A recent article in the New York Times mentioned a bit of civil disobedience that caught my attention: “. . . in the 1670’s . . . the prime minister was killed, and partially eaten, by a mob of angry Dutch. . . .” Would you mind giving out the background behind this incident? And perhaps the contact information for any of the mob’s descendants who might consider consuming a few unruly U.S. politicians? –Michael Roberts, via e-mail
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The article you refer to, which appeared in the Times on August 21, 2005, discusses the views of Yale economist Robert Shiller, who believes that “housing prices may drop sharply, as they did 300 years ago on the Herengracht [canal] in Amsterdam.” The article cites the work of Piet Eichholtz, a Dutch economist and evidently an admirer of Shiller’s, who charted housing prices on the prestigious waterway over a 400-year span. The passage about the unfortunate prime minister reads in its entirety as follows:
No further details are provided. The reader seeking guidance about the housing market can only conclude: If people are eating government officials in your neighborhood, it’s time to sell.
Question #1: Seriously, cannibalism? Answer: The sources cited in the principal English-language bio, Herbert Rowen’s 1978 John De Witt, are obscure, but Rowen himself doesn’t seem to doubt that the crowd snacked on burghers. Question #2: So what was up with these people? Answer: Rowen doesn’t say, though he distinguishes between the killers, who were solid citizens, and the mutilators, who were “scaffold scum,” as a contemporary pamphlet puts it. The atrocity had no noticeable impact on William III’s career (he later became king of England). Though notorious for centuries–the murders are the centerpiece of Dumas pere’s 1850 novel The Black Tulip–Rowen thinks the incident now has been largely forgotten, apparently for some merely marking an occasion when Amsterdam property values temporarily went to hell.
