15. The Public Assassination, Mutilation, and Cannibalization of the Dutch Prime Minister
Johan de Witt’s chief political goal was to decentralize and shift power from the national government to local ones. He focused on that so much, however, that he ended up neglecting the Dutch army and navy. When the Third Anglo-Dutch War erupted, the result was a series of military disasters in 1672. Disasters were so bad that 1672 is known to this day in Dutch history as rampjaar – “the disaster year”.
On August 20th, 1672, de Witt, who by then had dominated Dutch politics for twenty years, went to visit his brother Cornelis, who had recently been sentenced to exile. Out of the blue, the brothers were attacked by members of the Hague city militia, who shot them and left them on the street to the tender mercies of a Dutch mob. The mob was neither tender nor merciful. If the de Witts were not already dead from the soldiers’ bullets, they were quite dead by the time the mob was done stabbing and beating them. The mob then strung up the corpses upside down from a gibbet, disemboweled them, ripped off their genitalia, and roasted and ate chunks of them in a cannibalistic frenzy.
