THE PUBLIC EXECUTION OF TWO DUTCH POLITICIAN BROTHERS, JOHAN & CORNELIUS.
With his power in tatters after having been forced to resign, Johan went to visit Cornelius in prison at the Hague on August 20th, 1672. Unwittingly he walked straight into a trap. At the prison, an organized lynch mob awaited his arrival. “Everyone wanted to draw a drop of blood from the fallen hero and tear off a shred from his garments,” wrote the French writer, Alexander Dumas, in The Black Tulip.
The mob broke into the prison and accosted the two brothers. Dragging them into the streets, they hung them by their feet in the city’s public gibbet, one of the most humiliating forms of punishment and execution of the 17th Century. “After having mangled, and torn, and completely stripped naked the two brothers, the mob dragged their naked bodied to the extemporized gibbet, where amateur executioners hung them by their feet,” wrote Dumas.
The frenzied mob then literally ripped the brothers apart. According to Dumas: “Then came the most dastardly scoundrels of all, who had not dared to strike the living flesh. Cut the dead piece, and then went about town selling small slices of the bodies of Johan and Cornelius at ten sous a piece.”
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