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By Root 167 0

perfectly content to pay the balance of 11,400 guilders and agreed to do so in three installments: 4,000 guilders in June, 3,700 at the end of August, and the remaining 3,700 guilders on the first day of February 1638. This was a private agreement between two genuine flower lovers who had probably never bothered themselves with the tulip mania going on around them and who could well afford the fantastic luxury of spending ten thousand guilders or more on plants that would be enjoyed for only a few weeks each year. Among the more affluent and high-class tulip traders, there were still occasional signs of optimism about the state of the market. Jan Quaeckel, the rich Haarlem grower who owned The Golden Grape, traveled to the auction at Alkmaar the day after prices crashed in the colleges of his hometown and still felt confident enough to part with 3,260 guilders for some of Wouter Winkel’s fine bulbs. And in May 1637 Jan Admirael—the fashionable Amsterdam dealer who grew tulips in the garden behind his house on the exclusive Prinsengracht, the Prince’s Canal—agreed to guarantee his customer Paulus de Hooge that he would make at least 20 percent over the next twelve months on any tulips he bought from Admirael’s flower beds.

Yet the collapse of the tavern colleges threatened to bankrupt not just the florists but a substantial number of the bulb farmers too. Any growers who had been tempted, during the mania, to expand their business and sell to florists as well as connoisseurs was affected, and the crisis was serious enough to prompt the professionals to unprecedentedly rapid action. As early as February 7, only four days after the crash in Haarlem, the growers of the provinces of Holland and Utrecht agreed to arrange a general meeting, to be held at Amsterdam, to discuss ways of minimizing the damage caused by the collapse in prices. Even in a country the size of the United Provinces, some of these towns were two days’ journey from each other, so the growers’ reaction was astonishingly rapid. It can only have been the result of the most acute concern about their future.

With the single exception of Rotterdam—whose growers sent a letter agreeing to be bound by the decisions of the majority—each of the dozen towns and districts most closely involved in the tulip trade held their own assemblies to elect representatives to attend this meeting. Most of the big bulb growers, including Francisco da Costa from Vianen, Barent Cardoes and Willem Schonaeus from Haarlem, and François Sweerts from Utrecht, traveled to Amsterdam alongside lesser-known names such as W. J. Sloting of Leiden and Claes Heertgens, who was one of the representatives from the Streeck, a strip of good bulb-growing land that lay between the three West Friesland towns of Hoorn, Enkhuizen, and Medemblik.

The great assembly of growers took place on February 23. By then the tulip trade must have been in utter disarray, because the delegates seem to have wasted little time considering whether there was any way it could be revived. Instead, their discussion centered on ways of minimizing their losses.

In some respects the growers’ problems were nearly as bad as those faced by the florists. The great majority of them had incurred considerable costs over the previous year in buying bulbs and offsets, cultivating their gardens and, quite possibly, expanding their operations to try to meet the sharp rise in demand. Now they were owed huge sums of money by customers who had paid only small deposits and had long since sold the tulips on to other traders. In many cases the rights of ownership had vanished into one of the incredibly long and complex chains of trades and deals created during the mania. If just one of the florists involved in one of these agreements found himself unable to settle his debts, the whole chain would collapse and the growers waiting at one end of it would not have the slightest prospect of receiving the balance owed on their bulbs when payment fell due in June.

All these problems must have been debated during the assembly in Amsterdam. The growers