You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [15]
More was, of course, not the only trusted advisor that Henry sent off to the executioner. Cardinal Wolsey, whom More had succeeded, was removed from office for failing to be effectual in dealing with the pope and arrested, and probably would have been executed had he not died before his trial. Thomas Cromwell, one of More’s successors, was also executed for a truly unpardonable offense — the aforementioned betrothal of the king to the homely and old Anne of Cleves.
You Bought What?
Now here is a tale of real flower power. Sort of…
TULIPOMANIA
NETHERLANDS, 1636
Paul Kupperberg
Capitalism isn’t the road to riches for everyone. Take the examples of the 1990S dot-com boom and bust, or the 1929 stockmarket crash (as well as a series of disastrous depressions across earlier decades), not to mention the imploding speculative European market disaster known as the South Sea Bubble of the early eighteenth century.
And the curious case in the United Provinces of the Netherlands of 1636 that came to be known as Tulipomania.
The mania for the buying and selling of tulips might sound as though it were more in league with the trading of collectibles like baseball cards, comic books, or Beanie Babies, but this floral fever exploded into a full-blown economic frenzy that touched every strata of Dutch society. In the course of about a year, prices of tulip bulbs sold among the usually sensible population of Holland went from reasonable to outlandish. A single rare bulb could be — and was! — traded for an entire estate, landholdings and all. Tradesmen sold their businesses and plowed the profits into the tulip trade. It was the first futures market in the world. Fortunes were made in a single transaction, while even greater riches were lost in the headlong rush of speculators fleeing the collapsing market. The legal entanglements that ensued were so complex, legislators finally threw up their hands in surrender and left it for local courts to figure out.
All this over the simple, elegant tulip — and man’s seeming inability to avoid being sucked into even the most ludicrous fits of speculation when the smell of a fast buck was in the air.
While the names of some of the culprits of this floral bubble have been lost to history, their deeds live on, as in the case of a house in the town of Hoorn with three stone tulips carved into its façade, commemorating its sale in 1633 for the price of three rare tulips. It’s here that many believe the Dutch mania for tulips began, when word spread that someone had sold his entire house for three flowers!
Known among botanists by the name Tulipa (derived from the Turkish word tulpend, or “turban,” which the flower resembles), the wild variety of the flower is native to Turkey and western and central Asia. Though a few species occur in Europe, and though we’ve come to think of Holland as the home of the tulip, the flower was unknown there until sometime in the sixteenth century. Tulips had been cultivated in Turkey for centuries before they found their way into the gardens — and economic history — of the Netherlands, thanks to the botanist Carolus Clusius. The aged scientist brought the flower home with him from a visit to Constantinople in 1593 to the University of Leiden for purposes of medicinal research. Though always happy to share his finds with fellow scientists — Clusius was a respected researcher and writer on medicine and pharmacy in addition to botany — he refused to sell any of his rare tulips to envious neighbors who sought this new plant for their gardens. Of course, to be fair — and to help explain the scarcity in the coming craze — tulips can be grown from either seed (a slow — some six or seven years — and chancy process for achieving a specific variety of flower) or by producing offsets, or outgrowths, of the mother bulb, which become flowering bulbs in their own right within a year or two. A bulb, however, can produce