Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  It was not only incarnate in the body of Horatio Nelson that Drake returned to earth. In 1897 Sir Henry Newbolt published his poem Drake’s Drum, a stirring piece of patriotic mythmaking which combines a compellingly rhythmic beat with the potent figure of the once-and-future national redeemer:

  Drake he’s in his hammock till the great Armadas come

  (Capten art tha sleepin’ there below?)

  The poem alludes to a legend which Newbolt apparently invented: it appears in no earlier source, although it does echo a story from the fifteenth-century Hussite wars. In this tale an earlier Protestant hero, blind General Zizka, asks as he lies dying that his skin be used to cover a drum that will beat for the continuance of the heroic struggle for religious reform. A drum which Drake purportedly took with him on his circumnavigation has been on show to visitors in his house at Buckland Abbey since 1799, but it was Newbolt who imagined the dying Drake telling his men (in a fanciful version of the Devon accent):

  Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,

  Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;

  If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port of Heaven,

  An’ drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.

  When the German fleet surrendered at Scapa Flow in 1918 several English officers claimed to have heard a mysterious drumbeat emanating from none knew whence. (Newbolt was much read in the public schools where the evidently suggestible young men of the officer class were educated.)

  The Second World War found England’s immortal savior “ware and wakin’ ” again, as Newbolt had promised he would be. As the Armada sailed up the Channel in 1588, the youth of England, according to William Camden, “out of their entire love to their country, hired ships from all parts at their own private expense and joined with the fleet in great number.” (Camden omits to mention that Lord Admiral Howard refused the services of these volunteers, for whom he had no arms or provisions.) When, after the fall of France in 1940, the routed British army was taken off the beaches of Dunkirk with the help of a host of privately owned boats crewed by their civilian owners every British newspaper carried references to the Armada, and to the myriad loyal Englishmen who had cheerfully and voluntarily set out to sea to stop it. The supposed “littleness” of the English ships which confronted the Armada was repeatedly likened to the genuine smallness of some of the vessels involved in the evacuation, and Robert Nathan wrote a splendidly tear-jerking and phenomenally popular ballad about two plucky children sailing over to Dunkirk to rescue the brave soldiers in their dinghy. The poem ends with the lines “There at his side sat Francis Drake / And held him true, and steered him home.” In the months after Dunkirk, as the British braced themselves to repel or endure the apparently inevitable German invasion, several army officers reported hearing an insistent drumming along England’s south coast. The “capten sleepin’ there below” was getting ready to bestir himself again.

  Drake as immortal savior, as England’s fatherly guardian and guide, has become so reputable as to be almost unrecognizable as the man daubed with red and black warpaint who once robbed every ship in the Caribbean two or three times over. In the era when John Dee’s mystic vision of a British Empire became a reality Drake assumed a new retroactive glory as one of its pioneers and a founder of the navy whereby Britannia ruled the waves. By the mid-nineteenth century his robberies had been varnished over with a layer of plausible justifications so thick as to render them almost invisible and his role in the frustration of the Armada vastly inflated. In 1892 Sir Julian Corbett published an exhaustive biography presenting him as the wise and prescient initiator of Britain’s naval greatness. He became a patriot. “When Drake went down to the Horn, / England was crowned thereby,” wrote Rudyard Kipling. When (and if) Drake reached Cape Horn he was not working for England’s glory but for his own and his investors’ profit, but that did not prevent him becoming a totemic figure to sentimental nationalists. “The soul of Francis Drake was England,” wrote Noyes; he was “England to all English hearts.”

  Castile (latterly Spain) had the Cid: England (latterly Britain) had Drake. Two great imperial powers adopted as their heroes men who in their lifetimes were shameless bandits. It is no coincidence. To his contemporaries and to most of his posterity the Cid’s errantry, his independence of any established authority, and his freedom to go where he pleased and make of himself what he willed is the most exhilarating aspect of his story. So Drake’s carelessness of law and convention is the essence of his appeal. He is the presiding genius of Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, a novel disgraceful for its xenophobia, its rabid anti-Catholicism, and the startlingly perverse treatment of the female characters, but which earned the enormous popularity it enjoyed in the 1850s and in most of the succeeding century with its seductive idealization of the Elizabethan adventures and of their “mighty conquests achieved with the laughing recklessness of boys at play.” Kingsley presents them as the precursors of the nineteenth-century empire-builders, and Drake in particular is held up for admiration. Over the famous game of bowls he mutters to Hawkins that he intends to “let Orlando-Furioso-punctilio-fire-eaters go and get their knuckles rapped” while he lags behind the fleet in the hope of prizes. He is a scavenger. (“Where the carcass is, is our place, eh?” agrees Hawkins.) He has a deplorable lack of public spirit, but he is a hero for all that. “Of such captains as Franky Drake Heaven never makes but one at a time; and if we lose him, goodbye to England’s luck.” He is another of the heroes defined by their uniqueness, the “only man alive” who can do what he can do.

  Like Cato, and much more fittingly, Drake stands for freedom. Many imperialists have sincerely believed that by subjecting other peoples to their rule they were setting them free, of other oppressors or of their own ignorance and backwardness. Drake, the pirate, unreachable by any law as he sailed around the world, autonomous and uncontrollable in the little ship of which he was absolute master, is a potent figure of liberty, and as it happens a not inapposite patron for imperialists devoted to the taking of that which did not belong to them. In his legend Spain and its dominions are, first and foremost, a domain of unfreedom where a rigid religious orthodoxy and an autocratic monarch punish anyone who lays claim to independence with gruesome tortures and with death. England—contrasted with this somber, oppressive enemy—becomes in its own self-congratulatory literature the epitome of all that is creative and permissive of individual liberty. With its little island territory and its little ships, it is an outlaw state like Robin Hood’s greenwood, a hideaway for free spirits, and Drake is its personification. Defiantly he refuses an unjust law. Boldly he confronts the mighty oppressor. As he raids the ports of the Spanish Main in Noyes’s poem, “There came sounds across the heaving sea / of rending chains.”

  To point out that what he was actually doing in the Caribbean was liberating not slaves or oppressed native Americans but other people’s property is correct but does nothing to undermine his allure. In reality criminality and freedom seldom go together: lawlessness opens the way to oppression. But in the imaginary world of popular legend and national myth the criminal is a free spirit. Like the legendary thief and murderer Robin Hood, like the corsairs and highwaymen of Romantic fiction and poetry, like the gangsters and gunmen of twentieth-century cinema, Drake was and has remained an object of affection and admiration because of, not despite, the fact that the actions for which he is known were socially disruptive, violent, and illegal, excusable only on the shaky grounds that his victims were foreigners, and Catholics to boot.

  VI

  WALLENSTEIN

  When Achilles showed himself, flame-capped and awful, his enemies panicked and died; when he drove into battle, filthy with his victims’ blood, the Trojans scattered and fled. Homer’s hero was terror incarnate. So was Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland, the commander in chief of the Holy Roman Emperor’s armies during the Thirty Years’ War. On the frescoed ceiling of the great audience chamber of hi
s palace in Prague a grim-faced, splendidly accoutred warrior drives a four-horse chariot hurtling through the skies. He is the god of war, or Wallenstein himself, or more likely both, for in the minds of his contemporaries Wallenstein was the war’s genius, the personification of the devastating conflict by which Europe was racked. Storm, fire, and horror were reputed to be his accomplices. An eighteenth-century historian wrote: “When all around him fell in ruins, when smoke and dust filled the air, and the moans of mortal agony beat upon the ear, when all grovelled with terror shriekingly on their knees before him and he tore aside his hand from mothers and children who, clinging to him, implored their lives, then speechless satisfaction gleamed upon his face.” To his enemies and allies alike he seemed as ruthless as fate. In the words of the great Romantic historian and dramatist Friedrich Schiller, who wrote about him repeatedly: “In the night only, Friedland’s star can beam.” Darkness was his element, terror his instrument. Observers noted the fearful omens by which the epochs of his life were marked. On the day he assumed command of the emperor’s armies Vesuvius erupted; on the night he died, according to witnesses’ reports, the town in which he was killed was shaken by a storm so violent no one present could remember ever having seen the like.

  It’s an unhappy land that needs heroes, wrote Brecht, and seventeenth-century Germany was a land in which unhappiness was endemic, in which the kind of desperation which had led the Athenians to see in the treacherous Alcibiades an omnipotent savior gripped peasants and princes alike. An English preacher named Edmund Calamy described it as “a Golgotha, a place of dead men’s skulls … a field of blood.” From 1618 until 1648 central Europe was a battlefield, convulsed by the sequence of conflicts—nationalist uprisings, foreign invasions, peasant revolts, sectarian killings, power struggles between princes—known collectively as the Thirty Years’ War. “Some nations are chastised with the sword,” wrote Calamy, “others with famine, others with the man-destroying plague. But poor Germany hath been sorely whipped with all these three iron whips at the same time, and for above twenty years space.”

  Half-starved armies of uncertain allegiance traversed the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, alternately dodging and pursuing each other through the brief summer campaigning season and in winter descending on the towns or roaming across the countryside in search of food, shelter, and loot. In their wake they left burned-out villages, ruined crops, and, where there had once been viable communities, isolated groups of destitute civilians. Peasants, preferring looting to being looted, abandoned their smallholdings and turned soldier. “One may travel ten miles without seeing man or beast,” wrote a contemporary observer. “In all the villages the houses are filled with corpses, carcasses intermingled, slain by pest and hunger and partially devoured by wolves, dogs and carrion-crows, because there is no one left to bury them.” It was the worst of times, a period when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse stalked the land, an era of violent action so chaotic and futile that it felt like stasis.

  Hans Jakob von Grimmelshausen, author of the novel Simplicissimus the Vagabond, the one masterpiece to emerge from the war, has Jupiter (not the king of Olympus but a deranged, flea-tormented tramp of the same name) prophesy the coming of “such a great hero that he will need no soldiers, and yet will reform the world.” The advent of such a redeemer was yearned for. As the years dragged by it came to seem that only a superman could do what battles and diplomacy seemed equally impotent to achieve and effect the transition from a war which generated nothing but more war to a productive peace. Several candidates for the role presented themselves. “Numerous were the dark hero forms that loomed out of the chaos of blood and fire,” wrote a nineteenth-century German historian of the war. Darkest and most imposing of them all was Wallenstein, who rose from comparative obscurity to become generalissimo over all the imperial troops, who was stripped of his office when his power grew so great that even the emperor he served came to fear him, who was recalled when those who had conspired to get rid of him became persuaded that he was the only man alive capable of saving the empire, and who was eventually murdered in his nightshirt, deserted by all but a handful of the tens of thousands of men he had commanded, so ill he could barely stand but still so menacingly charismatic that the emperor felt it needful to have prayers read in all the churches in Vienna invoking divine assistance for the work of assassinating him.

  Heroes are not necessarily amiable. Fear is an emotion as overwhelming as love, and a man capable of inspiring it may be accorded as much respect, as much devotion even, as a hero of a milder sort. Alcibiades had beauty and charm, Cato integrity, the Cid munificence, and Drake a saucy wit, but they all shared a further quality, a menacing edge that made others, friends as well as enemies, uneasy. In Wallenstein that quality was paramount. It was the danger he apparently embodied that impressed his contemporaries, moving them first to accord him power unprecedented within his society for a man of his origins, and eventually to kill him. The Greeks valued Achilles for his awesome capacity for violence, not only because it was useful to them when turned against their enemies, but also because it was so intrinsically impressive. They described it as being a divine attribute. In the seventeenth century Wallenstein’s contemporaries were more apt to see his fearsomeness as diabolical, but they were still awed by it, and ready to depend on it for the safekeeping of their state.

  Wallenstein was a truly frightening man. He was not—no mere mortal could have been—the omnipotent fury that his admirers and detractors alike imagined him, but he sometimes came near it. As a teenage student he was nicknamed “Mad Wallenstein.” He stabbed a fellow student in the leg. He thrashed a servant so brutally the university authorities stepped in and ordered him to pay compensation to the boy’s family. He terrorized a professor, yelling outside his house at dead of night, smashing his windows, and attempting to break down his door. He was one of a group who set upon a local man in the street and killed him.

  As an adult he used his rage, holding himself tightly in check until such times as it suited him to be terrible. He was not a sacker of cities. He was responsible for no notorious massacre. He always preferred exhausting or outmaneuvering a hostile army to slaughtering it. In an age when what would now be considered war crimes or atrocities were commonplace, he was probably less guilty than most of his peers. Count Khevenhüller, the courtier and annalist who observed his career at first hand, praised the discipline in his armies: “he maintained exemplary order, so that the land was not wasted or burned, nor the people driven from hut and house.” Yet to his contemporaries and to posterity alike an aura of suppressed violence, of potentially devastating destructiveness seemed to hang about him. Stories circulated demonstrating his ruthlessness. A soldier accused of looting was to be hanged. The man protested his innocence. “Let him be hanged guiltless then,” said Wallenstein. “The guilty will tremble so much the more.”

  In private he was fiercely irritable. He is said to have stabbed a page who disturbed him against his orders, and to have had a man executed for waking him too early. When, on the last night of his life, his assassins came clattering up the stairs to kill him they were met by a servant terrified not by their grim faces and clashing weapons but by the thought of how angry his master would be at the intrusion. A nineteenth-century scholar, contemplating his portrait, thought that he bore “the dark and sinister aspect of a man whose hands have been imbrued in blood, whose seared conscience hesitates at no means, however base, cruel, or unholy, for the attainment of his purpose.” That idea of Wallenstein was already current in his lifetime. In attempting to justify his murder his rivals in the imperial court were to accuse him of conspiring to butcher not only the emperor but the entire imperial family, and to burn Vienna to the ground. Such was his supposed cruelty, the capacity for destruction ascribed to him, and the enormity of his imagined ambition.

  He was born into a noble but impoverished Bohemian family. Orphaned while still a child, he was brought up by guardians. Bohemia was a part of the H
oly Roman Empire but it had its own separate history and venerable culture. Wallenstein’s first language was Czech, his second Italian. After his death he was likened to Arminius, the tribal chieftain who dared to challenge Rome and who, Germanized as Hermann, was the totemic hero of German nationalism, but in his lifetime the German princes saw him as an untrustworthy foreigner, an alien whose interests might well conflict with their own. In fact, as a man with several far-flung homes in none of which he spent much time, he seems to have felt few sentimental ties to any place or nation.

  He was born a Protestant, but in his late teens he converted to Catholicism. According to Count Khevenhüller his conversion was occasioned by a miracle. He was dozing over a book when he toppled out of an upstairs window and was saved from certain death by the Virgin Mary, who caught him in her arms and wafted him gently down to earth. The story may have been developed to confound critics who doubted his commitment to the Church. It strikingly resembles those told about another, more celebrated defenestration, the incident commonly identified as the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, when Bohemian nationalists threw two imperial agents from the windows of Hradcany Castle in Prague. On that occasion, according to a contemporary account “several devout and trustworthy people … saw the most serene Virgin Mary catch [the imperial delegate Count Martinic] in the air with her cloak” and set him down so gently “it was as if he was merely sitting down … despite his corpulent body.” (Protestant Bohemian sources, by contrast, reported that Martinic and his fellow victim Slavata owed their soft landing to a handy dungheap.) Wallenstein, later a notorious skeptic, responded to his own miraculous escape with a markedly un-Christian blend of pride and solipsism. His first biographer, Gualdo Priorato (who served under him and whose Life was first published in 1643) saw it as inspiring his faith, not in the Almighty, but in his own status as one of the elect: “He believed himself reserved for extraordinary achievements; and from that moment made it the study of his life to penetrate the future and discover the high destiny that waited him.”