164 to about 200 people were killed in Dutch witch trials, rising to potentially 300 victims including casualties from regions that were under Spanish jurisdiction but eventually became part of the Netherlands.
Belief in witches persisted in some areas into the nineteenth century and in 1823 one woman underwent the water ordeal on her own request with the support of the authorities to prove her innocence to her superstitious neighbours.
[1] Early in the sixteenth centuries when witch trials were still in the initial stages in the Low Countries, authorities often sought advice and "expertise" from abroad, such a Cologne and Cleves.
An executioner from Cleves, master Symon, was contracted for several trials for his skill in breaking victims and extracting a confession from them.
The provincial courts in Zeeland and Frisia maintained strict central control, were staffed by trained jurists and insisted on due process.
This became a case of precedence which was henceforth followed as common practice in Holland, thereby de facto abolished the death penalty for witchcraft in the province.
The figure rises to at least 200 to potentially 300 victims if one includes casualties from parts of the Spanish Netherlands that the Republic conquered later (such as Staats-Overmaas and Staats-Brabant).
The fact that the common practice of repealing death sentences ended witchcraft executions in the Netherlands, however, did not mean that there were no witch trials.
It was also a cause of misplaced national pride as well as political propaganda, as the Dutch pointed to the severe Witch trials in the Spanish Netherlands and stated that in contrast to the case of their Catholic neighbor, there was no need of witch trials in the Netherlands as no one had been proven guilty of sorcery and claimed sorcery had been proven to be illusions.
[10] In 1823 a woman, Hendrika Hofhuis famously demanded that the authorities allowed her to be subjected to the ordeal of water to clear her name in her community after she had been accused of being a witch.