Tulipomania Read online

  Unfortunately for Clusius, some at least of those who implored him for bulbs would not take no for an answer. Just as he had been in Vienna, he began to be plagued by repeated thefts from his garden. Twice during the summer of 1596 and again in the spring of 1598, thieves stole tulip bulbs from him while he was away. The total loss must have been substantial, because we know from Clusius’s surviving letters that more than a hundred bulbs were taken in just one of these raids. The old man was so distressed by the loss—and by the familiar disinterest that the authorities at Leiden showed in investigating the thefts—that he vowed to give up gardening altogether and disperse the rest of his collection among his friends.

  Over the years Clusius’s reputation has suffered from the suggestion made by one contemporary chronicler that these thefts occurred because he asked an exorbitant price for his flowers and stubbornly refused to hand over bulbs to anyone who would not meet it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout his long career the botanist showed great generosity in sending samples of his finds to friends for nothing—“con amore,” as he sometimes put it in his letters—and the only people he refused to supply were those he suspected would not value his gifts. The people who organized the theft of his bulbs at Leiden fell into the latter category, and Clusius was surely right to suspect their motives from the start.

  Nevertheless, the thefts did have one positive result. Clusius’s tulips were far from the only ones in the United Provinces in the 1590s, but his collection was certainly the most varied and the best. As a result of the thefts these precious bulbs were distributed throughout the Netherlands, north and south, and they flourished. In some of their new homes, at least, they must have become parents of new hybrids, varieties that in their turn bred and formed an important part of the stock of bulbs traded in the next century. The Leiden bulbs thus became the progenitors of the flowers traded later in the century, and thanks in part to them, in the words of a chronicler, “the seventeen provinces were amply stocked.”

  *Surnames were still relatively uncommon in the United Provinces in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Most people still identified themselves using patronymics—Walich Ziwertsz. would have been the son of one Ziwert or Sievert. Because it was unwieldy to spell out the full patronymic, which in this case would be Ziwertszoon (“Ziwert’s son”), it was also common practice to abbreviate written names by placing a period after the z of “son.” When spoken, the name would have been pronounced in full.

  CHAPTER 7

  An Adornment to the Cleavage

  The spectacular colors and endless variations of the tulip marked it from its first discovery as an exceptional flower. There was general agreement on this point, not only between Turks and Dutchmen but also among botanists of every nationality, and by 1600 it had been widely acclaimed throughout Europe. The tulip, the French horticulturalist Monstereul wrote a little later, was supreme among flowers in the same way that humans were lords of the animals, diamonds eclipsed all other precious stones, and the sun ruled the stars. That judgment, to a seventeenth-century mind, said something important about the tulip. If humans were God’s chosen creatures, then the tulip was surely God’s chosen flower.

  The popularity of the new flower was such that garden lovers soon began to strive to outdo each other by producing ever more dazzling and brilliantly colored varieties. Thanks in part to the work of Clusius and his circle of correspondents, a good number of different hybrids were now available; to the tulips of the Netherlands and the dozens of varieties produced by James Garret in England must be added the forty-one French cultivars cataloged by the botanist Mathias Lobelius and uncounted others elsewhere; certainly many more than one hundred in 1600, and one thousand (of which at least five hundred were Dutch) by the 1630s. The latter total compares remarkably favorably to the 2,500 or so species produced by the mid-eighteenth century and the 5,000 cultivars recognized today.

  Nevertheless, the number of bulbs available at the turn of the century remained somewhat limited. Most of the new varieties had so far produced only a handful of tulips, and largely for this reason, the flower remained the passion of the privileged few. It was grown principally by rich connoisseurs, who valued it for its beauty and the intensity of its colors. These men traded prized flowers among themselves, but because they were, almost without exception, wealthy in their own right, they only rarely cared to make substantial profits from these exchanges.

  By the end of the sixteenth century small groups of tulip connoisseurs existed throughout Europe. They could be found in the city-states of northern Italy, in England, and in the empire. But thanks largely to the early introduction of the tulip to the southern Netherlands, the largest concentration of enthusiasts were to be found in the Low Countries among the members of the Flemish nobility and gentry. Many of these connoisseurs had obtained their first bulbs from Carolus Clusius and his companions. Clusius’s colleague Lobelius published a list of them in 1581; they included Marie de Brimeu and her husband the duke of Aerschot, who had a fine garden at their home in The Hague; Joris Rye of Mechelen, and Clusius’s lifelong friend Jean de Brancion.

  From the Netherlands the tulip soon spread south to France, where the soil of Picardy was well suited to the cultivation of bulbs. Around 1610 there was a craze for flowers in Paris, and fashionable nobles began competing with each other to present the ladies of the French court with the rarest and most spectacular specimens they could find. When the idea first caught on, most of the blooms exchanged in this way were roses, which had been, for several centuries, by far the most popular garden flowers. But the nobles of the French court found in the tulip something capable of surpassing the reigning empress of the garden. The subtle elegance of the flower—not to mention its novelty and rarity—quickly established it as the new favorite of the court. The fashion for tulips seems to have raged at least until the wedding of the young king Louis XIII in 1615, where aristocratic ladies wore cut flowers as an adornment to the cleavage, pinned to the plunging necklines of their low-cut dresses, and the most beautiful varieties are said to have been as highly esteemed as diamonds. The Dutch horticulturalist Abraham Munting, writing later in the century, recorded that at the height of the French craze a single tulip of especial beauty—and a cut flower, not a bulb—changed hands for the equivalent of a thousand Dutch guilders.

  Of course, the nobles of the court soon sought new diversions. But their enthusiasm for the tulip had important consequences, for Parisian society, even in the seventeenth century, was renowned throughout Europe for its elegance and style, and the fashions of the court were taken up and followed elsewhere. Indeed, they often continued to flourish in the backwaters of the continent long after the French themselves had moved on to some other craze, and it was not at all uncommon for visitors to the west of Ireland or the forests of Lithuania to find the ladies there dressed in styles that Paris had discarded ten or twenty years before. The passion for tulips that swept through the court of Louis XIII for a few short years thus did much to ensure that the flower would be looked on with high favor throughout the continent for decades to come.

  The first people to follow the fashion of the French court were the French themselves. Shortly after the tulip became popular in Paris, a miniature mania for the flower took place in northern France. There are, unfortunately, no contemporary sources of information about this episode, which by all accounts foreshadowed what was later to occur in the United Provinces. If later reports are to be believed, however, the passion for tulips was such that in about 1608 a miller exchanged his mill for a single specimen of a variety called Mere Brune, and another enthusiast handed over a brewery valued at thirty thousand francs in return for one bulb of the hybrid Tulipe Brasserie. A third account of the same episode tells of a bride whose dowry consisted of one solitary bulb of a new Rosen tulip, which her father had bred and named, with due sense of occasion, Marriage de Ma Fille. (The groom of this tale is supposed to have been delighted by the magnificence of the gift.)


  These stories may be apocryphal. It is, however, certain that the fashion for tulips soon spread through the rest of Europe. By 1620 the flower was nowhere more popular than in the United Provinces, where it quickly eclipsed rivals such as the lily and the carnation. Tulips began to be cultivated throughout the republic, where they were admired by an increasing number of knowledgeable connoisseurs and grown in a profusion of varieties from Rotterdam in the south of the country to Groningen in the north.

  The initial impetus for the long-standing Dutch enthusiasm for tulips was provided by the flood of refugees and immigrants who poured across the borders of the United Provinces from the southern Netherlands at intervals throughout the Dutch Revolt. Tens of thousands of Protestants living in the Spanish lands fled north in order to keep their religion and escape intermittent bouts of persecution. In some instances the influx of immigrants more than doubled the size of Dutch towns; 28,000 refugees arrived in Leiden between 1581 and 1621, and the total population quadrupled from 12,000 to 45,000, while in Amsterdam, throughout the seventeenth century, the majority of men marrying within the city walls had not been born there. The immigrants were willing to work hard, and they often had capital to invest, substantially adding to the sum total of Dutch prosperity. The majority were capable artisans who could contribute useful skills—the foundation of the famous Amsterdam diamond trade was directly attributable to immigrants from Antwerp—but among their numbers were many of the wealthiest merchants of great towns such as Brussels and Antwerp. These men included a number of early enthusiasts for the tulip who brought their bulbs with them, introducing many new varieties to the United Provinces. By swelling the number of bulbs in cultivation, the refugees must also have made the flower significantly more widely available than it had once been.

  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.