19. A Macabre Feast
Johan de Witt (1625 – 1672) was a major political figure in the mid-seventeenth century’s Dutch Republic, a prosperous period that came to be known as the Dutch Golden Age. He controlled the government from 1650 until shortly before his death in 1672, and his main priority in those years was to decentralize and shift power from the central government to local ones. His decentralization agenda however led him to neglect the Dutch army and navy. When the Third Anglo-Dutch War erupted, the result was a series of military catastrophes in 1672.
Things got so bad that 1672 became forever after known in Dutch history as rampjaar – “disaster year”. It was against that backdrop that Johan de Witt went to visit his brother Cornelis, who had recently been sentenced to exile, on August 20th, 1672. An angry mob spotted and seized the brothers, then shot, stabbed, and beat them to death. It then strung up their corpses upside down from a gibbet, disemboweled them, ripped off their genitalia, and roasted and ate their livers and other parts in a cannibalistic frenzy.
