News of the Pilsen decision caused more apparent anxiety at Prague than at Vienna. In the Bohemian capital they feared a nationalist revolt—feared, it would seem, rather than hoped for it. At the imperial court the news was, as far as possible, concealed or minimized in its importance.[86] Nevertheless, it hastened the secret decision of the Emperor. On January 24th 1634, he set his hand to a decree dismissing Wallenstein,[87] and immediately after instructed Count Gallas to consult with Piccolomini how best to take the general, living or dead.[88]
Meanwhile, with Franz Albrecht of Saxe-Lauenburg acting as go-between, Wallenstein worked for an understanding with Arnim and Bernard of Saxe-Weimer. He was anxious to exploit the loyalty shown him at the Pilsen decision before it should cool, but he dared not join Arnim and Bernard until he could be certain they would come half-way to meet him. His cautious hesitation gave Piccolomini and Gallas time to mature their plans.
Wallenstein had his truest henchmen and the soldiers under their command about him at Pilsen, so that any attempt to seize him there would be fatally dangerous. Besides, for the purposes of the Emperor and the young King of Hungary it was essential to avoid any division in the army; a crisis in which a considerable portion of the troops stood by their general would mean only dangerous civil war in Bohemia. The army must be cut away entire from under Wallenstein or the coup would fail.
Early in February wild rumours began to circulate among the officers; Wallenstein was plotting to be King of Bohemia, to make Louis XIII King of the Romans, to give away the Electorates of Saxony, Bavaria, Mainz, and Treves to Franz Albrecht, Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, Arnim, and Marshal Horn, to make Gallas Duke of Mecklenburg, Piccolomini Duke of Milan, Trčka Duke of Moravia, and to cut off Aldringer’s head.[89] The skilfully disseminated lies filled the officers of the army with doubts of Wallenstein’s sanity; their probable source was the plausible, popular, diplomatic Octavio Piccolomini.[90]
By the first week of February Wallenstein was anxious to move. ‘There is not a moment to lose, all is ready’, wrote Franz Albrecht to Arnim. He might well think so, for Wallenstein and his party still suspected nothing and Gallas blandly added his wishes for Arnim’s coming to the letter.[91] Doubting, the Protestants still hesitated, while at Pilsen from day to day rumours swelled and exploded. A servant of Trčka’s had refused admittance to some Franciscan friars, sneering that his master was a good Lutheran; on February 15th at night Piccolomini left the town secretly and none knew why; Wallenstein himself grew doubtful of his strength. Once again he sent for all his leading officers. Aldringer pleaded illness, and Gallas was dispatched to fetch him;[92] neither of them came back. Nor, for that matter, did Piccolomini. On the 18th Franz Albrecht had to admit the possibility of a split in the army. ‘They must bend or break’, he wrote to Arnim, ‘for I see well, they will have to pay for it who stand by Aldringer . . . Most of the officers are here and they have all been fixed.’[93] The last sentence was a lie; a few more than thirty officers only had come to Pilsen for Wallenstein’s second meeting and nearly all were nervous and questioning. Franz Albrecht’s letter was written on February 18th, and on the same day he set out to implore Bernard of Saxe-Weimar in person to march on Pilsen. He was already too late; on February 18th an imperial decree was published in the further outposts of Wallenstein’s army, commanding all officers to take orders in future from Gallas.
On February 20th the second Pilsen meeting took place; Wallenstein saw the colonels first in his bedroom, then asked them to withdraw with Trčka and Ilow; but the best that the eloquence and diplomacy of his trusted deputies could extract from them was a promise that they were willing to stand by him so long as nothing was intended against the Emperor—and several of those present refused to sign any undertaking even with this saving clause.[94]
Then at last Wallenstein and his two remaining conspirators, Adam Trčka and Christian Ilow, realized their mistake. They had depended on the army, and the army had deserted them. With the courage of desperation they made a last throw. Trčka set out for Prague to raise the capital for Wallenstein; the general himself was to follow. Two hours later Trčka came back; he had learnt on the way that Wallenstein’s dismissal had been published at Prague by the officer in command of the garrison.[95] Still hoping, Wallenstein sent for Colonel Beck, the supreme commander at Prague who was in Pilsen, and asked him to go to the capital and denounce the action of his subordinate. He smote against the obstinate imperial loyalty on which he had not reckoned in an army of mercenaries. They could do what they liked to him, said Beck, but he would not serve against the Emperor. There would have been little point in using the authority which still remained to him to shoot Beck, and Wallenstein with the last enigmatical and dramatic gesture of his life, gave his hand to his subordinate as he dismissed him, saying, ‘I had peace in my hands, God is just.’
Meanwhile Trčka was beating the drums for the evacuation of Pilsen and piling all the treasure he could find into his baggage wagons. The deserted lodging of Gallas was plundered, and on February 22nd 1634, with about a thousand men and a hundred thousand gulden, Wallenstein, Trčka, and Ilow fled from Pilsen.[96]
Their flight took Piccolomini by surprise. Planning to surround the town with troops loyal to the Emperor and force the conspirators to surrender, he had stationed men to cover the road to Vienna lest Wallenstein should attempt anything in that direction, and the evasion of his quarry northwards, to make a direct junction with the Saxons, found him at a loss.[97] He moved to Pilsen to make certain at least of the loyalty of any troops remaining there, and there on February 25th an agitated Irish priest, Father Taaffe, insisted on seeing him. It seemed that he was the confessor of a Colonel Butler who had been marching to Prague with a regiment of dragoons to join the loyal imperialists, when he had run face to face with Wallenstein and his convoy. Commanded to go with the general, he had not dared to disobey, but had contrived to dispatch Taaffe unobserved, carrying a guarantee of loyalty written in English and a verbal message asking what he was to do. Wallenstein was marching for the key fortress of Eger, to join with Arnim and Saxe-Weimar. Piccolomini did not hesitate, and Taaffe rode off at once with the command to Butler to bring in Wallenstein alive or dead.[98]
Before Taaffe could reach him, almost before he had reached Piccolomini, Colonel Butler had taken the law into his own hands. Wallenstein and his companions reached Eger on the evening of the 24th at about five o’clock, where John Gordon, one of Trčka’s colonels, received them with apparent willingness. But he opened the gates for fear of Butler’s troops as much as Wallenstein’s, and when that night he learnt that Butler was loyal to the Emperor, it needed only the firmness of his second-in-command, Leslie, and of Butler himself, to persuade him to betray Wallenstein.[99] The elements in their joint decision are hard to disentangle; Butler at least seems to have felt that he had a duty to rid the Empire of a traitor,[100] but in the behaviour of all three there was much of the mercenary; dangerous as was the deed, the reward would be great. None of them was likely ever again to have so golden an opportunity.
On the following day Ilow attempted in vain to secure further guarantees of loyalty from the officers in the town.[101] Optimistically, he did not regard the failure as grave, for directly afterwards he accepted Gordon’s suggestion that he, with Trčka and the Bohemian rebel Kinsky who had joined them, should dine that night with the officers at the castle.[102]
After that it was simple. Butler’s dragoons rushed the doors while the traitors sat at dinner and overpowered them almost at once. Trčka alone, immensely strong, fought his way out into the courtyard. There he was met by a group of musketeers who challenged him for the password. ‘Sankt Jakob’, he called. It was the word Wallenstein had given. ‘House of Austria’, they out-shouted him, and battered him down with the butt ends of their muskets, until one of them gave him the coup de grâce with a dagger. An Englishman, Captain Devereux, dispatched Wallenstein. Breaking into his lodgings with a few companions, he kicked open the bedroom door t
o find him undefended. Wallenstein was at the window; turning he faced his murderers, stumbled forward, moaned something which might have been a cry for quarter, and fell transfixed. A huge Irishman picked up the crumpled body and tried to throw it out of the window, but Devereux, with some remnant of decency, stopped him and hastily rolled the corpse in the bloodstained carpet on which it had fallen.[103]
All this time Franz Albrecht of Saxe-Lauenburg had been urging Bernard to march for Eger. But Bernard suspected that Wallenstein was fooling him, and not until February 26th would he agree to set out. Arnim was even more reluctant and did not break camp until the 27th.[104] On the way they learnt that Wallenstein was dead and Eger in the hands of his murderers. Their luckless go-between Franz Albrecht, galloping back with the news that they were on the march, fell all unsuspecting into the hands of Butler’s men and was sent prisoner to Vienna. Meanwhile, a sporadic outburst of mutiny was instantly quelled, the suspect officers were placed under arrest, and the army, entire but for a negligible minority, declared its loyalty to the Emperor.[105] The murderers were sent for to Vienna, thanked, fêted and generously rewarded with promotion, money and land.
There was no need to penalize the traitor’s family; his wife and young daughter were as harmless as they were innocent, his principal heir was his cousin Max, whose friendship the King of Hungary made haste to win and keep.[106] The organizing genius which had kept the army fed had gone, but there was no chance now that supplies would be deliberately cut off, for with Wallenstein perished the privileges which had guarded his estates. Moreover, the Cardinal-Infant was about to cross the Alps with men and money for the Hapsburg cause.
The nightmare of Wallenstein’s betrayal had proved itself to be a nightmare only. The greatness which had dazzled Europe and terrified Vienna evaporated at the touch of an assassin. The web of intrigue which had stretched from Paris to Vienna was brushed aside by the conspiracy of three expatriated ruffians in an evening over their cups.[107] Until so near the end he had seemed so terrible; fear gives an edge to the letters of Aldringer, Gallas, Piccolomini, in those last weeks; fear quavers in the obstinate, bewildered words of the officers assembled for that last Pilsen meeting;[108] fear drove the Emperor Ferdinand, day after day, to solitude and prayer.[109] Taaffe had implored Butler to fly alone rather than risk companionship with Wallenstein, Gordon had wished to abandon Eger, his troops and his reputation rather than come into collision with the general’s will.[110]
And in the end there was nothing to fear but a crippled man asking for quarter, and nothing left when all was done but carrion for the disposal of Walter Devereux. ‘Presently (they) drew him out by the heels, his head knocking upon every stair, all bloody, and threw him into a coach and carried him to the castle where the rest lay naked close together . . . and there he had the superior place of them, being the right hand file, which they could not do less, being so great a general.’[111]
5.
The death of Wallenstein had a more profound effect on the Hapsburg than on the Bourbon cause. Although at Frankfort French and Swedish hopes had risen high in the last days of February and the false news that he had seized Bohemia for France preceded by a bare three days the knowledge of his murder,[112] his death left them, but for the disappointment, neither better nor worse off than they had been.
But the revivifying effect on the Hapsburg dynasty was remarkable. The appointment of the already popular King of Hungary to the chief command, and the judicious distribution of rewards to the loyal, soothed and revitalized the imperial army. Matthias Gallas, the new general, was incompetent and self-indulgent, but he had the qualities necessary for the crisis: genial, friendly and unaffected, he liked popularity and aimed to acquire it. Piccolomini, the younger man and his subordinate, was in fact more important, for he had the grasp of actualities, the organizing ability and the tact necessary to tide over the difficult period. A happier combination than these two at this moment could hardly have been found, so favourably did their methods contrast with those of Wallenstein and his hectoring supporters.
In April the King of Hungary was officially proclaimed commander-in-chief. Although it was generally assumed that this young man of twenty-six, with no experience of war, would be merely a figure-head, he was a significant figure-head, since his appointment marked the completion of the Hapsburg plan for a joint and purely dynastic attack on their enemies. It also marked a step forward in the imperial policy of centralization. Since the check at Regensburg in 1630 and the overwhelming advance of the Swedes, the old policy of Ferdinand had been submerged. But his luck had held; in 1630 he had tried in vain to replace Wallenstein by his own son, in 1634 he had achieved it. The fall of Regensburg and the abandonment of Bavaria had driven Maximilian to accept any command rather than that of Wallenstein, and he had welcomed the very appointment which he had prevented four years before.
Underneath the immediate dangers raised by Wallenstein, the situation between the Emperor and the constitutional princes had not altered, and the appointment of the King of Hungary was no less opposed to their interests in 1634 than in 1630. Maximilian, when he wrote in despair to his agent at Vienna, telling him to ally himself even with the Spanish party to get rid of Wallenstein, may have done the only thing possible to save Bavaria from destruction, but he was undoing his own policy. Circumstances, not Ferdinand, had been too much for him, and this time indeed the Emperor’s luck and not his sense had brought out of Wallenstein’s treachery the dynastic achievement on which his heart was set.
Much depended on the use of his position by the King of Hungary. This was his first open step in the European field, although he had been active on the imperial council since his nineteenth year. Young Ferdinand was the elder of his father’s surviving sons by Maria, sister to Maximilian of Bavaria. The surroundings in which the prince had grown up were conventionally perfect. His father and mother, and later his stepmother, lived in unruffled devotion to each other and the children, who were brought up simply and happily in the hills of Styria. Whatever the educational theories of the Styrian household, they were successful in some unusual respects. Cleverer than his father, young Ferdinand never evoked jealousy nor felt resentment; he urged different opinions from the Emperor at the council table, had his own party at Court, criticized his father’s policy, particularly his finances, but avoided altogether that ugly antagonism between the ruler and the heir which so often embitters dynastic politics. Father and son admired each other’s qualities and compromised on their disagreements.
That young Ferdinand had some exceptional gift for affection is apparent in his relationship with his younger brother, Leopold. This prince, regarding himself as the ablest of the family, deplored his distance from the throne. His brothers were both delicate, and when the eldest, Charles, died in 1619, no one had thought that the second, Ferdinand, would long outlive him. But Ferdinand continued to stand between Leopold and the throne, grew to manhood, married and removed his younger brother by yet another and another life from the inheritance. Leopold, as he grew up, made his annoyance an open secret at Court, yet Ferdinand not only showed no equivalent resentment but set himself to put his brother forward on every possible occasion, to satisfy his lust for power, to consult and pacify him. Leopold’s political discontent could not be assuaged, yet in spite of all, the brothers remained the firmest of personal friends.[113]
The King of Hungary had inherited his father’s good nature but without his lightness of heart. He had inherited also much of his father’s charm. Less garrulous, he was more dignified and not less gracious, and his ability to converse easily in seven languages gave him power to undertake much of his own diplomacy. In appearance he favoured his mother’s family and had the melancholy dark eyes, brown hair and strong features of the Wittelsbach. Though he had been educated to enjoy hunting, he preferred to spend his leisure reading philosophy, writing music, carving in ivory, or experimenting in his laboratory. He had on occasion lectured to the Court, the old Emperor beaming on
him with proprietary pride. He was quiet, thoughtful, rather melancholy. Unlike his father he was economical to the point of meanness. As a boy, his reserve had made him appear dull-witted, but as he became surer of himself he gave the impression instead of being a profound thinker.[114] Profounder indeed than he was, for when all is said, he was only a decent, imaginative, worried intellectual. He had neither the intense faith in his mission nor the trust in his God which bore up his father; he had not the singleness of purpose which gave the old Emperor a touch of greatness. He was too clever to be happy, not clever enough to be successful. Ferdinand II was either very shrewd or very lucky; Ferdinand III was neither.
The chief influence in Ferdinand’s life, from his marriage in 1631 to her death in 1646, was his wife, the Infanta Maria of Spain, sister to the Cardinal-Infant. In a real, if a private sense, this attractive, sympathetic, intelligent woman acted as the connecting link between the Courts of Madrid, Brussels, and Vienna.[115] Several years older than her husband, she held his devotion and gave him hers unwaveringly throughout their lives.
As King of Hungary and, later, as Emperor, Ferdinand III played a large part in the history of Europe; it seems therefore only proper that the blank which is usually left for his character should be filled in. There is evidence enough that he impressed his contemporaries more than he has impressed posterity.
While the situation was thus prepared for the Hapsburg advance within the Empire, the plans of the dynasty elsewhere had matured. The aged Archduchess Isabella died in the winter. Almost with her last words she exhorted Gaston, Duke of Orleans, who had come to visit her, not to desert his mother, now exiled from France.[116] Earlier she had received Princess Margaret of Lorraine, Gaston’s wife, with every honour due to a king’s daughter.[117] Thus in her last acts she had tried to knit together these vapid malcontents, so that none of them should make peace with the King of France,[118] but remain united, an instrument to be used against the French monarchy. After her death the interim government at Brussels carried out her intentions by completing a treaty of alliance with Gaston of Orleans and inciting the Duke of Lorraine to rebel. Thus once again they set in motion the disturbers of France. In the summer they stifled the cry for peace of their Flemish subjects by dissolving the States General, while the ambassador who had been sent to Philip IV to further the settlement was arrested in Madrid.
The Thirty Years War Page 40
