The Disaster Year: The Republic That Drowned Its Own Country

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A nation's most precious possession was the land it had spent centuries stealing from the sea. In the summer of sixteen seventy-two, the Dutch decided that the only way to save that land was to drown it. That same week, they tore apart, in the open street, the man who had governed the country for twenty years.

In the spring of sixteen seventy-two, the richest country in Europe was also one of the smallest. The United Provinces of the Dutch Republic, seven provinces in all, covered no more ground than a medium-sized province does today, and its population was a little over two million; yet in the harbour of Amsterdam the masts of anchored ships rose into the sky like a forest, and on the city's exchange the price of everything from Baltic wheat to Javanese pepper was settled. This republic had no king. When the young stadholder died of smallpox in sixteen fifty, he left behind an unborn son, and the merchant families of the towns decided never to fill that vacancy again. For twenty-two years the country was governed by assemblies, clerks and ledgers. The architect of that order was Johan de Witt, chief administrator of the province of Holland since sixteen fifty-three: a mathematician, the author of a book on the calculus of chances, the first man to work out correctly the true value of a contract for a life annuity. His strategy was simple and consistent. The money of a maritime state goes to the navy; an army is expensive, dangerous, and hands political power to its commanders.

There was one flaw in this calculation: Louis the Fourteenth of France had no intention of forgiving the Dutch. They had stood at the centre of the triple alliance that in sixteen sixty-eight forced him to break off his conquests in the Spanish Netherlands halfway through. The tariff walls of his minister Colbert had failed to crush Dutch trade. On top of that, the printing houses of Amsterdam were turning out pamphlets, medals and caricatures that mocked the French king. In sixteen seventy, Louis signed a secret treaty with Charles the Second of England at Dover: in exchange for French money, the English navy would go to war against the Dutch. Then two German church states, the prince-bishoprics of Münster and Cologne, were bought with the same French gold. Four enemies, one plan of attack.

The first blow came before any declaration. On the twelfth of March, English ships fell upon the Dutch merchant convoy returning from Smyrna in the Channel; the declaration of war followed two weeks later, on the twenty-seventh of March. France declared on the sixth of April. In May an army of a hundred and twenty thousand men gathered near Liège, with Turenne, Condé and the king himself at its head. A separate force of thirty thousand, hired by Münster and Cologne, would advance from the east. On the other side there was, on paper, a Dutch army of as many as eighty thousand, but most units stood at half strength, officers' commissions had become salary lines distributed among town families, and the bulk of the soldiers were waiting in the southern fortresses, in the wrong place. In February, in desperation, the boy born fatherless in sixteen fifty was brought forward: William, twenty-one years old, was made captain-general of the army. The Perpetual Edict of sixteen sixty-seven, drawn up to keep him away from that office for ever, was forgotten five years later.

On the morning of the twelfth of June the French army crossed the lower branch of the Rhine in front of an old customs house called the Tolhuis, near the village of Lobith. The river was low that summer; the cavalry rode across a shallow ford and the infantry were carried over on pontoons. At Versailles this crossing was worked for years into paintings, ceiling frescoes and reliefs; the scene, known as the Crossing of the Rhine, was sold as the king's greatest feat of arms. In fact the losses were almost nil, because there was no one facing them. The defensive line built along the river IJssel was turned from behind in a single stroke. In the weeks that followed Doesburg, Zutphen, Deventer, Arnhem and Nijmegen fell one after another. The fortresses held out not for days but for hours. At the end of June the city of Utrecht opened its gates without firing a shot, and its council went out to receive the king of France. Three provinces were lost in six weeks, without an army even having to be beaten in the field.

The people fleeing back poured in floods into the towns of the province of Holland. Queues formed outside Amsterdam's city bank as depositors tried to withdraw their money, bond prices collapsed, days of public repentance were proclaimed in the churches. In the street, the name of Johan de Witt was now spoken together with treason. The Dutch would later remember that year in three rhyming words: the people irrational, the government helpless, the country beyond saving. The only weapon left was the thing they had regarded as an enemy for centuries.

Most of the province of Holland lies below sea level. This land was an artificial landscape, won from marsh over centuries, ringed with dikes, drained by windmills, encircled by canals. Every polder, every drained basin inside its ring of dikes, was in fact a machine that could be run in reverse. If you opened the sluices of the system that pushed the water out, the same system would let the water back in.

The decision was taken on the eighth of June by the States of Holland. A strip running from Gorinchem in the south to Muiden in the north, on the shore of the Zuiderzee, was to be put under water. This line would later be known as the Old Dutch Water Line, and its logic demanded a merciless precision. If the water rose too high, a boat could cross it; if it rose too little, soldiers would simply walk through. The depth they were after was roughly thirty centimetres. A sheet of water above a man's heel and below his knee. Under such a cover the ground becomes invisible; beneath it lie hidden ditches, irrigation channels, pits of mud. Horses dragging heavy gun carriages sink into them, infantry lose formation, an engineer cannot tell where to throw a bridge. The only dry passages were the raised roads and the crowns of the dikes; a redoubt was built at the head of each one and guns were placed there.

Opening the sluices was harder than taking the decision. That ground was somebody's pasture, somebody's hay waiting to be cut. It was the middle of June; asked to drown their own fields in the middle of the harvest, farmers went out at night and stopped up the breaches in the dikes with brushwood and earth. Some town governments delayed the order, others sat down to bargain over compensation. Soldiers were posted as sentries at the dikes, with permission to open fire on anyone closing a gap. Day after day the water was raised, measured afresh each morning, sluice by sluice and breach by breach.

There was one moment when all of it came very close to being wasted. The little town of Muiden, just east of Amsterdam, held the great sea sluice at the heart of the whole system. On the twentieth of June a French cavalry detachment reached the town; the gates stood open and there was no garrison. The detachment rode in, looked around a little, saw that no one was expecting them, and rode back out; it had neither an officer who understood the value of what he was holding, nor orders to stay. Dutch soldiers reached Muiden only hours later. Had that sluice remained in French hands, flooding the northern flank of Amsterdam would have been impossible. On the twenty-second of June the water took its place, and the French army came to a halt forty kilometres west of Utrecht, on the shore of a sea of mud it could not cross.

Louis was in no hurry at that point. He preferred to dictate terms of surrender to a country he considered militarily finished. The terms were read out to the Dutch delegation summoned to Utrecht: the great fortresses in the south would be handed to France, Catholic worship would be permitted, millions of guilders in war indemnity would be paid, the republic would from then on enter no alliance without French approval, and every year a special embassy would travel to Versailles to present the king with a medal of gratitude. The last article was not a military demand but a declaration of ownership. When the terms became known in The Hague, public opinion exploded; what people talked about was not the money on offer but the medal. The answer attributed to the young captain-general, William, was handed down years later by the pen of an English historian: told that he was doomed to see the end of his country, he said there was a way of not seeing it, and that was to die in the last ditch.

The same weapon was used a second time in the north. Bernhard von Galen, prince-bishop of Münster, whom the Dutch called Bomber Berend for his passion for siege guns, arrived before the city of Groningen at the end of July with more than twenty thousand men. The defence of the city was directed by Carl von Rabenhaupt, an old Bohemian soldier in the service of the republic. He too flooded the surrounding marshes and fields, condemned the siege lines to mud, and sent raiding parties against the trenches by night. The bishop threw thousands of bombs into the city; he brought down stone walls, but not the will behind them. On the twenty-eighth of August he lifted the siege and withdrew. Groningen still celebrates that day every year. The north and the west of the country had survived by sacrificing their own soil. But in those same weeks, in the political centre of the republic, something was happening that no enemy had done.

Johan de Witt was the man who had governed this country for nineteen years, and the country he governed had decided to pin the label of treason on him. He came from an old family of Dordrecht, he had studied law and mathematics at Leiden, and the book he wrote on the algebraic treatment of curves was taken seriously among the mathematicians of his day. His political creed was built like a theorem as well: true freedom meant government by the shared reason of the towns, not by a single dynasty. The most brilliant fruit of that creed had been gathered in sixteen sixty-seven, when the Dutch fleet sailed into the branches of the river Thames, burned part of the English fleet in its own harbour, and forced England to peace. The man aboard on that raid, as the States' representative with the fleet, was Johan's elder brother Cornelis de Witt. Five years earlier the brothers had been national heroes.

In sixteen seventy-two the very same choice, money going to the ships and the land army left unmaintained, became their death warrant. Within weeks the presses of Amsterdam and The Hague turned out hundreds of pamphlets: the de Witt brothers had made a deal with the French, they had deliberately left the fortresses empty, they had kept the young prince away on purpose from the office that was his by right. On the evening of the twenty-first of June, while the French army waited in front of the water line, four young men stabbed Johan de Witt near his house in The Hague. One of the attackers, Jacob van der Graeff, was caught and executed within weeks; part of the crowd began visiting his grave. The gravely wounded chief administrator could not leave his bed for weeks. In the country's most critical days, the helm of the state stood empty.

The vacancy filled quickly. At the beginning of July, under pressure from crowds besieging the town councils, the States of Holland repealed the Perpetual Edict of sixteen sixty-seven, and on the third of July proclaimed William stadholder. Twenty-two years on, the republic annulled its own founding decision.

For the brothers, this was not enough. A barber surgeon from Piershil named Willem Tichelaar came forward and claimed that Cornelis de Witt had offered him money to kill the prince. There was no evidence and no witness; the only thing on the table was the barber's word. Cornelis was arrested, shut up in the town prison in The Hague and put to torture to make him confess. According to the story handed down, through hours of torture he repeated Horace's famous lines in praise of the just and steadfast man, and signed nothing. The court could not sentence him to death; it sentenced him to exile. At the beginning of August, Johan de Witt resigned from all his offices.

On the morning of the twentieth of August, Johan went to that prison, the gate prison of the city known as the Gevangenpoort, to collect the brother who was to go into exile. A crowd gathered in front of it before long; the city's militia companies took up positions in the square under arms. The cavalry regiment, the only force capable of keeping order in The Hague, had been sent out that day to put down a disturbance outside the city, and its commander announced that he would not return without an explicit order. In the afternoon the crowd broke down the door. The two brothers were dragged into the street and killed. Their bodies were hung head down from the gallows opposite, torn apart, and passed from hand to hand through the crowd as souvenirs. Johan was forty-six, Cornelis forty-nine.

Afterwards there was no inquiry and no trial. Some of the leading figures of that day were rewarded in later years with offices and incomes, the barber surgeon among them. What the young stadholder knew that day, and what he was in a position to stop and did not stop, is still debated among historians; what is certain is that he asked for no penalty for the killers. The rift between the merchant government of the republic and the House of Orange took, in that street, a shape that would last two centuries. While all this was happening, the real fate of the war was being settled not in The Hague but at sea, and had been since two weeks before.

The water line had stopped the army coming by land. But the real part of the plan was this: the English and French fleets would join, land troops on the Dutch coast, and take the cities behind the line from the sea. Against that plan the republic had a man of sixty-five, Michiel de Ruyter, who had gone to sea at nine years old as a rope worker and risen from ship's captain to admiral. The force in his hands was some seventy-five ships, around four thousand five hundred guns and close to twenty-one thousand men. The combined fleet facing him was larger; its ships of the line alone numbered more than eighty, it carried over six thousand guns, and at its head was the brother of the king of England, James, Duke of York.

De Ruyter did not wait. On the morning of the seventh of June he found the allied fleet on the east coast of England, in Sole Bay off Suffolk: ships at anchor, taking on water and provisions, part of the crews ashore. He took the wind behind him and drove into the bay. The allied line was split before it could form; the French division, by the reading of its admiral d'Estrées, stood away to the south and spent most of the day out of the battle. Seeing this, De Ruyter detached a quarter of his fleet to keep an eye on the French and threw the rest in a mass against the English. In a close-range gun duel that lasted until evening both sides took heavy losses; the hundred-gun flagship of the Earl of Sandwich, admiral of the English blue squadron, was set alight by fireships, the ship blew up and the admiral died. The next day both sides declared victory. But the allied fleet had to return to port for repairs, and not one soldier was landed on the Dutch coast that summer.

The next threat came not from the wind but from the temperature. The flaw in the water line was obvious: if thirty centimetres of water freezes, an army walks over it. In December of sixteen seventy-two a hard frost set in, and in those days William the Third had taken the greater part of the field army south, towards the French fortress of Charleroi; the line was being held by a thin screen. The French commander in Utrecht, the Duke of Luxembourg, saw his chance and marched west over the ice with picked troops. The target was The Hague. As they passed the villages of Bodegraven and Zwammerdam on the line, the weather turned at midnight and the thaw began. The ice started to crack under them and the roads began to turn to swamp; they were forced to fall back. On the way back, between the twenty-eighth and the thirtieth of December, they burned those two villages and used severe violence against the inhabitants. In the hands of the Dutch presses the episode became the most widely printed image of the war: the village in flames, families running, soldiers' boots. The French threat was no longer an abstract military problem but an engraving that could be hung on the wall of every house.

In the north, in those same days, the ice worked for the Dutch instead. Rabenhaupt, who had defended Groningen, raided the fortress of Coevorden across the frozen ditches on the thirtieth of December and took back this key point that Münster had captured in the summer. Before the winter was over, the eastern flank of the occupation was beginning to come apart.

In sixteen seventy-three the matter was closed for good at sea. The English and French fleet came this time under the command of Prince Rupert, with transports carrying soldiers alongside it; the intention was again to make a landing. In June De Ruyter turned them back twice in the Schooneveld shoals, on the seventh and the fourteenth of June, using the shallow water of his own coast like a fortress. On the twenty-first of August, off Texel, he fought an all-day battle against a numerically superior fleet and at the same time got through the merchant convoy returning from the East Indies with a year's revenue of the republic in its holds. The landing troops waited aboard their ships and were never put ashore. The republic had survived because it had not lost the sea.

By sixteen seventy-three the ledger of Europe had changed. France swallowing a small merchant republic in six weeks woke Madrid, Vienna and Berlin from their sleep. William the Third's envoys made good use of this; Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor and Brandenburg entered the war on the Dutch side one after another. The young stadholder was no longer alone, and for the first time he could attack at a place of his own choosing. In September he retook the fortress of Naarden, which held the eastern gate of Amsterdam; this was his army's first real success in a year. Then he did something nobody expected. Instead of grappling with the French army inside Holland, he joined the imperial and Spanish forces and marched southeast, up the Rhine, and in November took the city of Bonn. Bonn was the lock on the line by which the French army in Utrecht was supplied along the river. When the lock was broken, the occupying force inside the country found itself suddenly without supply and surrounded. In the spring of sixteen seventy-four the French evacuated Utrecht and the eastern provinces without fighting a battle worth the name.

As the coalition began to come apart, the enemies came to the table one by one. England left the war with the Treaty of Westminster, signed on the nineteenth of February, sixteen seventy-four; Münster and Cologne made peace the same year. The war with France lasted until sixteen seventy-eight and ended with the Peace of Nijmegen; the republic came out of it without losing territory. On paper, it was a war that had been won.

Under the paper lay the bill. The water line had been the saviour, but the ones who paid for it were the people who lived under that water. The salt water let in from the Zuiderzee left meadows that gave no crop for years; dikes, mills and farm buildings were wrecked; in the occupied provinces French commanders had loaded the towns with heavy cash levies. The state debt multiplied during the war years and never came back down to the level it had held before. Historians do not agree on exactly where the Dutch Golden Age ended, but there is broad agreement that the country's commercial momentum never regained its old speed after sixteen seventy-two. The republic kept its existence and lost its primacy.

And the longest shadow of that year fell somewhere nobody could have predicted that spring. In sixteen seventy-two a twenty-one-year-old with no office had come to power because a country was being sunk under water. In sixteen seventy-seven he married Mary Stuart, the daughter of his uncle and heir to the English throne. In November of sixteen eighty-eight, at the invitation of the English opposition, he crossed the Channel with a fleet of hundreds of ships and landed troops at Torbay in the southwest of England. His father-in-law James the Second fled the country; in the spring of sixteen eighty-nine William and Mary sat down together on the throne of England. One of the two navies that had joined sixteen years earlier to drown his country was now under his command. That Louis the Fourteenth would fight all his remaining wars with the same man in front of him was the long-term price of not having been in a hurry at Utrecht in sixteen seventy-two.

The water itself remained at the centre of Dutch military thinking. The dike breaches hastily cut in the seventeenth century turned over the following two centuries into a system that was a marvel of engineering: calculated sluices, measured canals, hundreds of redoubts and forts strung along the line. This arrangement, known as the New Dutch Water Line, was still standing when it was called into service for the last time in May of nineteen forty, and it was still designed to hold the water at thirty centimetres; but in that war the enemy flew over the water. Today the line's dikes, sluice houses and redoubts are on the UNESCO World Heritage list; cyclists ride along the dikes between the pastures, and cafés operate inside the forts. War does not occur to anyone looking at that scene. Yet underneath it lies this decision: what a country does when it understands that it can defend itself only by ruining its own land. In sixteen seventy-two the Dutch answered that question, and opened the sluices.

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