Worcester battlefield

Aftermath and Prisoners

Image Credit: Battle of Worcester battlefield, by Gail Braznell, Reflected Images

 The Scottish Royalists were defeated and thousands were taken prisoner.

“Few of the Scots who survived Worcester ever returned home. Thousands of prisoners were “driven like cattle” to London. As one witness described the convoy, “all of them [were] stript, many of them cutt, some without stockings or shoes and scarce so much left upon them as to cover their nakedness, eating peas and handfuls of straw in their hands which they had pulled upon the fields as they passed.” At temporary prison camps in London and other cities, many prisoners died of starvation, disease and infection, while the Council of State debated what to do with the defeated multitudes. 1

Of the 10,000 prisoners taken in the Battle of Worcester, it is said that 1,000 prisoners were put to work draining the fens in East Anglia; 1500 shipped out to the gold mines of Guinea; others were sent to labor in the Barbadoes and Virginia; and in November [1651], 272 Scots were herded aboard the John and Sara, bound for New England.[6]”2

About 272 prisoners were exiled to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in May 1652 via the ketch John & Sara.  There is some speculation that some of these prisoners were also taken to the Virginia Colony as well as Barbados, possibly after arriving in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. 

  1. Rapaport, Diane. “Scots for Sale, The Fate of the Scottish Prisoners in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts, New England Ancestors. Boston, MA: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2000-2009.) (Online database. AmericanAncestors.org. New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2009 []
  2. Rapaport, Diane. “Scots for Sale, The Fate of the Scottish Prisoners in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts, New England Ancestors. Boston, MA: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2000-2009.) (Online database. AmericanAncestors.org. New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2009 []