A Brill Calendar: August 20

Few observers of Dutch civilization throughout the ages associate it with blood-thirsty bestiality.

This association can be applied for the date August 20 1672, when a mob of Hague citizens got hold of two De Witt brothers, both eminent politicians and statesmen: Cornelis (Dordrecht June 25 1623) and Johan (Dordrecht September 24 1625) and lynched them, tearing their bodies publicly apart in frenzied and gruesome squalor, including cannibalism...

The younger of the two, Johan, a Leyden alumnus and accomplished mathematician, applying his scholarship to analytic geometry as well as to problems in financial insurance, is still seen as one of the most astute & shrewd statesmen of Holland Province; while his older brother was particularly active in maritime services to the Republic. Both had a track-record second to none in their fields.

The period is typical for a classical polarity in Dutch politics: on one side of the dichotomy the populist and federal position of the House of Orange; on the other side, the Dutch oligarchic and republican tradition embodied in burgher-regents. It is seldom, that the very foundations of Holland – and of the Republic as a whole – have been challenged as dramatically as in 1672. In textbooks the ‘annus horribilis’ has been branded as devoid of reason, redemption and reflection. At the end of 1672 the collective debt of the Republic’s richest Province was multiplied by four compared to the beginning of that disastrous year.

Holland somehow withstood 1673, a combined attack by France, Britain and the bishopric of Münster. The excellent state of the economy and the Dutch fleet – both achieved by Councillor Pensionary Johan de Witt and his brother – saved the country from annexation by its foes.