A man … who was in the habit of asking his wife for money to buy brandy, would on her refusal say that he would go hang himself. When on 23 June 1668 he again asked for two pennies to buy brandy, his wife said she had no money, whereupon he replied, “I will hang myself or may the devil take me.” His wife replied, “Do whatever you like, you always say that,” and went back to her cleaning. Shortly thereafter, she found that her husband had hanged himself in their home. She then called for the neighbors, who have all made declarations and given evidence. On a charge by the bailiff, his corpse has been taken to the Volewijk on 26 June 1668 and hanged on a gibbet.
This excerpt, via Machiel Bosman’s chapter “The Judicial Treatment of Suicide in Amsterdam” in From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe, represents the last documented case of the Dutch posthumously punishing a suicide.
Well … a certain class of suicide.
It seems that Dutch law from about the 16th century, and certainly in the 17th century, began drawing a categorical distinction between suicides driven by madness or despair, and those ob conscientiam criminis — criminals who took their life to cheat the law.
Posthumous execution was inflicted upon the latter all the way up until the French Revolution reached the Low Countries in 1795. Bosman, for example, notes the case of a thief gibbeted in Amsterdam in 1792 after he hanged himself in jail. For non-criminal suicides, “punishment” was more typically a silent night-time burial, perhaps in unconsecrated ground: a meaningful deterrent for at least some of the living, but very distinct from judicial infamy. The widower of a 1532 suicide had even successfully appealed Amsterdam’s attempt to levy a punitive fine on the estate.
Hans Bontemantel, one of Amsterdam’s sheriffs, was incensed by the archaic sentence executed in 1668: “I am not responsible for this,” he noted in the margin of his summary. “And it is against the law.”
On this day..
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- 1685: Richard Rumbold, owner of the Rye House
- 1917: Dragutin "Apis" Dimitrijevic, of the Black Hand
- 925: Feast Day of St. Pelagius
- 1621: Christenze Kruckow, philanthropic witch
- 2014: Masanori Kawasaki
- 1943: Marianne Elise Kurchner condemned for a joke
- 1944: Krystyna Wituska, thanks to a bad romance
- 1885: James Arcene, the youngest juvenile offender hanged in the US?
- 1574: Gabriel de Lorges, accidental regicide
- 1979: Two former dictators of Ghana with four of their aides
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An interesting distinction — and kind of progressive, in a sick way. Certainly better than those laws that punished suicide by death, where the state would kill you if you failed to complete the job yourself.