Tulipomania - Mike Dash [84]
Pamphlets of the latter sort were typically funded by wealthy men who lacked the literary skills to pen something of their own. Instead they paid hack writers to put their views into verse and printers to publish and distribute the results. The actual authors of these works—men such as Stephen van der Lust, a professional playwright from Haarlem who churned out four pamphlets on the mania, and Jan Soet, a satirist with a vicious pen who wrote two—were often impoverished writers who wrote in rhyme or dialogue in order to appeal to the common man. Their words were meant to be read aloud to audiences gathered in taverns and other meeting places. Their shadowy patrons, on the other hand, were generally regents and patricians who had their own very specific agendas.
A smaller number of pamphlets, on the other hand, seem to have been designed to drum up support for the old growers and connoisseurs, who had been just as horrified by the mania as the sternest critics of the bulb craze. These broadsides, which bore tellingly defensive titles such as A new song about the connoisseurs who don’t go to the tavern and because of that wish to be distinguished from the florists, attempted to show that true tulip lovers bore no responsibility for the mania and were still deserving of respect. On the whole, though, their arguments must have sounded hollow to those who looked on the whole bulb trade with horror and distaste. It was the harder-hitting and more vitriolic broadsides that were the better sellers.
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