By the summer of 1651, [Parliamentarian leader Oliver] Cromwell held Edimburgh and part of southern Scoland, reinforced by thousands of fresh English troops. The king's growing army -- a motley collection of Highland foot soldiers, regular cavalry, local reinforcements, even some archers from Perth -- gathered at nearby Stirling. [David] Leslie still commanded the Scottish forces, but the Dunbar debacle left him reluctant to leave heavily-fortified Stirling and provoke a fight. Impatient, King Charles [II] wanted to march on England, expecting that English royalists would rise en masse and carry him triumphant into London.

The standoff broke near the end of July, when English troops crossed the Firth of Forth and lured part of the Scots army out to meet them at Inverkeithing. There the Scots fought with ferocious courage, but casualties were heavy. Highland lore tells of eight soldiers killed, one after the other, using their bodies as human shields to protect their chief, Sir Hector Maclean; as each man fell, the next leaped forward, crying "Another for Hector!" Although some Scots escaped to rejoin the main force at Stirling, the battle was an English victory.

Instead of following up with an attack on Stirling, Cromwell continued his northward advance. The southern route -- to England -- lay open. Historians debate whether Cromwell's troop movements were a ruse, aimed at tempting Charles to leave the Stirling defenses and invade England. If that was Cromwell's intention, it worked. On August 1, King Charles II and his Scots army crossed the border near Carlisle, heading for London. Cromwell turned around and followed.

The anticipated royalist rising did not materialize. Charles received little welcome on the 300-mile march south, his Scotsmen viewed as foreign invaders instead of liberators. He gained a few new recruits, but not nearly enough, and the royalists were clearly outnumbered. By the end of August, with Cromwell's army in hot pursuit and other Parliamentary forces blocking the route to London, Charles and his exhausted men stopped at the city of Worcester. The citizens of this densely-populated cathedral town had no choice but to open their gates to the royalist army and to wait for the inevitable battle at their doorsteps.

On the morning of September 3, 1651, exactly one year to the day from the Battle of Dunbar, Cromwell launched his attack. The battle raged outside the city until afternoon, the king himself leading an assault of foot soldiers and cavalry, but the royalists were doomed. As Cromwell described it, "We beat the enemy from hedge to hedge, till we beat them into Worcester." Finally, the English slaughtered a garrison of royalist gunners and turned their cannons on the city. Civilians cowered in their homes amidst the bombardment. Parliamentary soldiers poured through the gates and battered down doors to finish the killing and claim their plunder in a house-to-house rampage. The last desperate Scots fought in the streets with musket butts and swords as the sky grew dark.

The casualty figures, much like Dunbar, totaled 4,000 royalists dead and 10,000 captured, with minimal losses on the English side. The king escaped, to exile in France. An elated Cromwell wrote "Indeed this hath been a very glorious mercy."

Herded into a temporary prison of Worcester cathedral, then driven like cattle to London, the surviving Scots fared little better than the Dunbar captives of a year before. As one witness described a convoy of defeated Highlanders: "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 handful of straw in their hands which they had pulled upon the fields as they passed." English bystanders, moved to sympathy, threw bread and money to suffering Scotsmen, and in some cases, aided escapes.

Many of the royalist captives, however, ended up in makeshift prison camps (even prison ships) in London and other cities. The death count rose, from starvation, disease and infection, as the Council of State debated how to dispose of the Scottish prisoners. Simply executing the men, while not unprecedented in 17th-century wartime, risked intensifying Scottish nationalism and renewing support for the exiled King. Ransoming or paroling the Scots was dangerous since they could re-cross the border and return to their clans, able to raise armies and fight again. Sending Scottish war prisoners to Ireland would complicate the ongoing military conquest there, and the Scots could not be trusted as recruits for the Parliamentary Armt. A thousand prisoners were put to work draining the fens in East Anglia; contractors took others to labor overseas as far away as possible -- to Virginia, Barbados, Bermuda and New England.

As the title of the excerpted article suggests, the main interest of the writer is in those Scottish prisoners from Worcester who were shipped to New England. Scots were also deported to New England after the referenced battle at Dunbar, but no mention is made of Dunbar prisoners being shipped to Virginia.

William MackGahye turned up as an indentured servant in Virginia in 1653. Could he have been a member of the Scottish army at Worcester?

McGehee clan lore clearly places our immigrant ancestor as a participant in the bloody wars of the British Reformation, which raged for more than a century in one form or another. However, he wound up in Virginia in the aftermath of the overthrow of King Charles I and the unsuccessful attempt by Charles II to restore the monarchy by force. If a McGehee researcher were to look into what records may remain identifying the royalist captives deported to Virginia after Worcester, he or she might very well find our ancestor.

*The Highlander, "The Magazine of Scottish Heritage," is published by Angus J. Ray Associates, Inc., seven times a year. The publishers may be contacted by mail to 87 Highland Avenue, Hull, MA 02045.