The Bodies of Johan and Cornelis de Witt on the Groene Zoodje, 20 August 1672
The mutilated bodies of the grand pensionary Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis, hung on the gibbet at the Groene Zoodje in The Hague after a militia crowd killed them. Painted within three years of the lynching and now in the Rijksmuseum, it is a record of the moment the Dutch Republic's civilian government collapsed.
In the space of a few weeks in 1672 the Republic lost three provinces to the French, its fleet was pinned by the English, its towns rose against their magistrates, and the man who had governed it for nineteen years was torn apart by a crowd outside the Gevangenpoort. The year is remembered in Dutch as the rampjaar, in the phrase that the people were irrational, the government helpless and the country beyond saving. What the Republic did next — flooding its own land, restoring the stadtholderate, and surviving — is the harder half of the story. See political upheaval and survival in the Dutch Republic in 1672.
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