Tulipomania (25 page)

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 city 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.

Similar protests probably occurred elsewhere, and other Dutch cities joined Haarlem in petitioning the States of Holland to find a solution that minimized the losses to both growers and florists. By the middle of March the burgomasters of Hoorn were asking their representatives in The Hague to do what they could to speed the decision-making process. But the States, like the cities, soon realized that the tulip mania was a unique problem and one that required careful
consideration. Its members had little information on which to base a solution; judging from the example of Haarlem, where only two of the fifty-four regents who governed the city in 1636–37 had any involvement in the mania, few would have participated in the bulb trade themselves, and the scant summaries of events that some cities appear to have forwarded to The Hague cannot have provided sufficient detail. The States called for further information, and while it waited, it turned its attention back to other matters.

For more than a month, then, from the middle of March to the end of April, everyone caught up in the mania—growers and florists—endured an agony of anticipation. Tulips that had been worth fortunes only a few weeks earlier were in flower throughout the United Provinces, but while they brightened the damp Dutch spring, hundreds of florists were consumed with the fear that they would be forced into bankruptcy, and thousands of agreements, worth millions of guilders, remained unsettled.

For those who had actually participated in the mania, the most pressing concern was to survive the impending financial catastrophe. But they also wanted to understand why the market had crashed. Of course, few admitted, even to themselves, that they bore responsibility for their plight. They preferred to see themselves as victims, and like victims everywhere they found explanations that exonerated them from blame.

Many came to believe that the bulb craze had been some sort of fraud. At one extreme were those who simply thought they had been cheated by their fellow florists or perhaps by the auctioneer at their college. At the other stood a smaller group of people who convinced themselves that the tulip trade was itself a conspiracy. One anonymous author suggested that the market had been created and controlled by a shadowy cabal of twenty or thirty of the richest growers and dealers, who had deliberately manipulated prices to their own
advantage. How such a group could possibly have hoped to coordinate their activities across the dozen towns infected by the mania was not explained.

Blame for the mania was also placed elsewhere. The same writer who had hinted at the existence of a cabal also suggested that some of the worst excesses of the tulip trade were the result of the manipulations of bankrupts, Jews, and Mennonites, three groups that stood apart from the rest of society and thus made convenient scapegoats. Bankrupts, after all, had failed to adhere to the sacred Dutch principle of living within one’s means, been forced to account for their transgressions, and might well be looking for revenge. Jews, though considerably better treated in the United Provinces than in Germany or France, were nevertheless closely connected in the popular imagination with money lending and other forms of profiteering, and they had long been prohibited from mixing too freely with the rest of the population; the men were actively discouraged from conversing with Dutch women, and it was illegal for them to hire Christian servants. Mennonites, too, were outsiders. They were an Anabaptist sect easily distinguishable by their dress (they clothed themselves entirely in black, favoring long jackets and baggy breeches). In addition to opposing infant baptism—something the orthodox Dutch regarded as both a moral obligation and an absolute necessity at a time when child mortality was still extremely high—Mennonites were pacifists who steadfastly refused to bear arms. This made them unpopular at a time when the United Provinces was still at war with Spain.

None of these accusations stand up to scrutiny; indeed, there is no real evidence that any group—other than perhaps the tulip growers themselves—had promoted the bulb craze to further their own ends. It is true that some Mennonites had involved themselves in the mania; one, Jacques de Clerq, a merchant who traded with the Baltic and Brazil, was buying and selling tulips for as much as four hundred
guilders a bulb as early as the winter of 1635. But many other members of the sect were highly critical of the tulip trade and urged those who dealt in bulbs to cease. Similarly, there were actually very few Jews in the United Provinces, and the only one known for certain to have been heavily involved in the tulip trade—the renowned Portuguese grower Francisco da Costa—appears to have been a man of unblemished reputation. As for bankrupts, even if a few had managed to squirrel a little money away from their creditors, none of the records of the time suggest that a single one played any part in the mania.

Probably only a minority of florists believed in such conspiracy theories. But a number do appear to have suspected that individual dealers had forced prices up artificially in order to maximize their profits. Price fixing was popularly supposed to be accomplished by age-old means of fake auctions. These affairs were supposedly organized by cunning traders who opened the proceedings by “selling” bulbs for record prices to their own accomplices in order to stimulate excitement and persuade others to buy at inflated rates.

A number of florists laid the blame for the mania at the feet of the growers. Some were accused of stoking up interest in tulips by selling bulbs with a guarantee that they would buy them back next year for more than they had cost. Others, it was claimed, passed off worthless
vodderij
as valuable bulbs. A grower from Amsterdam who was suspected of this sort of fraud is said to have tampered with the bulbs he sold, running them through with needles so as to damage them so badly they would not flower and reveal his deception. The man was eventually caught when one disgruntled purchaser made a close inspection of his tulips and discovered tiny puncture marks on the surface of the bulb.

It is perfectly possible that methods of this sort were indeed practiced upon occasion, but surely not so cynically and so regularly as to have a significant effect on bulb prices. In truth there was no need to concoct elaborate conspiracy theories to account for the excesses of
the bulb craze. The greed, inexperience, and shortsightedness of the florists themselves were all that was required to turn tulip trading into tulip mania.

It was the last week of April before the Court of Holland finally concluded its review of the tulip mania. Eight weeks had passed since the growers had met at Amsterdam to propose their own solution to the crisis, three months since the collapse of the flower trade throughout the province. Yet when the learned judges of the Court returned their findings to the States, they began by admitting that they still did not fully understand what had caused the bulb craze or why things had gotten so badly out of hand.

The Court of Holland was, however, certain of one thing: It wanted as little as possible to do with the tangled and intractable wrangles thrown up by the mania. Instead, it recommended that disputes between buyers and sellers, florists and growers should be referred back to the towns to be dealt with locally wherever possible. The Court suggested that city magistrates should begin by gathering detailed information about the flower trade. Only when they had a better understanding of what had happened in their towns should they hear disputes, and while the necessary data was collected, all contracts for the purchase of bulbs should be temporarily suspended. If, in the event, there were cases that could not be dealt with at a local level, they might still be referred to The Hague; but this, it was implied, was a remote contingency. The Court’s verdict was clear: The cities should solve their problems on their own.

Presented at last with some definite suggestions, the States of Holland wasted little time in acting on them. On April 27, only two days after the Court presented its proposals, the representatives at The Hague agreed on a resolution that incorporated all the main recommendations and made them binding on the cities of the province.
A letter explaining the resolution was sent by fast messenger to all the towns of Holland. Thus, by April 28, the burgomasters of each of the cities affected by the mania finally received instructions as to how to deal with the hundreds of disputes still awaiting resolution.

The key point was the Court of Holland’s suggestion that all contracts for the sale of bulbs be suspended while the mania was thoroughly investigated. As originally proposed, this recommendation was plainly intended as a temporary measure; indeed the Court acknowledged that, once they were properly informed, local magistrates might decide that the contracts signed in the colleges could be enforced. In that event, it noted, disgruntled sellers should be permitted to pursue defaulting customers for payment. Yet as it turned out, the towns involved in the bulb craze never did compile detailed information on the tulip craze as the Court requested, and no further action was ever taken at The Hague. What had been intended as an interim measure became the basis for the liquidation of the mania.