The Journal of Joachim Hane / containing his escapes and sufferings during his employment by Oliver Cromwell in France from November 1653 to February 1654

CONTAINING HIS ESCAPES AND SUFFERINGS DURING HIS EMPLOYMENT BY OLIVER CROMWELL IN FRANCE FROM NOVEMBER 1653 TO FEBRUARY 1654 EDITED FROM THE MANUSCRIPT IN THE LIBRARY OF WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD By C. H. FIRTH, M.A. OXFORD B. H. BLACKWELL, 50 & 51 BROAD STREET LONDON T. FISHER UNWIN, PATERNOSTER SQUARE M DCCC XCVI OXFORD: HORACE HART PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
Joachim Hane, the author of the following journal and the hero of the adventures recorded in it, was a German engineer in the service of the Commonwealth. During the Civil War there were many foreign soldiers in the armies both of the King and the Parliament. Readers of Carlyle's Cromwell will remember 'Dutch Dalbier,' from whom, according to Carlyle, 'Cromwell first of all learned the mechanical part of soldiering'—a soldier who first served the Parliament but met his death at St. Neots in 1648 while heading a royalist rising against it. Another Dutchman in the Parliament's service was Vandruske, who like Dalbier went over to the royalist cause, and ended by seeking his fortune in the service of the Czar. A third of these foreign adventurers was Sir Bernard Gascoyne, or Bernardino Guasconi, a Florentine, condemned to death with Lucas and Lisle at Colchester, but spared to be rewarded by Charles II and to be employed by him as English envoy at Vienna. There were many others of less note in the two armies, but it was not merely as fighting men that the services of foreign soldiers were desired and valued. What made officers bred abroad necessary to both parties was their knowledge of the scientific side of warfare, a subject of which home-made royalist and parliamentary colonels knew little or nothing. Each party found these scientifically trained soldiers indispensable as engineers and commanders of artillery. When the king first established his headquarters at Oxford, and proceeded to fortify the town, he appears to have had no qualified engineer in his army. According to Wood the first fortifications about the city 'were mostly contrived by one Richard Rallingson, Bachelor of Arts of Queen's College,' who was rewarded by Charles with promotion to the rank of M.A. Such amateur engineers might be employed at a pinch, but the chief engineer in the service of Charles I was Sir Bernard de Gomme, another Dutchman, whose career is excellently sketched by Mr. Gordon Goodwin in the Dictionary of National Biography . The plans of the castle at Liverpool and the citadel he designed for Dublin, with his diagrams of the battles of Newbury and Marston Moor, are now in the British Museum.