “When my buyer pays me, I will pay you,” Gaergoedt assures a creditor in the Samenspraecken. Then he adds an ominous caveat: “But he is nowhere to be found.”

  It was thus evident that the bulb trade’s troubles could not be resolved by the bulb trade alone. Some higher authority would have to rule on who owned the thousands of tulips bought and sold before February 1637—and more importantly, who should pay for them. Whatever compromise was finally proposed, moreover, would need to have the force of law.

  The mania had become a problem for the courts. But while the tulip’s case was being heard, the critics of the flower were going to have their say.

  CHAPTER 14

  Goddess of Whores

  No one in the United Provinces loved tulips more than Claes Pietersz. of Amsterdam, who was probably the most fashionable physician in the whole of the republic. Other men might grow the flower, trade it, and even make their fortunes from it. Pietersz. changed his name because of it. He became, quite literally, Dr. Tulip.

  Claes Pietersz. began styling himself Nicolaes Tulp (the Dutch word for the flower) in 1621, when tulips were just coming into vogue among the wealthiest and most discerning members of the regent class. He used the flower as a personal emblem too. When he was elected an alderman of Amsterdam in 1622 and had to choose a coat of arms, Tulp had his shield adorned with a delicate, scarlet-flamed Rosen tulip. His alderman’s seal stamped a red wax flower on the hundreds of official documents to which he gave his approval. And when he returned home after a long day in the service of the city, it was to a painting of the tulip—one of the finest of the fabulous Admiraels, it was said—that adorned a signboard swinging to and fro over the front door of his fashionable house on the Prinsengracht.

  In time, young Dr. Tulp (he was in his late twenties when he changed his name) rose to a position of great eminence. He became a friend of Rembrandt’s and was the subject of one of the painter’s most celebrated canvases, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, which shows him as a distinguished surgeon busily dissecting the body of a recently executed criminal. Contemporaries knew Tulp as a botanist, a vigorous promoter of the medicinal benefits of tea—which he prescribed as an antidote to lassitude and cramps—and a successful politician who was four times burgomaster of Amsterdam. He was also a notoriously stern Calvinist, whose principled disdain for the intoxicated revels that were traditional at even the loftiest of Dutch weddings led him to sponsor a piece of legislation for which he is still occasionally remembered today: Amsterdam’s “sumptuary law” of 1655, which made it an offense for wedding feasts to involve more than fifty guests or last longer than two days.

  It is hardly surprising, then, that Dr. Tulp instinctively hated the drunken excesses of the tavern colleges. In private he remained a connoisseur until the end of his long life; indeed in 1652, on the occasion of his retirement from the surgeons’ guild, he presented a silver beaker in the shape of a tulip, with a lizard climbing its stem, to his old colleagues and asked that in the future it be used to propose the final toast at the guild’s numberless banquets. But in public, after 1637, Nicolaes Tulp preferred not to be associated with the famous flower with which he shared his name. The sign outside the house in the Prinsengracht came down, the coat of arms was less prominently displayed. Dr. Tulip felt ashamed of the excesses of the tulip mania.

  There were many who shared Tulp’s sentiments. Adolphus Vorstius, the professor who occupied Clusius’s old chair of botany at the University of Leiden and lectured twice each week in the hortus there on the properties of its plants and herbs, came to despise the vulgarity of the traders and their hysteria for bulbs and took to destroying every tulip he came across, hacking away at the flowers with a staff. Even outsiders who had taken no part in the mania themselves often shared the connoisseurs’ low opinions of the florists. During the final stages of the bulb craze, many ordinary people began to refer derisively to the members of the tavern colleges as “kappists.” This was a considerable affront; for the Dutchmen of the Golden Age, the name summoned up the image of a fool clad in a jester’s cap.

  Not all the critics of the tulip mania confined themselves to jokes and insults. Some, particularly the more religious members of Dutch society, took an altogether sterner view, accusing bulb dealers of casting aside the Christian principles of charity and moderation. Even before the final collapse of the market for tulips, a number of the most vociferous opponents of the mania had gone into print with their criticisms of the bulb trade. Their medium was the pamphlet, and beginning in the final months of 1636, presses throughout Holland poured forth a flood of broadsides on the subject of the flower craze.

  Most of these productions were ribald satires. With few exceptions their central character was the Roman goddess Flora, who had always been the most licentious of deities. According to her myth, Flora had been a notorious courtesan in the earliest days of Rome, who left so much of her immoral earnings to the city when she died that the grateful Romans deified her. She became both the goddess of flowers and the protector of prostitutes, and Dutch pamphleteers delighted in nothing more than drawing obvious parallels between the Roman whore and the valuable tulips that had been passed from hand to hand so rapidly at the very height of the mania. Flora, they reminded their readers, had made a practice of selling herself to the highest bidder, and her price had risen constantly until it was so steep no man could afford to keep her to himself for long. Though each of her lovers was richer and more generous than the last, she ruined them all with her demands for ever more lavish proofs of their devotion. Even after she ascended to the Latin pantheon and married the west wind, Zephyr, Flora had proved incapable of mending her ways. Before long she cuckolded her new husband by dallying with Hercules.

  Faithless companion, grasping mistress: perfect metaphor. In the eyes of the pamphleteers, Holland’s bulb traders were just the latest in a long line of men who had abandoned themselves to the goddess of whores, only to be betrayed by her. Many of their publications alluded to the florists’ dire financial straits and bore titles such as Flora’s Sick-bed or the somewhat more explicit The Fall of the Great Garden-Whore, the Villain-Goddess Flora. Others contained the fictional complaints of traders who had found themselves in thrall to a false and pagan idol. In one broadside a weaver speaks angrily of how Flora seduced him. In another, revealingly titled Charge Against the Pagan and Turkish Tulip-Bulbs, Flora and the other earth-spirits decree that the tulip and all other herbs and plants should return to their original places in the scheme of creation, lest plagues of vermin and foul weather be let loose on the land. The overall tone is one of bitter antagonism toward a goddess who had promised everything, yet left those foolish enough to trust her with less than nothing.

  At the same time that pamphleteers were pouring forth a torrent of sarcastic ver
se, the first of several memorable works of art, each rich in the details of the tulip trade, appeared, revealing more about the sort of ridicule the ruined florists must have endured after the crash. It was a painting by Pieter Nolpe (which was later turned into a copper engraving by an artist named Cornelis Danckerts) ponderously entitled Flora’s Fool’s Cap, or Scenes from the Remarkable Year 1637 when one Fool hatched another, the Idle Rich lost their wealth and the Wise lost their senses. Nolpe’s work shows bulb dealers gathering in a drinking house called At the Sign of the Foolish Bulbs, which is actually a gigantic jester’s cap. The sign outside the inn shows two men fighting. In the foreground men carrying baskets and pushing wheelbarrows full of bulbs are on their way to dump the now-worthless tulips upon a dungheap; three gardeners stand and watch, while just behind them Beelzebub, armed with a fishing rod, casts about for worthless tulip contracts. In his right hand the devil holds an hourglass that indicates that the sands of time have quite run out for the tulip trade. In the background of the picture stands a derelict house, and the goddess Flora can be seen riding past on a donkey, gesturing at the members of an angry crowd to keep their distance. She is, the text below the picture explains, being driven off “for her whorish immorality.”

  Similarly pointed attacks on the excesses of the bulb trade continued to appear for years afterward, so this artistic evidence supports the contention that the mania had a considerable impact—even on those who had taken no active part in it. In 1640 Chrispijn van de Passe (the same van de Passe whose Hortus Floridas had helped to establish the fashion for tulips more than twenty years earlier) engraved a famous illustration entitled “Floraes Mallewagen” (“Flora’s Fools’ Chariot”). This picture shows the goddess, drawn as a young girl in blooming health and a low-cut dress, riding a luxuriously appointed sand-yacht packed with carousing kappists dressed in jester’s caps. These allegorical figures bear labels such as “Vain hope,” “Tippler,” and “Hoard it all.” The sand-yacht itself is drawn tearing across the beach outside Haarlem and is adorned with the signs that hung outside some of the local taverns involved in the mania—the White Doublet, the Little Hen, and four or five others. An ape climbs the mast and defecates over the florists below. Flora, who is seated in state in the stern of the vessel, carries a bunch of the most sought-after tulips: Generael Bol, Admirael van Hoorn, and (of course) Semper Augustus in one hand; others, including a Gouda and a precious Viceroy, wait on the sand to be crushed beneath the sandyacht’s wheels. The contraption is heading straight for the sea, but a crowd of would-be tulip dealers run behind the yacht, desperate to join it on its short rush to destruction. They are weavers, and in their haste they are trampling underfoot all the tools of their old profession. In the four corners of his engraving, van de Passe placed small insets. One shows the bulb grower Henrik Pottebacker’s famous garden at Gouda, the others tavern-trading scenes in Haarlem and Hoorn. The central feature of his piece, the fast-moving sand-yacht, is itself a powerful metaphor for the fatal wind trade.

  In the same year that van de Passe engraved his fools’ chariot, Jan Breughel the Younger painted an ambitious work titled Allegory upon the Tulip Mania. Breughel was the most influential painter of flowers to emerge during the Golden Age. Although some modern critics find his style a little stiff, his flower paintings are always vivid and enlivened by the inclusion of small details, such as insects crawling upon the leaves. Certainly the Allegory is an exceptionally lively piece, as packed with incident as any cartoon by George Cruikshank or James Gillray. Two dozen simian florists are portrayed indulging in all the rituals of the bulb trade. One points at some flowering tulips; another holds up a flower in one paw and a bag of money in the other. Behind them a group of monkeys fight over who should pay for the now-worthless bulbs, and one speculator is carried to an early grave. On the right-hand side of the picture a pair of apes share one of the florists’ traditional banquets while another is hauled before a magistrate for defaulting on his debts. In one corner a particularly disgruntled monkey urinates on a flower bed full of tulip bulbs.

  These scabrous satires undoubtedly had a considerable impact. Even a hundred years later the tulip mania remained a raw and vivid scar upon the national psyche of the Dutch, and thanks in good measure to the pamphleteers and painters of the Golden Age, the very idea that bulbs could ever have been traded for colossal sums strikes many as perfectly ridiculous today. Nevertheless, the pamphlets of the mania, at least, are important not so much for what they were—ephemeral single sheets, often enough, which were illustrated with one shoddy woodcut, quickly and cheaply printed on low-quality pulp, and peddled by hawkers for a few stuivers apiece—as for the reasons they were produced. A few had been written simply to entertain; in the Dutch Republic, where literacy rates were high, pamphlets were a useful and profitable sideline for men such as Adriaen Roman, the official government printer of Haarlem. Roman, who published the three dialogues between Waermondt and Gaergoedt, could hope to sell perhaps 1,000 or 1,250 copies of a typical broadside, and bestsellers such as the Samenspraecken, which were reprinted on several occasions, could reach as many as fifteen thousand people. The majority, though, were produced specifically to influence public opinion.

  Pamphlets of the latter sort were typically funded by wealthy men who lacked the literary skills to pen something of their own. Instead they paid hack writers to put their views into verse and printers to publish and distribute the results. The actual authors of these works—men such as Stephen van der Lust, a professional playwright from Haarlem who churned out four pamphlets on the mania, and Jan Soet, a satirist with a vicious pen who wrote two—were often impoverished writers who wrote in rhyme or dialogue in order to appeal to the common man. Their words were meant to be read aloud to audiences gathered in taverns and other meeting places. Their shadowy patrons, on the other hand, were generally regents and patricians who had their own very specific agendas.

  A smaller number of pamphlets, on the other hand, seem to have been designed to drum up support for the old growers and connoisseurs, who had been just as horrified by the mania as the sternest critics of the bulb craze. These broadsides, which bore tellingly defensive titles such as A new song about the connoisseurs who don’t go to the tavern and because of that wish to be distinguished from the florists, attempted to show that true tulip lovers bore no responsibility for the mania and were still deserving of respect. On the whole, though, their arguments must have sounded hollow to those who looked on the whole bulb trade with horror and distaste. It was the harder-hitting and more vitriolic broadsides that were the better sellers.

  While the writers and artists of the United Provinces poured scorn on those who had lost everything they owned to tulip mania, the authorities of the republic were slowly coming to terms with the problem of averting the financial catastrophe threatened by the collapse of the bulb trade.

  The first difficulty was deciding who should resolve the thousands of outstanding tulip contracts. The only certainty was that the vast majority of these agreements would have to be nullified; in almost every case the would-be buyers no longer had the desire or, more importantly, the money to fulfill them. But whether the bulb contracts should be canceled on the terms proposed by the growers—10 percent of the agreed selling price—or those favored by the florists (who hoped to pay nothing) was another matter altogether.

  In normal circumstances it would have fallen to the regents of each of the towns caught up in the mania to decide which proposal to accept, or to substitute a solution of their own. But so far as the governors of these cities were concerned, the mania had the makings of a particularly tricky problem, and their response was far from resolute.

  In Haarlem, the town we know most about, the city council approved three separate resolutions in the space of little more than a month, proposing that disputes between florists be resolved in three different ways. The regents’ first decree, issued on March 7, annulled every transaction that had taken place within the jurisdiction of the c
ity since the previous October, without apparently making provision for the payment of any sort of compensation to the sellers. Less than five weeks later, in a second resolution that effectively reversed the first, the city fathers ruled instead that “those persons who have bought tulips in eating-houses will be obliged to pay for their transactions.” (The councilors did not explain how thousands of nominally bankrupt florists would find the money to comply.) Then, within a week of publishing that decree, Haarlem’s regents changed their minds for a third time. On this occasion, instead of proposing yet another solution, they resolved to wash their hands of the matter. They referred the whole problem to their immediate superiors, the members of the provincial parliament, the States of Holland, sitting at The Hague, petitioning the States for a ruling and suggesting that it adopt the compromise originally suggested by the growers at their meeting of February 23.

  Such indecision was quite uncharacteristic of the sober governors of Haarlem, and in all likelihood the changes in the city’s policy were the product of vociferous lobbying by the various interested parties: growers demanding the right to seek full payment, florists begging for relief. The subject must have been endlessly debated throughout the spring of 1637, with the councilors repeatedly harangued by tulip dealers anxious to press their own solutions to the problem. The frustration that they felt is illustrated by a resolution of March 17 that banned both the printing and the sale of inflammatory pamphlets on the mania and ordered the booksellers and printers of the city to surrender their stocks of the offending broadsides to be burned. The regents’ willingness to hand the matter over to a higher authority suggests they recognized the impossibility of conjuring a compromise acceptable to all.