Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  He knew how much he was hated. A year earlier one of the emperor’s counselors had written warning him that Tilly had secret orders from Ferdinand to imprison him or to “send you out of the world in a shorter and more summary manner.” Wallenstein dismissed the warning: “I wonder how you can give ear to such childish tales. The Emperor is a just and grateful sovereign who rewards faithful service in a different way from what you suppose.” But he didn’t doubt that there were many people who wanted him dead: in March 1630 he asked a trusted apothecary to procure for him an antidote to poison. His financial situation was also alarming. The fantastically complex system of credit whereby the war was financed was in the process of collapsing around him. The very day after Ferdinand agreed to his dismissal, before anyone outside Regensburg could have known of it, Hans de Witte, on whose financial wizardry so much of Wallenstein’s magnificence had been based, wrote telling him he would be unable to raise the money for the next of the monthly payments he had been sending him. The banker’s credit had been undermined by the uncertainty of his client’s situation. A month later de Witte drowned himself in the well in his garden. Wallenstein’s response to the despair of his longtime associate was chilling. “The tale passes current here that Hans de Witte has hanged himself,” he wrote to von Taxis. “See what things of mine there are with him and fetch them as speedily as may be, in particular tapestries, gilded leather and other things…. We are in no wise indebted to him.” But heartless as he may have been, he was not invulnerable. About the time of the Regensburg diet he laid off a large number of his servants without pay. The failure of de Witte’s credit might well have made it impossible for him to continue as commander even had the emperor not required his resignation.

  There is yet another way of reading the story. Wallenstein’s rivals had timed their move against him preposterously badly. Two years earlier Wallenstein had commissioned an astrologer to cast the horoscope of Gustavus Adolphus, the king of Sweden, and written that “in the Swedes we shall find a worse enemy than the Turks.” He had perceived that the king, vigorous, bellicose, and so far enormously successful, was potentially the most formidable enemy the Hapsburg emperor faced. Throughout the period of Wallenstein’s first command Gustavus Adolphus was engaged in a protracted conflict with his cousin, the king of Poland, but as soon as he extricated himself from it he turned his attentions southward. A devout Lutheran, he was ready to take on the role of champion of the German Protestants. On July 6, 1630, the third day of the Regensburg diet, he landed with an advance guard of thirteen thousand men at the mouth of the Oder. By the time Wallenstein had been persuaded to resign the Swedes had overrun Pomerania. Without any protest or appeal the former generalissimo withdrew to Bohemia knowing that the emperor had agreed to render himself militarily impotent at the very moment that his realm was undergoing a major foreign invasion. Dividing his time between Gitschin and Prague, Wallenstein waited for the emperor, for Germany, for all Catholic Europe, to discover that they could not do without him, that he, like Alcibiades two millennia before him, was “the only man alive” who could do what had to be done.

  Achilles, having fallen out with his royal master, fumed and raged in his tent. Wallenstein awaited his recall with apparent equanimity. He laid on boar hunts, not so much for himself as for his ever-growing retinue. He was reunited with his duchess. He began work on extending his gardens in Prague and building a second palace at Gitschin. He spent his days among his papers and his nights with his favorite resident astrologer, Battista Senno. It has been plausibly suggested that this was the happiest period of his life. Meanwhile the Swedes swept southward. Wallenstein’s duchy of Mecklenburg was among their conquests; he accepted its loss with surprising sangfroid. The emperor continued to write to him, courteously addressing him by all his titles.

  His army had been partly dispersed, the remnant being united with the Bavarian troops under General Tilly. Officers unwilling to serve under any other commander followed Wallenstein into Bohemia and attached themselves to his court (so did several of the emperor’s chamberlains). Others sought service elsewhere. Arnim switched sides again, to become commander in chief to Gustavus Adolphus’s most important ally among the German princes, the Lutheran elector of Saxony. It was a job which better suited his religious affiliation than his role as Wallenstein’s second in command had done. When the two men met again it was as opponents.

  There were those who asked themselves whether Wallenstein himself might be willing to serve a new and more appreciative master. While he busied himself with embellishing his garden (thirty statues commissioned from the Dutch sculptor Adrien de Vries, a great bronze basin surmounted by a statue of Venus, an aviary built to resemble a fantastic grotto containing four hundred singing birds), all Europe waited, wondering and apprehensive, to see what he would do next. In November 1630 Gustavus Adolphus wrote to him in the friendliest terms promising that he, unlike the ungrateful emperor, would be ready to show him every favor and offering to make him viceroy of Bohemia (once the country had been won from the imperialists). But when General Tilly wrote to inquire whether it was true, as a French gazetteer had reported, that Wallenstein had repaid the courtesy by sending the king a gold chain, Wallenstein retorted curtly that he was preparing a chain of very different kind for Gustavus Adolphus’s neck. Gustavus Adolphus’s messenger had been Count Thurn, erstwhile leader of the Bohemian rebels, now an exile and in service with the Swedes but still dreaming of an independent Bohemia. In the summer of 1631 a Bohemian agent, whose testimony would later be crucial in making the imperial case against Wallenstein, brought him a proposal, probably also originating with Gustavus Adolphus, offering him fourteen thousand Swedish troops under Count Thurn for an unspecified purpose—perhaps the reconquest of Bohemia?

  Wallenstein responded evasively to all these overtures. His accusers were later to allege that for the rest of his life he was secretly working for Sweden and its German Protestant allies, and perhaps for France as well, against the interests of those he pretended to serve, but they could never prove it incontrovertibly. It is hard to imagine why he should have wished to do so. He knew very soon after he had been obliged to resign his command that, should he want to go to war again, he would have no need of a new master.

  By March 1631, less than half a year after his dismissal, Ferdinand was begging him to come to Vienna and advise on how the crisis could be met. He did not stir. The empire was fragmenting as one after another of the Protestant princes allied themselves with Sweden. The imperial cause looked hopeless. Wallenstein’s former officers wrote to him, deploring the muddle and lack of strategy in the imperial and Bavarian armies, now united under the command of General Tilly. Tilly himself wrote: “Your Princely Grace can account yourself fortunate that you have riddance of this heavy toil and great burden.” He probably meant it sincerely. In September he was crushingly defeated by Gustavus Adolphus at Breitenfeld. A caricature in a contemporary broadsheet shows Wallenstein at ease in a grandly regal chair, laughing uproariously at the news of his former colleague’s discomfiture and the rout of the army that had been his own. The caption says that he laughed nonstop, “shaking belly and chair,” for fourteen days. Wallenstein was not much given to belly laughs. It was more plausibly reported that, hearing the news, he remarked that had he been Tilly he would have killed himself.

  In November Sweden’s allies, the Saxons under Arnim, invaded Bohemia. Wallenstein, a private citizen now, left his palace in Prague, the exodus of his enormous household triggering a citywide panic. The imperial garrison withdrew without a battle, leaving the Saxons to occupy the capital. Arnim, who was said to have chosen his route through Bohemia to cause minimum damage to his former commander’s estates, posted guards in front of Wallenstein’s palace to protect it from looters. Rumor circulated to the effect that he would not have had the effrontery to march on Prague at all had Wallenstein not invited him to do so. The former generalissimo now commanded no fighting force but it was still assured, such was the
magnitude of his reputation, that the kingdom of Bohemia lay in his gift.

  Gustavus Adolphus was celebrated by English and other Protestant commentators as the glittering champion of religious and political freedom, a second Gideon who tackled oppressors as bravely as the biblical hero had challenged the Midianites. Seen from the viewpoint of the Holy Roman Emperor and his Catholic subjects, though, he was a sinister predator from the land of outer darkness. The “Lion of Midnight” they called him, the “Midnight King.” As he swept through Germany at the head of his “hunger-wolves” he laid waste the land. A far more belligerent commander than Wallenstein, he seldom withdrew when he could fight. “It was his maxim,” wrote Schiller, “never to decline a battle, so long as it cost him nothing but men.” Those who attempted to deflect his aggression by diplomatic means received short shrift. Rulers of the territories standing in his way begged him to pass them by, honoring their “neutrality.” He scoffed at them: “What is ‘neutrality’? I do not understand it… It is nothing but rubbish which the wind raises and carries away.” No one could withstand him. “We cry ‘Help, Help’ but there is nobody to hear,” wrote one of Ferdinand’s councillors as the imperial capital came under threat. General Tilly was seventy-three years old and, after Breitenfeld, according to a Bavarian councillor, “wholly perplexed and seemingly cast down.” None of his lieutenants seemed a plausible successor. There was, by common consent, only one man in all Europe who could save the situation. In December 1631, only a year and a quarter after he had so brusquely dismissed him, the emperor—by pleading, by imploring, by granting him this time such extraordinary powers and privileges that it seemed to contemporary observers that he had effectively handed over to his subject his imperial authority—prevailed upon Wallenstein to resume his command.

  The generalissimo took up his old position not with jubilation but cautiously and by grudging degrees. Initially he agreed to serve for three months only, to raise an army but not to lead it. He was proud, said his detractors then and later. He wished to humble the emperor who had cast him off, to make his master beg. Perhaps he did, but he was also wary of finding himself once more saddled with the costs of an extended campaign. This time the army was to be financed in a more orderly fashion, with each district of the empire required to pay a levy. That established, Wallenstein began his recruiting.

  Schiller’s Wallenstein boasts:

  I did it. Like a god of war, my name

  went throughout the world. The drum was beat; and, lo;

  The plough, the workshop, is forsaken, all

  Swarm to the old familiar long-loved banners

  It was true. Wallenstein was accounted one born in a happy hour, like Rodrigo Díaz, and believed, moreover, to have supernatural powers. Most of the participants in the Thirty Years’ War had encountered witches and believed in magic. The Duke of Brunswick issued his troops bullets made of glass, the only kind which would not be stopped by the spell which, so he understood, had rendered the entire imperial army invulnerable. Wallenstein’s reputation for wizardry greatly enhanced his standing as a military commander. It was popularly believed that he had made a pact with the powers of darkness which rendered him invincible, that he had “enchained victory to his banner.” He had, besides, a reputation for paying his men promptly. By the end of March he had nearly a hundred thousand men assembled, one of the biggest armies Europe had ever seen, and once more the farms and mines and factories of his Bohemian estates were supplying him with food, clothes, and weapons.

  The three months elapsed. It was unthinkable that anyone other than Wallenstein could lead the army he had created. The emperor entreated him to assume command. He remained immovable. The emperor begged him at least to come to Vienna for talks. He refused to go. (Already he had not seen Ferdinand for four years—they would not meet again.) At last, in the middle of April, when the huge army had already been notionally without a commander in chief for weeks, he agreed to meet the imperial minister Prince Eggenberg at Gollersdorf. There he laid out the conditions on which he would consent to assume the command. Whatever they were, they were accepted.

  When, after the invasion of the Almoravids, Rodrigo Díaz consented to fight again for the king of Castile who had once driven him out, he insisted on terms of service so extraordinary as to render him effectively his master’s equal. So, in a similar situation, did Wallenstein. According to contemporary but unreliable sources, he demanded that he be generalissimo in “assolutissima forma” of all Hapsburg armies, Spanish as well as Austrian. There had been talk of Ferdinand’s heir, the king of Hungary, acting as his joint commander: Wallenstein not only rejected the suggestion, but required an assurance that neither the young king nor his father the emperor would ever come near the army. He would have unrestricted authority to confiscate and award property, a power which gave him unlimited opportunities to win allies and castigate rivals. Neither the emperor nor any of his ministers would have any power to reverse his decisions. He, and he alone, would grant pardons; a pardon granted by the emperor would be valid only if he, Wallenstein, had endorsed it. The emperor would guarantee the costs of the war, and would immediately grant Wallenstein a large sum of money for his personal use. On top of all this he was granted the license, as the Cid had been, to build a kingdom for himself. He would have the right to keep and rule over any territory that he conquered. At the war’s conclusion he would receive compensation for any property he had lost (Mecklenburg, for instance, which was already in the hands of the Swedes) and he would be rewarded for his services with a part of the Hapsburgs’ hereditary lands.

  Cardinal Richelieu, ignoring the fact that he himself was another example of a subject who had overtopped his ruler, described the agreement as “an outrage perpetrated by the servant against his master.” Schiller, in the next century, saw it as a clear prelude to rebellion: by it the emperor was deprived of his authority, and placed at the mercy of his general. Wallenstein, who had been dismissed—as Alcibiades and the Cid had been in their time—because he had grown too great, was now returned, with new, officially sanctioned powers which made him greater still.

  His army was multiethnic, polyglot, a horde as menacing as any that ever swept in off the steppes. Thomas Carlyle was to describe them as “all the wild lawless spirits of Europe assembled within the circuit of a single trench … Ishmaelites, their hands against every man, and every man’s hand against them; the instruments of rapine; tarnished with almost every vice and knowing scarcely any virtue but those of reckless bravery and uncalculating obedience to their leader.” Carlyle, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, was referring to Schiller’s drama, but Schiller accurately reproduced firsthand impressions of Wallenstein’s army. Its leaders were exotic, frightening. There was General Ottavio Piccolomini, of whom much more later, whom the German historian Wolfgang Menzel called “a venal Italian mercenary, the most depraved wretch that appeared on the scene during the war,” who was generally held responsible for the disgraceful murder of a Danish prince under the flag of truce and whose use of violence in exacting “contributions” struck even Wallenstein himself as culpably extreme. There was Count Isolani, crazy gambler and leader of the Croats. There was General von Pappenheim, a byword for courage and for bellicosity who bore on his brow a birthmark in the shape of crossed swords and who had been Tilly’s lieutenant when their armies sacked and burned the great city of Magdeburg, the worst atrocity of that atrocious war.

  The troops these generals led seemed, to the civilian eye, outlandish and savage. Isolani’s Croats, horsemen who operated as scouts and skirmishers, wore Turkish armor which gave them the look, to the devout peasant, of the infidel, Christendom’s enemy. The Scots, English, Irish, and Italian mercenaries were no less alien, jabbering in their incomprehensible languages, all too evidently gathered on the bleeding empire like flies on a carcass, greedy, vicious, and predatory. Alongside the strangers were known enemies, men who had fought for Denmark or Sweden or for Count Mansfeld until the misfortunes of war
had swept them onto the other side, and, curiously enough for an imperial army, there were thousands of refugees from imperial persecution. Ferdinand was still energetically attempting to impose Catholicism on all his Austrian subjects. As a contemporary news sheet reported: “Peasants do not want to be reformed and are going to war in large numbers—there being nine to ten thousand of them in Friedland’s army.” When Rodrigo Díaz took Valencia, a triumph which was to be represented in the centuries to come as a victory for the Cross, he did so at the head of a partially Muslim army, the supporters of the deposed King al-Qadir having joined his forces. So Wallenstein, military representative of the Catholic Church, was followed by hordes of persecuted Protestants. Driven from their homes and deprived of their land and livelihoods by the emperor’s religious policies, they could find no other way of supporting themselves but by killing and dying for the emperor.

  These warriors conducted themselves as savagely as those of any other contemporary army. A pamphlet entitled The Dreadful but Truthful Narration of the Exceedingly Barbarous, Verily Satanic Devastation by the Imperialists of the Town of Goldberg describes an occasion when some of Wallenstein’s troops axed the gates and overran a town, raping the women, stealing all movable goods, and then torturing the men in a variety of horrific ways to induce them to reveal where more treasure might be concealed. Homeless and inimical to homeliness and civility alike, the soldiers seemed to those they supposedly defended to be beasts of prey, feeding on flocks the peasant fattened, as wild and wolfish as Achilles and his Myrmidons must have looked to those who watched them, terrified, from the walls of Troy. And Wallenstein, their leader, whom Carlyle imagined as “the object of universal reverence where nothing else is revered,” epitomized the dread they inspired. “Leaving a hundred villages in flames,” wrote the nineteenth-century historian Wolfgang Menzel, “he marched with terror in his van.”