Johan de Witt
Johan de Witt governed the Dutch Republic for nineteen years without a prince, fought two wars with England and sent the fleet up the Medway, priced the first life annuity by probability, and was torn apart by a crowd at The Hague in the summer the French came. He was born at Dordrecht in 1625 into the regent class, studied law and mathematics at Leiden, and became Grand Pensionary of Holland in 1653 at twenty-seven, in the middle of the first Anglo-Dutch war and three years after the young stadtholder William II had died leaving a posthumous son. His politics were the True Freedom: the provinces governed by their regents without a House of Orange to make them a monarchy, and in the peace with Cromwell in 1654 he accepted a secret clause barring the infant William III from office, which the Orangists never forgave. He rebuilt the navy under de Ruyter with sixty new ships, and in the second war his brother Cornelis sailed with the fleet that burned the English flagships at Chatham in June 1667, which brought the Peace of Breda. The same year the Perpetual Edict abolished the stadtholderate of Holland. He balanced France against England in the Triple Alliance of 1668, and Louis XIV took it as an insult. In 1671 he published the Value of Life Annuities, which showed the state was selling them too cheap. In the spring of 1672 France, England, Münster and Cologne attacked together, the army he had starved for the navy collapsed, the towns opened their gates, and Holland was saved by cutting the dykes. The country blamed him. He was stabbed in the street in June, resigned in August, and on 20 August went to the prison at The Hague where Cornelis was held on a fabricated charge. The militia let the crowd in, and the brothers were shot, hanged upside down from the gallows, and cut to pieces that were sold. William III, twenty-one, had been made stadtholder six weeks before and did not punish anyone.
- Lived: 1625 CE – 1672 CE
- Nationality: Dutch
- Roles: statesman, mathematician
