April 17th 1986: 335 Year War ends
On this day in 1986, the alleged three hundred and thirty five year war between the Netherlands and the British Scilly Isles officially ended. During the English Civil War, the Dutch sided with Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarians over the Royalist supporters of King Charles. The Royalists felt betrayed by their former allies, and responded by raiding Dutch shipping lanes. The tide of war gradually turned against the Royalists, and by 1651 their army had been pushed back to Cornwall on Britain’s south-western coast. The Royalist navy was forced to the tiny Isles of Scilly off the Cornish coast, the largest of which is only four square miles. The Dutch sent warships to Scilly to demand compensation for their mercantile losses, and when the Royalists refused, Dutch admiral Maarten Tromp declared war on the islands and set up a naval blockade. Tromp’s authority to make such a declaration is unclear, but what is known is that no blood was shed, as the Parliamentarians took the Isles of Scilly in June 1651 and the Dutch promptly sailed home. The incident was forgotten until a Scillonian historian enquired at the Dutch Embassy for evidence of a war which by then had been raging for three centuries. The embassy subsequently found evidence to suggest that the war between the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly had indeed never formally ended. Despite questions about Tromp’s authority and the technical impossiblity of declaring war on a specific region of a nation, thus throwing the legitimacy of the alleged war into confusion, the Dutch ambassador was invited to the isles to negotiate peace. On April 17th 1986, an official peace treaty was signed between the two unlikely adversaries, ending a bloodless 335 year conflict.
“It must have been awful to know we could have attacked at any moment.”
- The Dutch ambassador in 1986
ADST
