Sydney Holyfen, Syd to his friends, Holyfen to his fellow merchants, occasionally Tulip, sometimes Bulb, for certain transactions in the Netherlands in the year 1638 that won him a small though fortune and required his surreptitious departure from Amsterdam, return to which were he ever so inclined was precluded by a warrant more or less guaranteeing a nasty death. Syd was at his desk in the counting-room of Halpenny and Holyfen, Bishopsgate Street in the City of London, a member of the Company of Merchant Adventurers engaged in the export of English cloth to Hamburg, Antwerp and Petersburg and the import of tar, hemp and furs from Russia, copper from Germany and velvets from Italy. Business was not good, witness Syd’s current activity: extracting from Walker, H&H’s dealer in Yorkshire, a more complete explanation of how he came to London from the West Riding without the seven carts of undressed woolens that were his charge.