13
Such of them who in the battle escaped death lived but longer to die, for the most part, more miserably.
Thomas Blount, Boscobel
One of Charles’s first questions to Wilmot when they had been reunited at Moseley Hall had been what had happened to the other great men of his cause. While Wilmot had not been able to answer, the truth emerged as the two men moved between Royalist hiding places, and learnt more of what had been going on outside the bubble of their escape attempt. The news was dire indeed.
The Duke of Hamilton, one of the senior aristocrats of Scotland, with a potential claim to the English throne, was the most prominent Scot not to make it out of Worcester alive. His elder brother had been beheaded in 1649, after being captured fighting for Charles I the previous year. Now it was his turn to suffer the consequences of an ill-fated foray into an England protected by the professionalism of the New Model Army, inspired by the brilliance of Cromwell.
Leading a counterattack on Perry Wood, Hamilton was shot through the leg. He was then subjected to a grisly amputation, after which he lay in agony in the Commandery, the building that had been Charles’s headquarters during his twelve days in Worcester. Hamilton would join the long list of Worcester’s fatalities nine days after the battle. His followers were refused permission to remove his body, and he was buried under the high altar of Worcester Cathedral.
The city had paid dearly for welcoming Charles Stuart into its walls. It was violently looted on the night of victory. Those officials who had greeted the king so wholeheartedly on 22 August were soon identified, tried and hanged. As these men lost their lives, so the city lost its dignity, and its defensive lines. On 16 September the Council of State ordered that the walls of Worcester be torn down, and ‘laid so flat that they may not be in a posture to be again made defensible’.1
Now it became clear that Parliament had had various informants in place, transmitting information about Charles and his army from inside Worcester’s walls. On 6 September the Council of State gave rewards to those who had informed them of goings on in the Royalist stronghold in the run-up to the battle, sending particular thanks ‘to the little maid mentioned by Major Salway in his narrative to the House [of Commons]’.
Meanwhile the city had a shroud of death hanging over it. Marchamont Nedham’s Mercurius Politicus gloated that Worcester had ‘indeed become a sad spectacle, and was very noisome by reason of the multitudes of dead carcasses, both of man and beast (for the fight was very fierce, and the slaughter of the enemy great) till care was taken for their removal (by God’s blessing) to prevent infection’.2 In the meantime the dead were laid out, John Aubrey hearing that ‘The penes of the dead stripped bodies 2 or 3 days were all erect.’3 ‘Death erection’, or ‘angel lust’, can occur in the corpses of men who have met a sudden and violent end.
Lady Fanshawe, who had noted the scarcity of provisions when she had accompanied Charles to the Isles of Scilly in the spring of 1646, now wrote to one of her children: ‘Upon the day of September following was fought the battle of Worcester, when, the King being missed, and nothing of your father being dead or alive for three days was heard of, it is inexpressible what affliction I was in. I neither ate nor slept, but trembled at every motion I heard, expecting the fatal news.’
While the king’s fate remained a mystery, she soon read the name of her husband, Sir Anthony, among a list of prominent prisoners of war in a Parliamentary newsbook. Later she was advised that he was being brought to London, and that she would be able to meet him before he was sent for imprisonment pending trial.
She waited in a room in Charing Cross on the agreed date. ‘At last came the captain and a soldier with your father, who was very cheerful in appearance; who, after he had spoke and saluted me and his friends there, said: “Cease weeping; no other thing on Earth can move me. Remember, we are all at God’s disposal.”’
Sir Anthony stressed that being taken prisoner was one of many things that could happen in times of war. He was proud that he had managed to burn his private papers before being taken, and was sure that this action would save ‘the lives and estates of many a brave gentleman’. After lunch with his wife he was escorted to Whitehall, where he was kept in solitary confinement in a small room overlooking a bowling green.
Ann Fanshawe worked out where he was being held. ‘During the time of his imprisonment I failed not constantly to go, when the clock struck four in the morning, with a dark lantern in my hand, all alone and on foot, from my lodging in Chancery Lane … to Whitehall at the entry that went out of King’s Street into the bowling ground. There I would go under his window and softly call him … Thus we talked together; and sometimes I was so wet with rain that it went in at my neck and out at my heels.’4
Sir Richard Fanshawe was interrogated repeatedly. The combination of the grim conditions in his cell, and the exertions of the ‘cold and hard marches’ he had endured since his capture, meant that he became seriously ill, perhaps with scurvy. He was saved from death by Oliver Cromwell, who liked Fanshawe, and advised Ann to get a letter from a doctor explaining how sick he was. Cromwell used this document to persuade his comrades to release Fanshawe from captivity, on a bail of £4,000.
The foremost Englishman to be captured in the days immediately after the battle was not so fortunate. The Earl of Derby had been deeply reluctant to leave Charles’s side at Whiteladies. Derby had reached Newport in Shropshire, where he surrendered to Captain Oliver Edge, from Colonel Lilburne’s regiment, on the promise that his life would be spared. Edge received a reward for catching such a prized enemy, one of several he accumulated during Harrison’s mopping-up operation.
Derby was sent to Chester, and was held in Chester Castle. While there, he heard that the Council of State had written from London insisting that he should be ‘brought to trial, [and] made an example of’. Realising that his life would soon be taken from him, Derby wrote to his wife on 10 September: ‘I will not stay long on particulars, but, in short, inform you that the King is dead, or narrowly escaped in disguise; whether [one or the other is] not yet known.’ He outlined the utter destruction of the Royalist army, with all its noblemen killed or captured, and its rank and file imprisoned or sent overseas. There was little point, he assured her, in her continuing the defence of the Isle of Man in this hopeless, kingless, state.
The earl signed off his parting letter with love for his family, and revulsion at the cauldron of hate and destruction that his country had become: ‘God almighty comfort you and my poor children,’ he wrote, ‘and the Son of God, whose blood was shed for our good, preserve your lives; that by the good will and mercy of God, we may meet once more upon Earth, and last in the Kingdom of Heaven, where we shall be for ever free from all rapine, plunder, and violence; and so I rest everlastingly.’5
Derby was court martialled by a board of officers who had, to a man, fought against him during the Civil Wars. Proceedings began at the end of September. The first of the four charges brought against him was ‘That he had in a most traitorous and hostile manner, been aiding, abetting, to Charles Stuart, son of the late tyrant.’6 His attempt to rely on the mercy guaranteed him at capture by Captain Edge proved worthless. His judges decided that ‘Quarter for life belongs only to such as are … enemies, not to such as are … Traitors to their Country; The Earl is a Native of England, and therefore being taken fighting against England, cannot be accounted a competent enemy, nor in reason expect an exemption by Quarter.’7
Despite Cromwell requesting that his life be spared, Derby’s fate was sealed: he was sentenced to death. The place of his execution had been secretly decided before the court martial had even begun. He would be transported forty-five miles north-east of Chester, to Bolton. The officers of the court martial congratulated themselves on this choice, ‘wherein the just judgement of God upon this man is very remarkable, that in the same County where he first raised Arms, drew the first blood, and had done so much mischief, yea, and in the very same Town, where by his means so much blood had been spilt … it should be so brought about by his righteous providence, that he should now come to have his blood shed there upon a Scaffold before all the world, by the hand of a public Justice’.8 He was beheaded in Bolton on 15 October.
There can be no doubt that the death sentence would also apply to Charles on his being captured. Although commonly referred to as ‘the King of Scots’, he was, like Derby, a native Englishman. Furthermore, he was one who had already been declared traitor by name. In such circumstances, no trial would be necessary: the authorities would simply need to establish his identity. The only fit consequence for his sin, of breathing fresh life into the calamitous civil wars that had cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, Scots and Irishmen, would be public justice in a fitting setting. Like his father he would be condemned as a ‘Man of Blood’, and like his father he would be publicly beheaded.
Charles’s good instincts kept him out of his enemies’ reach. His decision, on his ride from Worcester to Whiteladies, not to join his 3,000 men fleeing north, was sound. Parliamentarian newsbooks recorded scarcely credible victories by small bodies of their men against large units of defeated Royalists: ‘On Thursday last there marched by our town about 1,000 of the routed Scots, who rendezvoused on Congleton Moor, there taking up their quarters for the most part of that night, lying in their close order,’ ran one such report. There they were attacked by 300 irregular Parliamentary troops under a Major Gibson: ‘He fell on them with his men in their Rear, killed about 300 and took above 100 prisoners with little loss: for indeed so great is the spirit of fear amongst them, that 10 men will chase 100.’9 Judging by what happened to the 3,000, if he had joined them on the doomed trek back to Scotland, Charles would have been captured or killed; or, for that matter, captured and then killed.
One of those cavalry officers taken in the chaos of full retreat wrote from prison in Chester soon afterwards. He addressed the hectic period that started with the certainty of imminent defeat inside the cramped Royalist position in Worcester, and ended with his own capture, 125 miles north of the rout: ‘Towards the evening all things appeared very horrid, alarms being in every part of the city, and a report that the enemy had entered one end of the town, and we of the horse trampling one up against another, much readier to cut each other’s throat than to defend ourselves against the enemy. In this confusion we at last got out of the town, and fled as far as we could, our two Lieutenant Generals [Leslie and Middleton] being, as appeared the next morning, at our head. We had no guide, so we often lost our way, but yet reached Newport [in Shropshire], 30 miles this side of Worcester, the next morning, and there thought to have refreshed ourselves, and marched quietly for Scotland.’10
But this was no time for quiet. The Council of State’s pre-emptive decision, once it had become confident of victory at Worcester, to block up the ways back north to Scotland, had proved its worth. The imprisoned Cavalier recalled the relentlessness of the enemy, whether uniformed or not: ‘There wanted not considerable forces in every place to [con]front us, and we were so closely pursued, in the day by the army and garrison forces, and in the night by the country [folk], that from the time we came out of Worcester, until the Friday evening that I was taken prisoner seven miles from Preston, neither I nor my horse ever rested. Our body consisted of 3,000; in the day we often faced the enemy, and beat their little parties, but still those of us whose horses tired or were shot were lost, unless they could run as fast as we rode. In the night we kept close together, yet some fell asleep on their horses, and if their horses tarried behind, we might hear by their cries what the bloody country were doing with them.’11 Many were bludgeoned to death.
Leslie and Middleton were among those to lose their horses, most likely to exhaustion. They managed to buy fresh ones, but after that point they were suspected of abandoning their men, the anonymous prisoner in Chester recalling: ‘On [the] Thursday night [after the defeat] Lieutenant Generals Middleton and Leslie left us, or willingly lost us, but with all the haste they made, both of them, and Sir William Fleming, are here prisoners.’
Major General Harrison’s men held a steady and impenetrable net across northern England. The operation in which Leslie and Middleton were caught by 800 Parliamentary cavalry and dragoons was described in a jubilant report from Lancashire written by the commanding officer, Colonel John Alured, another signatory of Charles I’s death warrant:
Sir,
It hath pleased the Lord to give a great mercy to us in the delivery up of a great many of the leaders, and chief of the Scottish forces into our hands. I marched on a dark rainy night, in rough and tedious way, to the town … called Ellel, where we had intelligence that most of the Scots commanders lay, which were found to be true, and have taken there these Prisoners, in this enclosed list, nominated …12
This list included the two Scottish lieutenant generals, two earls, five lords, and many other Scots of great note. As Mercurius Politicus gloated: ‘I believe now, all the nobility of Scotland that are at liberty may all sit upon a joint-stool.’13
The architects of the rolling victory saw this as a time to celebrate God’s blessing, and to reward those who had played a significant part in it. The Council of State would vote ‘£30 a piece to be paid to Lieutenant Robert Milnes, and Captain Lieutenant John Key, for their good service in taking Lieutenant General Leslie, and Lieutenant General Middleton, after the rout of the Scottish army at Worcester’.
That was considered quite a bounty. At the same time, it puts in context the £1,000 reward for catching the elusive Charles Stuart.
There were so many Royalists taken after Worcester – perhaps 10,000 – that the cities where they were first held were choked with them. The cathedral at Worcester was made into a pen to keep hundreds of Scottish prisoners under guard; after they were moved on, Parliament gave a grant for cleaning the place, to get rid of the terrible stench.
The New Model Army soon had prisoners of war in York, Chester, Lancaster, Stafford, Derby, Leicester, Shrewsbury, Nottingham, Warwick, Liverpool and Carlisle. In Chester there were so many detainees that once the castle and the church were full, private houses were converted into temporary jails.
The first task of the Parliamentary officers was to sort the Scots from the English. The Englishmen who had fought for Charles were kept back for special treatment, for, as Derby had discovered, they were viewed not simply as the enemy, but as contemptible homegrown traitors. The Scots were merely defeated foreign invaders, to be treated cruelly, but not mercilessly. Nineteen of the senior Scottish officers were escorted to Windsor Castle, where they were kept under separate constant watch. The journey south was tougher for the men they had led.
The Council of State asked Cromwell that those Scottish prisoners destined for London should be marched in a way that was ‘not too speedy, so that we may be the better prepared to dispose of them’. Various options were looked at to provide a sufficiently large prison compound, including the tiltyard at Greenwich and the East India Company’s shipbuilding yard at Blackwall. The latter had the advantage of being surrounded by a twelve-foot-high wall.
The regicide Colonel Barkstead was instructed to see if the artillery ground in Tothill Fields, where the militia had recently paraded before the battle of Worcester, might be suitable for holding 4,000 of the Scottish prisoners. This was marshy land between Millbank and Pimlico, historically associated with necromancy – communication with the dead. It was suitably bleak, and large, and was approved for the task.
En route, the ‘Scots, Highlanders, or Redshanks’, as Parliament referred to them, were made to sleep on Hampstead Heath, before being led through Highgate, Islington and Kingsland (now Dalston, but then a wooded area with few inhabitants, where the young Samuel Pepys ‘used to shoot a bow and arrow’). On their way to London they had relied on people’s kindness for food. The oatmeal bags they carried with them on campaign, that held a week’s worth of oats (used for making porridge, oatcakes, and a rough but calorific raw oat paste), were long empty. Now they ate tough biscuit given to them by strangers as an act of charity.
On the Saturday the Scottish prisoners were escorted through the City of London, passing through Aldgate, then along Cheapside, Fleet Street and the Strand. After that, as a Royalist called James Heath noted in his Chronicle of the Late Intestine War, they were ‘driven like a herd of swine through Westminster to Tothill Fields’. It was reminiscent of a scene from a triumph of Ancient Rome, the barbarians paraded before the gawping, jeering citizens of a conquering republic.
Another eyewitness to this humiliation of the defeated revealed the contempt for the Scots that was prevalent in England at the time: ‘For the most part they were sturdy surly knaves,’ he told his readers. ‘Keep them under, and they may serve for nasty, stinking, vassals. I leave to every indifferent person that hath beheld them to judge what a condition they had been in if such a generation as this had prevailed and become their masters, or cut their throats, of which they made themselves so sure many of them brought their wives and bairns in with them. Yet were so many of our Scotified Citizens so pitiful unto them, that as they passed through the City they made them (though prisoners at mercy) masters of more money and good white bread than some of them ever see in their lives.’14
This contingent of Scots prisoners and their dependants were turned out into Tothill Fields. Food was bought for them in bulk. It was enough to keep them from starvation, but not to fill their bellies. The very basic bread and cheese of this prison diet was costing the Commonwealth more than £56 per day, and there were concerns at how such a great expense could be maintained for long. A shed was built for the sick and wounded to shelter in, with the rest forced to live in the open autumn air like farm animals. Straw was provided at the end of September ‘for their lodgings’. It was all relentlessly grim and unhealthy – an estimated 1,200 of the Scots who were imprisoned at Tothill were also buried there.
It was a similar tale of extreme hardship in the north. Sir Arthur Hazlerigg had been instructed by Parliament to take the 2,300 prisoners in his custody from Durham to Chester and Liverpool, so they could be transported as forced labourers to Ireland. He felt compelled to report to London how terrible conditions had been among the captured: ‘When they came to Morpeth, the prisoners being put into a large walled garden, they ate up raw cabbages, leaves, and roots … which cabbage, as I conceive, they having fasted, as they themselves said, near eight days, poisoned their bodies; for, as they were coming from thence to Newcastle, some died by the wayside; and when they came to Newcastle, I put them into the greatest church in the town: and the next morning, when I sent them to Durham, about seven score were sick, and not able to march, and three died that night, and some fell down in their march from Newcastle to Durham, and died.’
Hazlerigg was at pains to say that the Scots ‘wanted not for anything that was fit for prisoners’, and boasted that ‘there was never the like care taken for any such number of prisoners that ever were in England’. He had broths made for them from oatmeal, beef and cabbage, and provided enough coal to make a hundred fires, but they could not shake off the flux – dysentery. Hazlerigg believed the Scots were themselves responsible for their susceptibility to this illness, for ‘they were so unruly, sluttish, and nasty, that it is not to be believed; they acted rather like beasts than men; so that the marshal was allowed 40 men to cleanse and sweep them every day’.
He also despaired at the Scots’ treatment of their fellow prisoners, ‘for they were exceeding cruel one towards another. If a man was perceived to have any money, it was two to one but he was killed before morning, and robbed; and if he had any good clothes, he that wanted, if he was able, would strangle him, and put on his clothes.’15 Hazlerigg reckoned he had suffered the loss of 1,600 Scottish prisoners through death, mainly because of sickness and wounds, but the rest to violence.
Meanwhile the effectiveness of Harrison’s operation was astonishing. The Diary, a Parliamentary newsbook, would record with satisfaction on 29 September: ‘We cannot hear of one man come into Scotland of all the army that was defeated at Worcester.’16 The result of this was that for some time many in Scotland refused to believe the news of a massive defeat put about by the English soldiers in their land. They wanted to hear from their own people what had happened, but Parliament’s strict guarding of the route north meant defeated eyewitnesses could not get home with the terrible news – not just of the battle, but also of what was happening to those Scots captured in its aftermath.
Meanwhile, the womenfolk of those who had marched south, not to reappear, were distraught at the vanishing of so many of their men: ‘Here is old (or rather new) howling among the ladies in Scotland,’ Parliament’s propagandists noted, ‘for their husbands, fathers, sons, friends, that are slain and taken in England and Scotland.’17
The future, for many of the taken Scots, involved years of indentured labour, during which they were treated little better than slaves. A thousand of them were sent to help drain the malaria-infested fens of East Anglia. Their task was to control the waterways so they could be used for transport, and also to prevent these fertile flatlands from being flooded each winter. This hard manual toil was deeply unpopular with the local inhabitants, whose livelihoods of fishing, wildfowling and reed-cutting were threatened by the improvements, and who rioted in protest. But the project was favoured by a commercial body called the Gentleman Adventurers, to whom it promised great wealth. Their work had been disrupted by the Civil Wars, but the end of the conflict, and the supply of cheap prison labour, meant that it could now resume. At the same time Parliament benefited, by farming out the policing and feeding of some of its multitude of captives to a third party. The Gentleman Adventurers had to pay a £10 forfeit for each escapee.
On 22 September, the Council of State agreed that Oliver Cromwell should oversee the transportation of all the Scottish prisoners beneath the rank of lieutenant, or cornet of horse, from Liverpool, Chester, Stafford, Shrewsbury and Worcester, to Bristol, to await transportation abroad. Prisoners were kept in poor conditions, and received meagre daily provisions. They died at the rate of thirty a day before the ships had even left harbour. One imprisoned Scottish minister was to be sent with every 200 prisoners, at no charge, for spiritual counselling, and these preachers were to be ‘free from servitude’ when relocated.
Two thousand prisoners were sent in chains to do forced labour in the New World. The Reverend John Cotton wrote to Cromwell, explaining how it would be for these men: ‘They have not been sold for slaves, to perpetual servitude, but for six, or seven, or eight years.’ Those selling them for these stretches received around £30 per man, against transatlantic transport costs of about one-tenth of that sum. It was a lucrative trade in conquered human cargo.
The ship John and Sara would take 272 of these Scottish prisoners across the Atlantic to Massachusetts. There they were sold by Thomas Kemble of Charlestown, north of Boston, and worked mainly as unskilled labourers in Hammersmith, the ironworks on the Saugus River, which had started production of pig iron and grey iron in 1646. Others went to work in sawmills in New Hampshire and Maine. Many others were sent to toil in the West Indies and Ireland.
In the face of their terrible battlefield losses, and the garnering of so many prisoners, leading Scots back home were quick to make peace with the victors. On Wednesday, 1 October, reports were sent to London that many of the gentry and clergy of western Scotland had been to visit Lieutenant General George Monck, Parliament’s military commander in their country. They said they were eager to make amends with the government in England. The Weekly Intelligencer reported, in a bemused tone, how these men ‘allege, or at least pretend, that they have all along opposed the late proceedings of the King, and have protested against them’.18 The Scots said they recognised that this latest victory against them was God’s punishment for having allied their country with the Royalist ‘malignants’, and that they had no interest in ‘increasin[g] the indignation of the Almighty’. They threw themselves on the Commonwealth’s mercy, in total submission.
Despite the huge numbers of captives, the Commonwealth knew from the beginning that there were more to be brought in, if victory were to be taken to its ultimate point. On 8 September, five days after the battle, the Council of State urged its militia forces throughout England and Scotland to maintain their high state of watchfulness for fugitives: ‘Many stragglers from the rout and slaughter of the army may endeavour to hide themselves [in your counties, so] be very diligent to apprehend all such, and keep them in safe custody.’
A few days later, on 13 September, in order to encourage everyone to join the search for Royalists, the Council of State announced that all horses and weapons taken from each Royalist prisoner should be given to his captor. Nobody – whether regular soldier or local official – could deprive the brave citizen of his rightful prize.
On 16 September, further encouragement was sent out to the commanders of the militia in the north to watch all roads, so ‘that those who obscure themselves may be apprehended when they attempt to escape home’.19 On the same day, three commanders further south were reminded of the remaining enemy still on the run: ‘As some of them do for some time obscure themselves, hoping, after the enquiry for them is over, to pass into their own country, order a watchful eye to be still kept upon the ways and passages for their apprehension.’20
Two of those caught by this time were men who had been with the king at Whiteladies. Charles Giffard, who had readily agreed to the Earl of Derby’s suggestion that the king hide in his house at Boscobel, was captured and held in an inn at Bunbury, in Cheshire. He managed to escape.
Meanwhile the first Francis Yates, the small farmer from Brewood who had guided Charles through back roads to Whiteladies on the night of defeat, was caught and identified as having helped the king in his flight. The Parliamentarians repeatedly interrogated him, determined to find out where he had taken Charles, but he refused to talk. Realising that he would not give up the information, and eager to set an example to others who might be tempted to assist the king, Yates was hanged in Oxford.
Even as the vigorous search for fleeing Royalists continued across the land, there was a need to celebrate the victory that had scattered the Commonwealth’s enemies so dramatically and decisively. Before the battle, the very survival of the new republic had been in question. Worcester put paid to any such worries in a day. Victory on such a scale also established who was going to be its leading light.
At ten o’clock on the morning of Friday, 12 September the lord mayor of London, his aldermen, the sheriff and the recorder met at the Guildhall in their scarlet robes. They knew Cromwell was returning, and set off in their carriages to greet him. They met the conquering hero in Acton, where the recorder read out profuse praise and congratulations from the City of London before Cromwell continued towards the capital. He was cheered on his way by members of the Council of State, who had so recently questioned his trustworthiness as they quaked at the thought of royal retribution for their part in the death of Charles I.
By the time Cromwell’s carriage reached Hyde Park Corner, there were 300 coaches following in his wake. At Knightsbridge the Blue Regiment of the militia, drawn from eight wards of the City of London, saluted the Lord General. In Piccadilly, Colonel Barkstead’s redcoats stood to attention. Cannon thundered their gratitude from St James’s as Cromwell reached Charing Cross. Throughout his progress, volleys of musket-shot from the troops mixed with cheers from the London crowds. ‘As the General passed by,’ an admiring scribe wrote, ‘the people all along as he went put off their hats, and had reciprocal respects returned from him.’21
While the public acclamation of his military victory was relentless, Cromwell insisted that he was only the instrument of God, performing His will, and striking down His enemies. But Hugh Peter, the leading firebrand preacher of his time, who combined his role as Cromwell’s unofficial chaplain with command of a fighting regiment, confided to friends that victory at Worcester changed Cromwell forever. Before, he had been humble. But afterwards, Peter noted, Cromwell was more ‘elevated’. Although he remained God-fearing, Worcester gave Cromwell confidence that he had been marked out to do great things. Nineteen months after this, his final battlefield victory, he would enter Parliament with a troop of musketeers and forcibly expel its members. Eight months after that, he would accept the title he would keep for life: that of Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland.