Tulipomania - Mike Dash [68]
In those days Dutch children began their schooling at the age of seven, so the whole family except the youngest, a boy of six named Claes, were already of school age. That suggests that Wouter Winkel would not necessarily have had to hire anyone to help him with the children. Even so he would undoubtedly have felt the loss of his wife financially as well as emotionally. Someone would have to be paid to do the sewing, the cleaning, and the cooking that Elizabet had done, and so the profits of the tulip trade would have been even more important to the surviving members of the family now.
Wouter Bartelmiesz. seems to have gotten involved in bulb dealing relatively early on. He was certainly buying and selling tulips in 1635, well over a year before the market really boomed, and the chances are that he started dealing in bulbs a year or two before that. This early start, combined with a little luck and a good understanding of the flower trade, enabled him to amass a tulip collection of quite spectacular quality.
By the spring of 1636 the tavern keeper owned more than seventy fine or superbly fine tulips, representing about forty different varieties, together with a substantial quantity of pound goods totaling about thirty thousand aces of lower-value bulbs. His tulips included some of the most valuable flowers to be found anywhere in the United Provinces: a very rare Violetten called Admirael van Enkhuizen, together with two Viceroys and five Brabansons of various types; three bulbs of the celebrated Rosen Admirael van der Eijck, an Admirael Liefkens, a Bruyn Purper (“Brown and Purple”), a Paragon Schilder, and no fewer than seven examples of the increasingly sought-after Gouda. At the height of the mania bulbs of every one of these varieties could easily change hands for a thousand guilders and often substantially more. Assembling such a quantity of the most sought-after tulips in the United Provinces was an astonishing feat of dealing on Winkel’s part. If his tulips were not the most fabulous collection of flowers in the republic, they must have come close, for no other record has yet been found of a bulb trader whose tulips even approached the quality and variety of those owned by Wouter Bartelmiesz.
The most impressive thing about Winkel’s collection, though, was neither the variety nor the magnificence of the tulips in it, but the fact that he actually owned every flower in his inventory. Wouter might have been a tulip trader, but he was neither a connoisseur nor a florist; he was a grower. That meant his assets were more substantial than those of the majority of dealers, who owned nothing but promissory notes inscribed with a price and a notional delivery date and had no guarantee that their tulips were of good quality or even that they actually existed. Winkel’s assets were bulbs, planted in a garden close to his inn.
Unfortunately for Wouter Winkel and his seven children, he did not live long enough to reap the enormous profits that his canny trading would have earned him. He saw his tulips flower in the spring of 1636, but he died sometime in the early summer, probably aged only in his late thirties or early forties. We do not know what accident or illness killed him, only that shortly afterward a party of grim-faced representatives of the local orphans’ court arrived at the Oude Schutters-Doelen and took the tavern keeper’s children off to Alkmaar’s orphanage.
In some respects the children’s plight was not quite as catastrophic as it appeared. The death of both parents was a relatively common occurrence in the seventeenth century, and the United Provinces probably made better provision for caring for its orphans than any other country at that time. Most places of any size had their own orphanage, funded by the town and governed by a board of regents, who assumed responsibility for the children’s interests, supervised the full-time staff, and made sure sufficient funds were raised to keep the institution running smoothly. The same cities typically