The 335 Years' War: Admiral Tromp, the Isles of Scilly and a 1986 Peace

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By 1648 Oliver Cromwell's Parliamentarians had driven the Royalists west through Cornwall until their navy retreated to the Isles of Scilly, owned by the Royalist John Grenville. With no tax base or supply lines, the fleet turned to piracy and preyed on Dutch merchant shipping in the Channel. The Dutch Republic, newly independent under the 1648 Treaty of Münster, needed safe trade routes and sided with Parliament, drawn by economics, the regent class's republican leanings, and a shared Calvinist faith. On March 30, 1651, Lieutenant Admiral Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp arrived to demand reparations, and according to Whitelocke's Memorials he received no satisfactory answer. Legend says he then declared war on the islands alone.

No shots were fired. Parliamentarian Admiral Robert Blake forced the Royalists to surrender in June 1651, and Tromp sailed home. The 1654 Treaty of Westminster never mentioned Scilly, and the supposed war survived as island folklore. In 1986 local historian Roy Duncan, chairman of the Isles of Scilly Council, asked the Dutch embassy in London to check its archives, and staff found no document ending the conflict. On April 17, 1986, Dutch ambassador Jonkheer Rein Huydecoper visited the islands and signed a formal peace.

• Tromp could not declare war on England because the Dutch were allied with the Parliamentarians who controlled most of the country.
• Huydecoper joked that islanders must have found it agonizing to live under threat of a Dutch attack for three centuries.
• Historian R. L. Bowley argued in 2001 that Tromp never held a commission from the States General and was bluffing.
• Graham Donald, in Loose Cannons, wrote that neither an admiral nor the islands had the sovereignty to wage war and called the 1986 treaty a publicity stunt.
• The episode sets the legend beside the Anglo-Zanzibar War, the shortest recorded war, as a classic oddity of military history.