Battle of Worcester - Aftermath

Aftermath

About 3,000 men were killed during the battle and a further 10,000 were taken prisoner at Worcester or soon afterwards. The Earl of Derby was executed, while the other English prisoners were conscripted into the New Model Army and sent to Ireland. Around 8,000 Scottish prisoners were deported to New England, Bermuda, and the West Indies to work for landowners as indentured labourers. Parliamentary casualties numbered in the low hundreds.

Charles II escaped after many adventures, including one famous incident where he hid from a Parliamentarian patrol in an oak tree in the grounds of Boscobel House.

After the battle, Cromwell returned to Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, one of the parliamentarian strongholds and close to the seat of his late cousin the civil war hero John Hampden. He stayed at the aptly named King's Head Inn, Aylesbury and it was here that he received the thanks of Parliament for his final defeat of the Royalists.

The result of the battle was, in brief, one of those rare victories in which a pursuit is superfluous. Cromwell thought the victory was the greatest of all the favours, or mercies, given to him by God. He famously wrote to William Lenthall, the Speaker of the House of Commons "The dimensions of this mercy are above my thoughts. It is, for aught I know, a crowning mercy". The phrase "Crowning Mercy" is frequently linked to the battle, descriptive of the complete destruction of the last Royalist army and the end of the English Civil War.

The Parliamentary militia were sent home within a week. Cromwell, who had ridiculed "such stuff" six months ago, knew them better now. "Your new raised forces," he wrote to the Rump Parliament, "did perform singular good service, for which they deserve a very high estimation and acknowledgement". The New England preacher Hugh Peters gave the militia a rousing farewell sermon "when their wives and children should ask them where they had been and what news, they should say they had been at Worcester, where England's sorrows began, and where they were happily ended", referring to the first clash of the Royalist and Parliamentarian Armies at the Battle of Powick Bridge on 23 September 1642, almost exactly nine years before.

Before the battle King Charles II contracted the Worcester Clothiers to outfit his army with uniforms but was unable to pay the £453.3s bill. In June 2008 Charles, Prince of Wales paid off the 357 year old debt.