Introduction

INTRODUCTION One of the killers cuts the right finger from the lifeless but still warm body of Johan de Witt. The politician’s naked corpse hangs upside down, tied to a post by his ankles. Next to Johan hangs his brother Cornelis, who is also dead, but his body remains in one piece. The killer shows the bleeding, cut-off finger to his fellow assassins, an action that sets off a feeding frenzy among the killers. They pull on the arms of both brothers until the limbs tear off at the shoulders. They cut out the hearts from Johan’s and Cornelis’s chest and chop off their feet. Blood-smeared pieces of clothing and sev- ered body parts pass from hand to hand in a spontaneously formed market for souvenirs of this terrible act. The bloodbath ends only after the last possible humiliation: the killers chew on the brothers’ dead flesh, including their cut-off penises. The assassins will later describe their behaviour as “the verdict”. It is 20 August 1672. Night has just fallen in The Hague near the Binnenhof, the administrative centre of the Dutch Republic. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of Dutchmen have just witnessed one of the most grue- some political murders in European history. Only four weeks earlier, on 21 June 1672, Johan de Witt had realized that his popularity had declined below a critical point. The worried grand pensionary wrote a letter to his cousin Nicolaas Vivien, telling him that he did not know how to save the Dutch Republic. Four enemy states – France, England, Munster and Cologne – had entered the seven united provinces on the first day of June. Three weeks later, these foreign invaders occupied the provinces of Gelderland, Overijssel and Utrecht. Villages, cities and strongholds had fallen into enemy hands with little resistance. According to De Witt, however, there was an even bigger problem: “Our biggest threat is not the power or the progress of the enemy, but the general revolt, the disobedience and rebelliousness of the citizens and inhabitants in the cities and the peasants on the land”.1 The reality was even worse than Johan de Witt believed at that time. A couple of hours after he had mailed the letter, four of these “disobedi- ent and rebellious” men attacked him on the street. They hit him in 1 N. Japikse, Brieven van Johan de Witt IV (Amsterdam, 1913), 389. 2 introduction Fig 1. The assassination of Johan and Cornelis de Witt. Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam 2400 (Muller). the abdomen and stabbed him with a knife. De Witt, the most influential politician of the Dutch Republic since his appointment to the office of grand pensionary in 1653, survived this first attempt on his life. A month later the “citizens and inhabitants” whom he had mentioned in his letter would not let him get away a second time. The relationship between political upheaval (including assassination) and the press is at the heart of this book. There is no better event in the history of the Dutch Republic for an investigation illuminating this relationship than the “Year of Disaster”, 1672. Riotous Dutchmen reacted to the dramatic events of that year by debating politics with the pamphlet as their weapon of choice. Presses poured out publications as never before in Dutch history. In 1672, more than 1600 different pamphlets were published in editions that ran between 500 and 1500 copies, which meant that between one and two million pamphlets were circulating in the Republic. This historical treasure has never been systematically studied. By explor- ing these pamphlets and their relationship to source material such as cor- respondence, (manuscript) petitions, diaries and state papers, we can uncover a day-to-day narrative that offers revealing insights into this year of political turmoil..

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