by Mike Dash
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 dispute
s 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.
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:
Four pounds of Switsers 6,000 guilders
2,000 aces of Maxen 400 guilders
1,000 aces of Porsmaeckers 250 guilders
6,650 guilders
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 compos
e 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.