Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  He was given his reward. The Emperor Ferdinand offered the crown of Denmark to his victorious general. Wallenstein judiciously refused the honor “for I would not be able to maintain myself,” but he accepted the duchies of Mecklenburg and Sagan, with all their lands and palaces, and the Order of the Golden Fleece.

  He had declined a kingdom, but he was now richer and more powerful than many kings were. He had achieved the kind of eminence that attracts lethal envy and arouses the suspicions of any latter-day Catos wary of new-made military grandees. In England in the previous year Parliament had moved to impeach George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham had been the homosexual King James I’s adored favorite. (The king called him “Steenie”—after St. Stephen, whose “face was as the face of an angel”—and “my sweet child and wife.”) An exceptionally beautiful and brilliantly manipulative young man who was hailed by his admirers as a “second Alcibiades,” Buckingham had used his personal glamour to acquire both political power and vast wealth. At the zenith of his career he was as rich as the king and, as first minister, second only to him in authority. He put his magnificence at the service of the state, strutting on diplomatic missions in pearl-encrusted suits whose cost would have provisioned a sizable army, but like Alcibiades he outshone the institution he supposedly represented, angering as many as he dazzled. When his royal patron died he cast his spell over the new king: Charles I was as entranced by him as his father had been. But when Buckingham made an ill-judged and expensive attempt to intervene in the German wars Parliament turned on him, identifying him as the “chief cause of all these evils and mischiefs with which the country is afflicted.” The king saved him from impeachment by dissolving Parliament, but two years later, after another disastrous military adventure, he was stabbed to death in a crowded tavern. His rise to power had been meteoric, but it had made him so much hated that when his body was carried through the streets of London to Westminster Abbey the guards lining the route defiantly held their weapons erect instead of trailing them (as was customary at a funeral) and crowds gathered outside the Tower to pray for his murderer. His was a story which Wallenstein, another upstart potentate whose position depended on a monarch’s favor, would have done well to mark.

  In December 1627 Wallenstein waited on the emperor, who was hunting not far from Prague. Ferdinand received him early and bade him cover his head. Wallenstein hesitated. He was a military hero, the savior of the empire and by now three times over a duke, but only the hereditary princes of the empire were privileged to keep their hats on in the imperial presence. For one who, like Wallenstein, had been born into the lesser nobility to be granted the status of a prince would be all but unprecedented. Twice the emperor repeated the order before Wallenstein, understanding the stupendous honor being done to him, presumed to obey. A little later the same morning the court gathered for the ceremony of the emperor’s breakfast. Ferdinand dipped his hands in a silver bowl. It was for a prince of the empire to hand him a towel. Wallenstein, bareheaded again, fulfilled that function. Once more, in public acknowledgment of his new status, Ferdinand invited him to put on his hat. He did so, “whereby,” observed the papal nuncio who was present, “he perhaps drew upon himself more the silent envy of the Court than its whispered censure.”

  Envy, whispered censure, mummery with hats and towels and washbasins— this was the kind of thing Wallenstein detested. But its significance must have pleased him. Achilles, in revolt, declared himself independent of all authority save that of the gods. Wallenstein, now an imperial prince, need defer to no one except the Holy Roman Emperor, God’s secular deputy. The greater the master, the less the humiliation of serving him. Later, when asked to place some of his troops under Tilly’s command, Wallenstein refused, saying haughtily, “I am wont to serve the House of Austria, not to let myself be bullied by a Bavarian slave.” That spring Ferdinand appointed him generalissimo, with authority to “ordain and command” in the emperor’s absence, as though he were the emperor himself.

  Ferdinand also pronounced him Admiral of the German Ocean and the Baltic Sea. The title preempted reality, for the emperor had no ships, but Wallenstein intended that he soon should have. His first biographer relates that in the previous year, when he found himself unable to pursue the Danes into the offshore islands where they took refuge, “he ordered red-hot shot to be fired into the rebellious waves which had dared to limit his conquests.” Any let to the extent of his power made him angry beyond reason. Now he planned to have a canal dug across the neck of the Danish peninsula, allowing ships to pass from the North Sea into the Baltic. With the cooperation of the port cities of the Hanseatic League, and with ships loaned by the Spanish, he would extend the imperial dominion northward, ruling the waves and thus gaining control of all northern Europe’s seaborn trade. He had made the imperial power paramount on land, its foreign enemies defeated, its internal critics cowed. Now he promulgated a grandiose vision of an expanded empire. He talked of attacking the Turk, of seizing control of the sea. The nineteenth-century historian Sir Adolphus Ward opined that no one except Napoleon had ever evolved a plan for European domination “so daring in outline and systematic in detail.”

  It was not for Wallenstein to realize that vision. Three centuries elapsed before Adolf Hitler, who admired him immensely, succeeded in creating a newly efficient and ruthlessly predatory German Reich. Meanwhile, that spring of 1628, the season of Wallenstein’s apogee, his luck changed. In January his first and only son, a seven-week-old baby, died (he had already decreed that his other child, a girl, would not be his heir). And there was irritating news from the north.

  While he wintered in Bohemia, visiting court and attending to his own estates, he had left his army under the command of Hans Georg von Arnim. Arnim’s career, which to the modern mind looks like a sequence of betrayals, vividly illustrates how much the concept of loyalty has shifted since the seventeenth century, for he was generally acknowledged by his contemporaries to be a man of unusual probity. A Lutheran, he was noted for his sobriety, for his strict discipline, and for his practice of leading his men in prayer before a battle. He had served the king of Sweden, the king of Sweden’s inveterate enemy the king of Poland, and Count Mansfeld (and therefore whomever Count Mansfeld was serving at the time). In 1627 he had been offered employment by both the king of Denmark and Denmark’s scourge, Wallenstein. Somewhat surprisingly, given his religious allegiance, he had chosen the latter. Wallenstein respected his judgment and his professionalism, appointed him his deputy, and wrote to him up to seven times a day.

  In Wallenstein’s absence Arnim attempted to install a garrison in the semiautonomous Baltic harbor city of Stralsund. The Stralsunders resisted. The kings of Denmark and Sweden both offered them their support. By the time Wallenstein made his way back northward that summer the situation was escalating at an alarming rate. En route Wallenstein was taken ill. From his sickbed he wrote to Arnim: “I see that they of Stralsund persist in their mulishness, wherefore I am resolved to deal seriously with them.” It was a bad-tempered decision taken without enough knowledge of the circumstances. The Danes sent Stralsund a regiment of Scottish mercenaries. The Swedes followed suit with eight ships full of fighting men and ammunition. A local dispute about quartering had become an international incident.

  Wallenstein arrived at the beginning of July and, as though exasperated beyond all caution by the city’s defiance, exclaimed (or so it was reported), “Stralsund must down, were it hung with chains to Heaven.” A hubristic blasphemy, and a stupidly conceded hostage to fortune. Stralsund was all but an island, protected on its landward side by marshes and accessible only along five easily defended causeways. For forty-eight hours Wallenstein bombarded the city by day, while by night his foot soldiers advanced along the narrow approach routes in the darkness, stumbling over each other into the Stralsunders’ direct fire, and the cavalry floundered through the marshes alongside. Twelve thousand imperial troops were killed in the mud. This petty conflict was costi
ng way too much. Wallenstein offered lenient terms. He wanted now only “to come out with honour and soon depart.” But Stralsund’s allies did not want to let him go so easily. Negotiations dragged on. More Danish troops arrived, and another thousand Scots. Wallenstein had made the elementary mistake of attempting to blockade a seaport with only a land army. The city council refused to accept any terms whatsoever until he had withdrawn his troops. It had been raining for days. Wallenstein’s men, in order to protect their forward positions, had to stand up to their waists in water. On July 24, barely three weeks after he had arrived on the scene, he gave the order to retreat.

  To Protestant pamphleteers of the time and Protestant historians thereafter the resistance of Stralsund, the staunch little city which withstood the dual might of the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Emperor as represented by the cruel and saturnine Duke of Friedland, became an heroic legend. To Wallenstein’s detractors at court it was a useful instance of his vincibility. In the short term, though, he was quickly able to efface the unfortunate impression it made. He had been waiting for the opportunity to finish off the Danish challenge. As long as the imperial fleet remained a figment of Wallenstein’s imagination, King Christian was safe until he dared venture back onto the mainland. Wallenstein taunted him: “He is soused full every day and I hope to Heaven that in his cups he will one day venture something and creep out of his watery holes, when he will assuredly be ours.” Sure enough, less than a month after Wallenstein withdrew from Stralsund, Christian, with seven thousand men, took the coastal town and fortress of Wolgast. Wallenstein moved immediately. The ensuing battle was bloody and conclusive. The Danish forces were trapped between the imperial army and the sea and slaughtered, all but the handful of survivors whom Christian managed to take off with him in his ships. The war with Denmark was effectively over, the peace treaty was formally signed the following June. Wallenstein’s critics were silenced. He was once more the victorious generalissimo.

  The war ebbed southward. Wallenstein let it go. There was a dispute over the succession of the dukedom of Mantua in which the French and Spanish and eventually the emperor became involved, but Wallenstein held himself aloof from it. In typically uncompromising fashion he told a Spanish envoy that “the thought of procuring a single soldier from him should not enter their minds, even though the Emperor in person were to give him the order.” Instead he occupied himself with his new duchy of Mecklenburg.

  The former rulers, a pair of brothers who had sided with Denmark and been exiled for it, had left their palace empty. Wallenstein moved in, along with the eight hundred or so people who made up his court (but without his duchess), and set about refurnishing it to his usual taste. Tapestries, gold-embossed leather wall-hangings, fine table linen, damask, carpets in his favorite blue from Venice and Lucca, thirty thousand talers’ worth of silver from Genoa. A Calvinist church was demolished to provide space and stone for a new wing. He was simultaneously building a brand-new palace in his third duchy, Sagan. According to the Irishman Thomas Carew the plans for it were so marvelous that it would have proved the eighth wonder of the world. It was never completed. In the whole of the rest of his life Wallenstein was to spend only nine days in Sagan.

  As he stripped and redecorated the palace, so he revised and improved Mecklenburg’s government. “I see what impertinences and protractions have been indulged by the Estates,” he wrote. “They shall not deal with me as they used to deal with the former Dukes, for I shall assuredly not suffer it.” He rewrote the constitution. He established a postal service. He introduced uniform weights and measures. He built almshouses. He drastically reduced the number of legal cases awaiting resolution. He installed garrisons and built citadels. He exacted large quantities of money in rent, in license fees, in excise duties, and in “contributions.” When the hereditary owners of all these assets, the former dukes, sent an envoy naïvely asking that their successor might intercede with the emperor on their behalf, Wallenstein told him brutally, “Come again on such a mission and I shall lay your head before your feet.” The man began to remonstrate. Wallenstein cut him short: “You have heard.”

  While he ordered his new estates, the second decade of the wars began. Wallenstein’s own territories were havens of peace and prosperity in what was beginning to seem to contemporary observers a howling wilderness. An imperial official compared the generalissimo’s Bohemian estates around Gitschin and Friedland to a “terra felix.” “A general state of peace, delectable and beneficial, predominates.” How lamentable the contrast afforded by the “terra deserta” that was the rest of Bohemia. There “towns, precious castles, markets, villages all tumble down and the cherished fruitful soil is overgrown with thistles and thorns.” Throughout most of the enormous empire it was the same, and the damage had been done not by the fighting but by the simple passage of armies over the land. The contrast between Wallenstein’s terra felix and the surrounding desert was easily explained. As commander in chief he was enabled to ensure, as the official remarked, that “the military is not in the least allowed passage, and still less billeting.” As a result, “everything is to be found in a condition of greatest prosperity.”

  Wallenstein, il grand economo who abhorred waste, used to argue fiercely against his political masters when they suggested he march across arable country when the corn was still green, but few military commanders and none of the common soldiers had his foresight. Foreign mercenaries and dispossessed peasants-turned-soldiers were careless how much destruction they caused, and they were all hungry. It was mercenaries returning from the German battlefields who introduced the word “plunder” into the English language.

  Historians are still arguing about the exact extent of the devastation wrought by the war. Certainly many of the atrocious tales and shocking statistics contained in contemporary documents are exaggerated (because the authors wished either to maximize the amount of compensation they could claim or to blacken their opponents’ reputation), but the stark truth was bad enough to appall foreign travelers and to reduce the emperor’s wretched subjects to despair. A Silesian mystic announced that the end of the world was at hand: the death and destruction all around was a prelude to the Last Judgment. It was all but impossible to imagine life ever resuming its normal patterns. A shoemaker’s diary of the war years records thirty separate occasions when he and his family had to flee from their village to hide from marauding armies. An English traveler’s journal for 1636 describes “castles battered, pillaged and burnt,” villages deserted by people fleeing from the plague, houses left to burn, plundered churches, cities pillaged and apparently deserted but for starving children watching from doorways, broken bridges, woods full of scavenging mercenaries, and roads lined with gallows from which corpses swung. The Lamentations of Germany, published in London in 1638, is a horrific illustrated anthology of refugees’ testimonies. The picture captions include “Priests slain at the altar,” “Snails and frogs eagerly eaten,” “Mother lamenting over six dead children.” Contemporary broadsheets show pictures of parents eating their own children, of graves gaping open while the desperate gnaw exhumed corpses. Unverifiable as such images are, they indicate that the peoples of the empire felt themselves to be living through a time of unspeakable horror, when suffering was endemic and when the structures of everyday life had been so fatally undermined as to leave them no shelter against chaos and old night.

  In such a situation people look around for a culprit. And by this time, for many people, Wallenstein had come to personify the war. It was one of the functions of the commander in chief to take upon himself the guilt and the odium of warfare. When it was suggested that the emperor’s heir, the young king of Hungary, should be the supreme commander, councillors objected that were he to play such a part it would inevitably and irreparably damage his relations with the people he would one day rule, for the generalissimo could not but be a “scourge” and an “oppressor.” No matter that Wallenstein had not started the ghastly chain of conflicts, no matter that
he was (or was supposed to be) a mere servant and instrument of the emperor. It was Wallenstein who had called into being the army which lay like a malign and ravenous parasite on the empire. It was Wallenstein whose harsh motto was “Better a ruined land than a lost land.” It was Wallenstein whose armies, as envisioned by the contemporary English playwright Henry Glapthorne, stained all the fields crimson and swam “through rising seas of blood” to victory. It was Wallenstein whose agents came to town after town demanding “contributions” so extortionate that all trade, all husbandry was rendered futile, and whose soldiers tramped back and forth through the empire, eating the land empty and spreading disease. It was Wallenstein whose ambition (whether for himself or his imperial master) seemed the most obvious cause of the prolongation of the war. People punned on his name: Wallenstein—allen ein Stein—a (tomb)stone for all.

  As Drake had entered the visions and nightmares of the Spanish people, so Wallenstein entered those of his own. A mystic, one Christina Poniatowska, arrived at Gitschin in search of “the raving dog, him of Wallenstein.” Finding him absent, she gave the duchess a letter enjoining him to repent, then fell into a trance in which she saw Wallenstein, his clothes drenched in blood, attempting to climb a ladder to Heaven but being thrown down. Even the less ecstatic credited him with supernatural powers of destruction. At the time of his last visit to Vienna a fire broke out, destroying the bishop’s palace and 148 other houses. “The arrival of the Duke of Friedland has brought us nothing but storm, fire and terror,” wrote a courtier. “When he came to Prague in January his own house took fire. What else is to be concluded but that he will burn and spoil much else and at length himself be consumed?” In the public mind, he took on the character of Mars or of Thanatos, the embodiment of devastation and of death.