Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  He was forty years old. As the last and most momentous decade of his life began he was well past his physical prime. Contemporary portraits show a stern, pale, strongly sculpted face: hair receding from a high, furrowed brow, a long straight nose, high cheekbones, full red lips, a look of dour watchfulness. He is described as being exceptionally tall. The delinquent “Mad Wallenstein” had matured into a man who intimidated not so much by his rages (though they were still notorious) as by his reserve. He had no confidants, no advisers. He was famously unreadable. “None but God delves to the bottom of his heart,” wrote one who knew him. Kepler had noted that the gloomy planet Saturn had been in the ascendant at his birth, inducing a tendency to “melancholy, always vigilant thinking,” and indicating that he would be “harsh to those beneath him … usually silent… of an assiduous, restless temper.”

  He had an intelligence so incisive, so vigorous that the shilly-shallying of others irritated him almost beyond bearing. He abhorred futile words, his own or others’. Once, when a delegate visited him with an unwelcome proposal when he was ill in bed, he hid his face in his pillow and stopped his ears with both hands. He had no time to fritter way, no taste for frivolity. “He had a marked aversion to regular court jesters, as well as to buffoons of every kind,” noted Gualdo Priorato. In an era when even the highest-ranking grandees in Europe opened their letters to each other with paragraph upon paragraph of courteous salutation, he addressed all his correspondents, up to and including the emperor, with a brusqueness close to lèse-majesté. “The Duke of Friedland doth incline in thoughts and manners to be somewhat rough,” commented the emperor.

  He was not a committee man. He disdained to justify himself, to explain himself, to listen to others’ arguments. “When he commanded,” according to a French tract published shortly after his death, “no man must open his mouth but execute his order without reply.” One of his most frequent rejoinders (in Italian, his second language, and his favorite for expressions of emotion) was “non si puó”—it can’t be done. He seldom deigned to explain to those whose requests he thus brushed aside why it couldn’t, even if the inquirer was his imperial master. When the representatives of the city of Magdeburg came to implore him to reduce the levy he had imposed upon them, he interrupted their petition rudely: “I cannot haggle. I am no trader.” “I have no longer any use for the dean,” he wrote of a cleric who had balked at some too-summary order. “He wants to be supplicated. That I neither care nor am accustomed to do.” In 1619, when one of his officers rode up alongside his horse to remonstrate against his astonishing order to lead the Moravian militia out of Moravia, Wallenstein silenced the man with a single barked-out word, drew his sword and killed him.

  He was not incommunicative. At home in Gitschin he would write ten or twelve letters a day in his own hand, over and above the far greater number dictated to secretaries. On campaign his output was no less; his inexhaustible energies were never fully occupied by what was happening in the here and now, even when the business to hand was a battle on which the fate of all Europe might hang. As indefatigable and as attentive to detail as Cato had been, he controlled, even at long distance and when absent for months or even years on end, every facet of his property’s management. As he drove the emperor’s enemies out of Silesia he took the time to write to his agent ordering that silkworks be established on his estate and Italian weavers brought to work there. One the eve of his conclusive campaign against King Christian of Denmark he sent orders that a hundred lime trees be procured for an avenue in his garden. Shortly before his momentous encounter with King Gustavus II Adolphus at Lützen he wrote to the supervisor of buildings on his estates urging him to have tiles baked so that an entire town could be reroofed: “It is our desire that nowhere shall shingle roofs obtain.” But, voluminous though they are, his letters are essentially functional. To his subordinates he issues orders. To his political masters he reports his movements. With Count Karl von Harrach, the eminent courtier who was his second father-in-law and who probably came closer than anyone else ever did to being his friend, he exchanged information.

  As a young man he had frequented the court, as was necessary for a man on the make. But once he was in position of power he stayed away for longer and longer intervals. Like the Cid of the Poema, a man of action contemptuous of effete silk-slippered lordlings, he was riled by the airs and graces of those of superior hereditary rank but inferior achievements. He was impatient of the rigmarole by which the gradations of social and political hierarchy were marked, even when it was designed to honor him. He disliked being bowed to or flattered or fawned upon. “He was not pleased that anyone should stand to salute him, nor that anybody should behold or look on him as he passed,” wrote a contemporary. If someone addressed him overceremoniously he would abruptly turn away. And if he was irked by deference to himself, he abhorred being required to defer to others. He avoided having to humble himself before those who could claim to be his superiors by refusing to see them. On his way to court in 1626 he fell ill, and was obliged to stay for nearly a month in a wretched inn in an out-of-the-way village. The illness, whether psychosomatic or assumed, certainly seems to have been connected with his reluctance to expose himself to courtiers’ games. “I have a harder fight with certain ministers than with the enemy,” he wrote. At the time he died it was seven years since he had last been in Vienna, the imperial capital, six years since he had laid eyes on the emperor whose commander in chief he was.

  Immured in his palace he awed the public not by spectacular appearances, but by his absence and invisibility. He wanted neither to see nor be seen by hoi polloi. It was not easy to gain access to him. Where possible he liked to observe a man covertly before granting him an audience. The tribulations of the elector of Brandenburg’s envoy, Count Bertram von Pfuel, were typical. In his desperate attempts to obtain a few minutes’ conversation with Wallenstein, von Pfuel lay in wait for his carriage on Prague’s Charles Bridge and thrust a letter through the window as it passed. He joined the press of noblemen who stood all day by the entrance gate to Wallenstein’s palace, hoping to catch the great man’s attention as he returned home. He sweated for hours and hours in anterooms. At last he received an invitation to dinner, but was seated nowhere near Wallenstein. He was granted, or so he thought, an appointment, only to see Wallenstein’s carriage roll away from the gate just as he arrived. Another appointment. Again von Pfuel arrived to see his quarry in the act of escaping him. With reckless temerity he asked to be allowed to join Wallenstein in his carriage for the brief journey up to the Castle. Wallenstein consented, but when von Pfuel brought out some notes he declared that he could not abide anything in writing (he, who wrote or dictated dozens of letters a day) and that he had too much on his mind to attend von Pfuel’s requests. Those with whom Wallenstein wished to communicate would hear from him in his own time. To force oneself into his presence was to incur his displeasure.

  He was as fastidious about what he touched as he was about whom he met. In his household the tablecloths and napkins were only used once. He bathed regularly—to his contemporaries’ astonishment—in a silver bath made especially for him in Genoa, or in a tub constructed by a goldsmith from Prague. His dress was magnificent. Tradition has it that he invariably wore black, with just a sash of blood red, an outfit consonant with his fabulous reputation as a sabled prince of darkness, but his tailors’ bills reveal his taste for more variety in his sumptuous ostentation: “eighteen ells long carmine fringes for His Princely Grace’s gloves,” “a robe of scarlet thickly edged in carmine and a doublet of red satin.” Red—clearly visible across a battlefield—was useful. “In the field,” wrote Priorato, who had fought under his command, “his usual dress was a buff or elk-skin coat, red hose, a red scarf, a scarlet cloak and a grey castor hat, adorned with red feathers.” He loved blue as well: blue leather tooled in gold to line the walls of his palace in Prague, powder-blue liveries for his scores of pages. It was said that he painted his lips.

 
He was a harsh but scrupulous employer of servants and commander of soldiers, one who paid promptly and demanded punctilious obedience. According to Schiller he issued an order that all his men were to wear red sashes. “A captain of horse no sooner heard the order than pulling off his gold-embroidered sash, he trampled it under foot. Wallenstein promoted him on the spot.” A contemporary writer reports that he preferred his officers to be “men of mean condition” who, owing their elevation to him alone, would therefore be the more devoted to him. But “whosoever sought to enrol in his service was to take very good heed for he dismissed none unless it came of his own accord.” His people were to be his absolutely, and preferably forever.

  He was already suffering from gout, brought on—or so he believed—by drinking too much wine. Several of his most prominent contemporaries were sots. King Christian of Denmark was sometimes too inebriated to deal with matters of state for weeks on end. Elector John George of Saxony, the most powerful of the German Protestant princes, was another drunk. “He is a mere brute,” said Wallenstein; “see how he lives.” It was an era when what passed for moderate consumption might well have been enough to damage a person’s health. By the time Wallenstein entered middle age he ate and drank abstemiously, preferring beer brewed on his own estates to wine and avoiding red meat. But it was too late to save him from the gout, which was a constant and ever-worsening trial. Towards the end of his life he had to be carried into battle in a litter. Already, in the early 1620s, he wore fur-lined boots designed to mitigate the pain in his feet, and he rode with stirrups made of velvet. Suffering made him irascible. “Our General is in the grip of his gout,” wrote one of the councillors most friendly towards him, “Hardly one in the town durst other than whisper in his neighbour’s ear lest he disturb the Prince by the clamour of his speech.” He detested noise. In Prague, and wherever he stayed on his travels, he ordered that all the streets adjoining his residence be covered with straw to muffle the sound of passing footsteps and closed off with chains to exclude wheeled traffic. No cock might be permitted to crow in his neighborhood. When he felt unwell, as he often did, he forbade the ringing of church bells. His officers removed their spurs before entering his presence lest their jingling irritate him. In his vicinity his attendants crept and murmured. His court was populous—at the height of his power his household numbered nine hundred people—but it was not animated. He kept a lavish table for guests and dependents, but he himself dined meagerly and alone.

  Landownership was for him both a business, at which he worked assiduously, and a pleasure. He disliked dogs—presumptuous, fawning, noisy creatures—and it is said that when he entered a town he would have all the strays rounded up and killed. But he took pleasure in animals who kept to their proper place. In the palace grounds in Prague he had an aviary built to resemble a marvelous grotto for his collection of exotic birds, and at Gitschin he kept a zoo, where he liked to admire the red deer. He was no huntsman, unlike the emperor, and unlike the elector of Saxony, who claimed to have killed over 150,000 animals. But he was, like Alcibiades, an enthusiastic breeder of horses, of which he kept hundreds and on which he spent thousands of gulden. An Irish adventurer describes his stables, where the mangers were of marble “and by each manger a spring of clear water to give drink.” The warhorse shot under him at the battle of Lützen he had stuffed and mounted and displayed in his palace in Prague.

  On his vast Bohemian estates he was de facto an independent ruler. At Gitschin he conjured up a brand-new city built to an orderly plan incorporating handsome squares and parks and grand avenues and a massive palace for Wallenstein himself. A contemporary biographer, watching five thousand men at work on the project, compared the scene with the construction of Carthage as described by Virgil. He had his own court, his own executioner, his own councillors and chancellery, and his own governor, Gerhard von Taxis, who stood in for him when he was absent. He might be a warrior but he was always, first and foremost, an administrator. He had farms, mines, industries, and a subject population who were both his labor force and his captive market. No one in his land might drink any but his beer except “if they travel, when now and then a draught must at need be quaffed, though otherwise positively not.” Cheese makers were brought from Italy and a tailor from Paris so that Wallenstein could eat Parmesan and wear French fashion without spending cash outside his own domain. He decreed how much butter and cheese his cows should yield; he gave orders that every house was to have a store of water, that by every chimney a ladder was to be kept. He required the burghers of his towns to build their houses “of stone or brick, executed finely and neatly” (order and seemliness were as important to his fastidious mind as productivity). Everything in the realm he had acquired was to be efficient, prosperous, and subservient to him. Golo Mann, a recent biographer, has remarked how often, in his correspondence, the phrase “für mich” (for me) recurs. Von Taxis wrote to him once that deposits of a mineral “red in colour,” called cinnabar, had been found on his land. Wallenstein responded acidly: “Take me not for such a fool. I know very well what cinnabar is. Let it work for me.”

  He married his second wife, Isabella von Harrach, in 1623. He was often away from her on campaign but he spoke kindly of her. Letters she wrote to him have survived, and seem genuinely affectionate. Of all the many allegations made against him, none has to do with his sexual conduct, which can probably therefore be assumed (given how many watchers there were eager to discredit him) to have been irreproachable. Kepler had said that Wallenstein would “lack brotherly or marital love” and perhaps he was too dourly self-contained to be other than a little frigid emotionally but he was always solicitous for Isabella’s safety and conscious of what was due to her. She bore him a son, who died in infancy, and a daughter.

  Wallenstein had become a great man in Bohemia. It was not enough. Soon after his wedding he made the move which eventually led to him becoming, in his own person, a great European power. The Holy Roman Emperor had no standing army. Ferdinand’s realm was geographically enormous, politically ramshackle, threatened by invaders without and dissenters within, and yet he had no regular troops of his own for its defense. In each crisis ad hoc armies were pieced together from local levies and militias (like the Moravian force with which Wallenstein had served), augmented by units recruited at their own expense by ambitious private gentlemen. In 1617, for instance, when the Venetians were besieging Gradisca, Wallenstein had raised a regiment and led it to help relieve the city on the emperor’s behalf. These piecemeal and unreliable forces were never enough. The emperor had to depend on the military support of the princes of the empire, who were under no constitutional obligation to use their armies on his behalf and who expected to be well rewarded when they did so. In order to subdue the rebellious Bohemians he had had to call upon the aid of the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria, to whom, by the time the uprising had been put down, he was massively in debt. Without a sufficient army or the money to raise one Ferdinand was dangerously dependent on his subject rulers, and that dependence made nonsense of his supposed authority over them.

  Wallenstein saw his need. He must also have seen how tremendous might be the reward to anyone who could supply it. In the spring of 1623 he made the emperor an astounding offer. He, Wallenstein, a private individual albeit a rich one, a nobleman but not from one of the empire’s great families, would do what no one else, not even the mighty Hapsburg himself, seemed capable of doing. He would provide the emperor with an army. He had to repeat his offer several times. So unprecedented, so extraordinary was it that the emperor and his ministers were initially suspicious, even afraid.

  Schiller was to liken Wallenstein’s political opponents to ignorant conjurors who invoke a mighty spirit, “and when he comes, / straight their flesh creeps and quivers, and they dread him / more than the ills ’gainst which they called him up.” In Wallenstein’s lifetime there were still, supposedly, conjurors abroad in Europe. Half a century earlier John Doughty had told members of Drake’s crew that he co
uld summon up spirits, and later in his life Wallenstein was rumored to have the same skill. It was a dangerous gift. A conjuror summoned spirits at his or her peril: in several medieval legends a magician is punished for his impious breaching of the divide between nature and the supernatural when a spirit he has called up proves too potent for him to master, defies him, torments him, and eventually drags him down to Hell. During the sixteenth century a version of those legends began to be told about a Doctor Faustus of Wurttemberg. In the 1580s The History of the Damnable life and deserved death of Doctor John Faustus was published first in German and soon thereafter in French and English. Faustus summons up a devil, Mephistopheles, who promises to gratify his every wish for a period of years on condition that at the end of that time he will surrender his soul in payment. It was a compelling story. In England Christopher Marlowe made of it a beautiful and terrible warning of the worthlessness of all pleasure, knowledge, and power in the face of eternal damnation. But the story could be read not only as a parable about an individual’s spiritual ordeal, but also as a political allegory. The Athenians, having made Alcibiades commander of the most splendid fighting force ever mustered by a Greek city, immediately recoiled aghast at the danger he constituted—thus empowered—to themselves as well as to their enemies. Alfonso of Castile twice summoned Rodrigo Díaz to his rescue and, having done so, hastened to be rid of him. Wallenstein, a new Mephistopheles, offered his imperial master a superb temptation: the military power to make himself ruler of the best part of Europe in fact as well as in name. Ferdinand hesitated because he and his councillors could all sense the infernal danger of the deal. So far Wallenstein had been a loyal servant of the empire, but Wallenstein at the head of an army on the scale he proposed would be a servant with terrifying powers, and there was no knowing what diabolical price he might eventually exact for his service.