Kettle War 1784: Joseph II, the Closed Scheldt and One Shot at a Pot

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In 1585, during the Dutch Revolt against Spain, the northern Dutch Republic closed the River Scheldt to shipping, cutting Antwerp off from the North Sea and steering trade to Amsterdam. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia confirmed the closure, and it held even after the southern Netherlands passed to the Austrian Habsburgs. The Diplomatic Revolution of 1756, which allied Austria with France, made the Dutch barrier fortresses in the south pointless, and the Republic turned to neutrality. In 1781, with the Dutch tied down in the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, Emperor Joseph II demanded an end to the barrier, then the evacuation of Maastricht, and finally the reopening of the Scheldt, despite a poorly equipped army in the region.

In October 1784 three ships sailed from Antwerp, among them the merchant ship Le Louis flying the emperor's flag. On October 8 the Dutch Dolfijn fired a single shot that hit a soup kettle on deck, and the crew surrendered. Joseph declared war on October 30. Austrian troops razed a customs post and occupied Fort Lillo, and the Dutch broke dikes that flooded the land and drowned civilians. Under the French-mediated Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1785, the Scheldt stayed closed, but the Republic paid roughly 2 to 10 million guilders.

• Observers wrote to Benjamin Franklin in Paris that war between the Habsburgs and the Dutch Republic was inevitable.
• The Annual Register noted the Dolfijn would have needed a broadside of at least seven guns to stop a ship the size of Le Louis.
• The Patriot movement used the crisis to form citizen militias, the exercitiegenootschappen, against the stadtholder's power.
• Friesland's Admiralty offered two new warships that got stuck in the port of Harlingen and had to be dismantled.
• When the Austrians took Fort Lillo, the decommissioned fort was mostly being used as a vegetable garden.