The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  The situation for the Emperor was intolerable, but there seemed no way out. Any open attack on the general, considering the extent of his power and of his supposed influence with the army, might precipitate some catastrophic treachery. Better to veil mutual suspicion under a pretence of confidence than rush Wallenstein into raising a revolt in Bohemia or going over to the enemy with his troops.

  There is no evidence of any further definite plot against Wallenstein, for if any such plot existed it was only in the minds of the young Ferdinand and his supporters. For some time even the Spanish party preferred the idea of Wallenstein’s continuance in command to that of the inexperienced King of Hungary;[35] the general’s own conduct forced them only by degrees to give whole-hearted support to young Ferdinand, and the development of events throughout the year gives proof of no defined scheme on the part of Ferdinand’s supporters. But if no connecting thread binds the events of 1633 to the murder of Wallenstein in February 1634, this much at least is clear: the destruction of his personal power was essential to the maturing of the plan for a joint attack on their enemies by the rulers at Vienna and Madrid.

  4.

  From the beginning of his career Wallenstein had been conscious, perhaps over-conscious, of the hostility of Vienna, and since his dismissal in 1630 the desire for revenge had dominated his policy.[36] Only the means to his end did not always present themselves, and after Lützen he became a prey to uncertainty. Intermittently he seems to have contemplated joining forces with the Saxons, making a private peace with John George in his own interests, leading a revolt in Bohemia. Noble conceptions float hazily in his letters, but not one of them is consistently pursued. In the last year of his life he appears vindictive, changeable, hesitant, a sick, superstitious man surrounded by doctors and astrologers.[37]

  At Lützen he had been ill with gout, and his health thereafter broke down completely, carrying the ruin of his mind with it. Grimly significant, the bold signature of 1623 dwindles to a crippled scrawl before the end of 1633.[38] The egomania which had marked his career soared no longer on the wings of genius; even his organizing skill was less, and he parried the attacks of Vienna and Madrid clumsily, arrogantly or not at all. The actions of Wallenstein, from Lützen to his murder, are the actions of an old and sick man, a man enmeshed in his own illusions, seeking guidance no longer from his own brain but from the revelations of astrologers. In his dual personality the contradiction between the hard-headed man of the world and the superstitious idealist seems to have resolved itself in the victory of the latter. There remained of his once acute worldly perceptions nothing but the mean desire for a personal reward, cutting uncouthly across the grandiose plans with which he fed those with whom he came in contact.[39]

  The heaviest loss Wallenstein had suffered at Lützen was that of Pappenheim. Reckless of his men, arrogant and insubordinate, Pappenheim was nevertheless the soldiers’ hero: tireless, restless, vivid, the first in attack, the last in retreat.[40] Stories of his fantastic courage were told round the camp fires and he had a legend before he was dead—the hundred scars that he boasted, the birthmark like crossed swords which glowed red when he was angry.[41] He flashes past against that squalid background, the Rupert of the German war. His loyalty to Wallenstein, his affection and admiration,[42] had been of greater effect in inspiring the troops than Wallenstein probably realized. The general owed his power to his control over the army alone, and the loss of Pappenheim was irreparable.

  Deceived by his apparent strength, the general did not pause to analyse its cause, and during the year 1633 he forfeited both the loyalty and respect of his men. Immediately after Lützen he signalized his indignation at the defeat by arresting, trying, and condemning for cowardice and treachery thirteen officers and five men.[43] In vain his leading subordinates implored him to reconsider the sentences; far from cowing the army, the trials had evoked mutinous murmurs, but Wallenstein would not stay for reason or pity, and on February 14th 1633 his scapegoats were executed in public at Prague with every circumstance of military ignominy.[44]

  This actual brutality was paralleled in the popular mind by stories about his dangerous humours which doubtless had roots, however slender, in fact. He would have no officers come into his room in jingling spurs, he would have straw laid in the neighbouring streets to mute the rattle of wheels on cobbles, he killed the dogs, cats and cocks wherever he lodged, he had had a servant hanged for waking him in the night, he kept special bravos for the immediate chastisement of visitors who talked too loud.[45]

  Wallenstein’s conduct justified the rumours; in the opening weeks of 1633 he shut himself away from the world and allowed no one to visit him except his servants, his brother-in-law Trčka[46] and General Holk. Trčka was a cipher; Holk was not a man likely to soothe his temper or replace Pappenheim as a popular figure with the army. A drunken, brutal boor, Holk was competent in the bludgeoning, ruthless manner. ‘Hol’ Kuh’, the peasants called him, clumsily punning on his name and his exploits in plunder. He had once been a Lutheran and remained so in theory, but a popular song put the expressive verse into his mouth:

  Conscience hither, conscience thither,

  I care for nought but worldly honour,

  Fight not for faith, fight but for gold,

  God can look after the other world.[47]

  Until a few minutes before his death, it summed up his feelings with tolerable accuracy.

  Wallenstein’s position with his army was further undermined by reckless recruiting. His personal lands had been invaded in the previous year; for the first time in his military career his funds were unequal to his needs, and he fell back on the old and evil method of selling commissions without inquiring into the credentials of those who bought them.[48]

  Meanwhile, Maximilian was in a fever of irritation. While Wallenstein marched to Lützen he had fallen back with his few troops under Aldringer to Bavaria and there passed the winter and early spring on tenterhooks of anxiety. A large detachment of the Swedish army under Marshal Horn had pressed up the Rhine during the autumn of 1632 and occupied the greater part of Alsace. Hence it turned eastwards and in the following March joined with an equally large force under Bernard of Saxe-Weimar at Oberndorf in the Black Forest. Their intention was to crush Bavaria.[49] Ever since January Maximilian had been asking Wallenstein vainly for reinforcements.[50] Lacking these, the wretched Aldringer was chivied back into Munich, while many of his over-marched, exhausted troops surrendered to the Swedes.[51] Mercifully for Maximilian, ill-feeling between Bernard and Horn, want and mutiny among the men, held up the attack.[52] In May the Elector, despairing of Wallenstein’s help, appealed directly to Holk. A good subordinate, Holk merely passed the letter on.[53] With one of those half-gestures by which Wallenstein intermittently attempted to prove his loyalty, he sent Holk to Eger whence he could watch the progress of events in Bavaria. Whatever confidence he created by this move, he immediately destroyed again by establishing a prolonged truce with Arnim in which terms of peace were discussed with markedly little reference to Vienna.[54] He may have regarded himself as the Emperor’s agent in these negotiations, but more probably he was playing for time in order to gauge accurately the best advantage for himself. Since May a confidant of his, the Bohemian exile Kinsky at Dresden, had been working out plans in conjunction with Feuquières and the Swedes, for a national rising in Bohemia.[55] Wallenstein’s part in these, if any, must remain doubtful, but it is significant that his chief confidant at this time was his brother-in-law, Trčka, who had burnt his fingers badly in the rising of 1618.

  Whatever Wallenstein’s motives, his negotiations with Arnim were not supported by any strong desire for peace in Vienna. The party of the young King of Hungary and his friend, Count Trautmansdorff, was growing more effective on the Council than that of the old Emperor and Eggenberg, and in the course of the summer young Ferdinand gained the support of the Spanish ambassador.

  The Swedes under Marshal Horn had been for some months threatening Breisach,[5
6] the fortress which guards the higher waters of the Rhine and from whose eminence the traffic up and down the river may be effectively controlled. Should the Emperor, and thereby the King of Spain, lose Breisach, the Cardinal-Infant’s plan for transporting an army overland would be scotched at the outset, and he might as well put on his robe and biretta again and devote himself to theology. In May 1633 the Spanish ambassador informed the Emperor that his master would shoulder the expenses of the war, if he might direct it.[57] The Cardinal-Infant had already assembled an army in Italy ready to cross the Alps.[58] But early in July Horn closed in his blockade round Breisach.

  Meanwhile on the Saxon border plague devoured Arnim’s army and Wallenstein’s. The imperialist troops, greedy for plunder, murmured at the enforced idleness.[59] To still their outcry,[60] Wallenstein at length took up arms again and launched Holk, not to the help of Maximilian, but against Saxony, intending by this demonstration of force to induce Arnim, John George and even Bernard of Saxe-Weimar to treat his offers of peace with respect. Plague, the horrible companion of the war, defeated his plan. Holk reached Leipzig, with the pestilence raging among his men, only to find that Bernard would not so much as answer his letters.[61] He had no choice but to fall back once again across country which his own deliberate plundering had stripped bare. Bowed down by useless booty, his men stumbled in the mud and were crushed under wagons and the feet of their comrades. Hungry, mutinous, diseased and weary, they died by the way in ditches and barns, untended, in the stormy August rains.[62] Typhus raged in the army, but there was worse than that; bubonic plague, the scourge of the latter half of the war, spread horribly among the troops. Bubonic plague killed Holk.

  Coming out to meet them with fresh stores, Colonel Hatzfeld found the old barbarian at Adorf, huddled in his coach, angry and terrified.[63] He had sent out to offer five hundred talers for a Lutheran minister to pray with him, but in all that desolate country none could be found; he had forsaken his God, and forsaken of his God he died.[64]

  Once again, in September, Wallenstein called a truce, and once again the negotiations came to nothing. No one on the Protestant side believed that the general had the support of Vienna.[65] Rightly so, for by September the breaking-point had come between him and the imperial government. The Duke of Feria, with the advance guard of the Spanish army, was waiting at Innsbruck to march on Breisach; he wanted Aldringer to help him. Throughout August Wallenstein had hesitated to let Aldringer go, and when the Spanish ambassador asked in person for help, had dismissed him with scornful words.[66] On September 29th 1633, he wrote to the Emperor again asserting his unwillingness to let Aldringer join the Spaniards,[67] but the little self-made soldier from Luxemburg had already fooled him. Seven years before, Wallenstein had called him an ‘ink-swiller’; meeting Feria in person at Schongau, the ‘ink-swiller’ had agreed to put his forces at his disposal whether Wallenstein would or no.[68]

  The landslide in the army had begun, and Wallenstein did not realize it. Despising his officers individually, he could not see that his power depended on their goodwill.

  On September 29th the armies of Feria and Aldringer met at Ravensburg, on October 3rd they relieved Constance, on the 20th Breisach. Meanwhile, in the east, Wallenstein clumsily attempted to redeem his position. Descending rapidly on Silesia, he surprised the Swedish troops under Thurn and his disorderly lieutenant, the ‘brandy-souser’ Duval,[69] at Steinau, and within a few days occupied the whole province. But joy gave place to anger at Vienna when they heard that the arch-rebel Thurn had been set free. He had bought his liberty, Wallenstein explained, by surrendering all the fortresses in Silesia;[70] the excuse was sound on military grounds, but taken in conjunction with the rumours of Wallenstein’s understanding with the Bohemian rebels, Thurn’s release was highly suggestive.

  Meanwhile, Aldringer having gone to Breisach, Bernard of Saxe-Weimar descended on undefended Bavaria. Ferdinand and Maximilian implored Wallenstein to come, receiving only the cynical reply that doubtless Aldringer would help them; he himself could not spare a man from the Bohemian border.[71] On November 14th 1633, Bernard entered Regensburg.

  The city of the Diet, the city which held the line of contact between Bavaria and Bohemia, the city whose name had been the last audible word of the dying Tilly—one man only was responsible for its loss, and that man was Wallenstein. He could partly have saved himself from blame had he stood by his defence, that he could not spare a man from Bohemia. But the danger to Regensburg jolted his sick judgement into further folly, and the news of its capture reached him when he was already marching to its rescue. Miscalculating utterly, he saved neither the city nor his own reputation. He refused to come in time, and by coming at all he proved the frivolity of his first excuse.

  Conditions in Bavaria were growing steadily worse: two consecutive years of active fighting across the land, the horrible excesses of Tilly’s defeated troops and, later, the deliberate wasting of Gustavus’s and Bernard’s men, drove the peasantry at last to frenzy. If they had nothing to gain by revolt, they had nothing left to lose. The good harvest of 1632 and the poor, hail-smitten harvest of 1633 had been alike destroyed by the passing armies or ruthlessly collected by the Elector’s officials to supply his own troops. When Aldringer attempted to take up winter quarters in the country the rising became general. Maximilian, frightened for once of his own people, attempted to prevent quartering in the worst districts, but the soldiers, driven by necessity, took no notice, and fired on those who resisted them. By the end of December between twenty and thirty thousand peasantry were in arms, holding the roads against Aldringer and his hungry troops.[72] But it was a revolt against the quartering, not against the government, for the help offered by Bernard of Saxe-Weimar was not accepted,[73] and Maximilian in the end calmed the rebels by driving Aldringer’s troops to find restricted lodging in the calmer districts.[74] Of the two evils he had to choose the less.

  Bavaria was not alone in its misery. In spite of the particular request of Ferdinand,[75] in spite of the entreaties of the local authorities,[76] Wallenstein once again quartered his army on the imperial estates in Bohemia. As in the previous year, military exigencies gave him no other choice, but this was no argument against the resentment of Vienna.[77] He lost Regensburg, he allowed Bavaria to be wasted, and he himself ate Bohemia bare. Short of open treachery he had done as much harm as one man could in so short a time to the cause which he was supposed to serve.

  Wallenstein himself fixed his headquarters at Pilsen; a lame, bent, nerve-ridden wreck of a man. At Vienna they were openly complaining of him, and Maximilian had written to his agent telling him to join even with the Spanish party to overthrow him.[78] The rank and file of the army were discontented, the higher officers already suspected treason. But Trčka had written to Kinsky, the leading Bohemian exile in Dresden, saying that the general was ready to make terms with Brandenburg, Saxony, Sweden, and France, that the time had come ‘to throw off the mask’.[79] The time had come, not for Wallenstein to ‘throw off the mask’ but for others to tear it from him and show him his own reflection, the image of a man drunk with the illusion of a power he no longer possessed.

  As early as May 1633 Wallenstein had begun obscure negotiations for the Bohemian Crown through Kinsky in Dresden;[80] in July Feuquières, by the same agency, had promised that France would recognize him as King in return for his treason to the Emperor. In December he seems to have made up his wavering mind to accept the offer.[81]

  Meanwhile, on the last day of 1633, the Emperor and his council took their decision to be rid of him.[82] Wallenstein’s position in his army was the next point to be ascertained, and through his leading subordinates Vienna was already well informed. Aldringer had shown his opinions by obeying the Emperor and not the general, and in the winter of 1633–4 fear of Wallenstein’s possible revenge added another motive to his dislike of the commander-in-chief. Holk, whose loyalty was certain, was dead; Octavio Piccolomini, the Italian soldier of fortune who had succeeded
to Pappenheim’s command, was hand-in-glove with the government at Vienna. Matthias Gallas, the genial, easy-tempered, incompetent general of the artillery, was tempted by the offer of the commandership-in-chief under the King of Hungary. Those who were loyal to Wallenstein numbered only Adam Trčka who controlled eight regiments, Christian Ilow, the quartermaster, the princely soldier of fortune, Franz Albrecht of Saxe-Lauenburg, and a few lesser men. Nevertheless, Wallenstein must be tempted into giving open evidence of treachery before he could be struck down. For this reason it was essential that he should suspect nothing.

  His stars fought for the Emperor and the King of Hungary. He trusted rather to the horoscopes of his officers than to their talent, and the horoscopes of Piccolomini and Gallas, of the former in particular, were full of signs which gave him confidence.

  In December the Emperor implored him to lighten the contributions imposed on the imperial lands; he refused.[83] In despair, Ferdinand, an old man now and no longer as resilient as in his youth, gave himself up to prayer and fasting, seeking God’s guidance to rid him of Wallenstein.[84] The general had indeed gone as far as he safely could, and from now on he felt his way towards open betrayal. He intended to go over to the enemy with his whole army, and on January 12th he called his leading colonels to Pilsen and exacted from them an oath of loyalty to him, telling them that there were plots at Vienna to replace him. Forty-nine colonels signed an obligation to stand by him,[85] and Wallenstein felt safe. It did not cross his mind that the soldier of fortune is an opportunist to whom a signature means little. Unscrupulous himself, he calculated unhesitatingly on the honesty of his subordinates.