The Netherlands made peace with Scilly 335 years late

30 March 1651

Maarten Tromp, admiral of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, arrived at the Isles of Scilly, an English archipelago off Cornwall, to claim the damage that Royalist ships sheltering there had been doing to Dutch trade for years. He got no satisfactory answer and, under the commission he carried, declared war on the islands. In June the Royalists surrendered — but not to him: to Robert Blake’s parliamentary fleet. The Dutch squadron sailed away without having fired a gun.

1654

The United Provinces signed with England the general peace that closed the First Anglo-Dutch War. The agreement made no mention of Scilly. Nobody seems to have missed it: there were no troops facing each other, no prisoners to exchange, not a foot of ground to hand back. And there it stayed, in writing, for three centuries.

1985

Roy Duncan, a historian and chairman of the local council of the Isles of Scilly, grew tired of telling tourists a legend nobody had ever checked, and wrote to the Dutch embassy in London to ask whether it was true. The embassy went through the records and answered that it was: no peace was on file. After three centuries and a bit, the next military move in that war consisted of asking the archive for a folder.

17 April 1986

Jonkheer Rein Huydecoper, ambassador of the Netherlands to the United Kingdom, travelled to St Mary’s, the largest island in the group, and signed the peace with Duncan in front of the islanders and the press. Three hundred and thirty-five years had passed between the declaration and the signature, without a shot, without a casualty and without a foot of ground occupied: the longest war on record.

It should be said that some historians dispute that this was a war at all, and doubt that Tromp had the authority to declare one on a handful of islands. So the record is arguable. What nobody argues about is what the ambassador said that day, when he was asked how the islanders must have lived through three and a half centuries of conflict:

“It must have been horrible to know we could have attacked at any moment.”