Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Such fantasies need not have bothered him. It was not an era when public opinion had much influence over the actions of the mighty. But there were plenty among the powerful, too, who feared and hated him. His huge army had fundamentally altered the balance of power. The electors, whose puppet the emperor had formerly been, were now the emperor’s intimidated subjects. His exorbitant demands for “contributions” had damaged the interests not only of the common people but of their masters as well. At a meeting of the electors in 1627 there were unanimous complaints that “territorial rulers are at the mercy of Colonels and Captains, who are uninvited war profiteers and criminals, breaking the laws of the Empire.” The army’s very existence was a menace. Pompey and Caesar once loomed over Rome, threatening to crush the life out of the state if they chose to fall upon it: Wallenstein and his army, similarly inordinate, lay upon the Holy Roman Empire, an insupportable weight, crushing the life out of it by slow degrees. “The Duke of Friedland,” declared the elector of Mainz, “has disgusted and offended to the utmost nearly each and every territorial ruler in the empire.” Wallenstein was fully aware of how much he was resented. “All Electors and Princes, yea a multitude of others must I make my enemies for the sake of the Emperor,” he wrote. While he had Ferdinand’s protection there was little anyone could do to harm him. But in 1628, the very year in whose beginning he had been so loaded with honors, that protection began to fail.

  “Had Wallenstein been a greater diplomatist,” wrote Oswald Spengler, “and had he in particular taken the trouble, as Richelieu did, to bring the person of the monarch under his influence, then probably it would have been all up with princedom within the Empire.” But Wallenstein served a master with a strong will and a sacred mission. As archduke of Styria Ferdinand had terrorized or tortured his Protestant subjects until they recanted or went into exile. As emperor he had been more circumspect, but with the Danes and their Protestant allies defeated and his personal power assured by Wallenstein’s troops he finally felt secure enough to recommence his persecutions. In 1629 he introduced the Edict of Restitution, a measure requiring that all the property of the Catholic Church which had fallen into secular hands since 1552 should be restored. It was an incendiary act. (Ten years later a similar proposal would provoke the Scottish Covenanters into rebellion against Charles I of England and Scotland, the first link in the chain of events which led eventually to his decapitation and the temporary overthrow of the monarchy.) All Protestants, and many moderate Catholics, were appalled. One of the surviving printed copies of the original edict bears the comment, scrawled by a contemporary Catholic hand, “Radix Omnium Malorum”—“the root of all evil.”

  It was not a measure that Wallenstein could happily enforce. He had maintained from the outset of his command that he was not fighting a religious war. His aims were not sectarian but political, the establishment and preservation of strong, centralized imperial government. His army was a secular, cosmopolitan organization into which men of all denominations were welcomed. Arnim, his second in command, was Lutheran. What he himself believed no one knew for certain. Allusions to the Lord God displeased him. When the master of his mint issued coins bearing a pious legend, he wrote brusquely, “I know not who put into your head the ‘Dominus Protector Meus.’ ” As duke of Mecklenburg his only interference in his subjects’ habits of worship had been his order that they pray for him, “für mich.”

  He saw the Edict of Restitution as an act of political self-destruction, bound to alienate the empire’s Protestants and incline them to welcome any foreign invader bold enough to challenge the Hapsburgs. But Ferdinand had once exclaimed, “Better a desert than a country full of heretics!” and his priorities had not changed. His confessor, the Jesuit Father Lamormaini, told the elector of Bavaria: “The Edict must stand firm, whatever evil might finally come from it. It matters little that the Emperor, because of it, lose not only Austria but all of his kingdoms … provided he save his soul.” No wonder Wallenstein, whose task it was to protect the emperor’s secular interests, came to see the Jesuits as his chief enemies at court. His agenda was a radically different one. “The Edict,” he unguardedly told the people of Magdeburg, “cannot stand.”

  As the aims of the emperor and his commander in chief diverged there were plenty of whisperers and insinuators standing ready to widen the gap between them. Like Alcibiades and the Cid before him Wallenstein had grown too great to be a subject, as observers, both foreign ambassadors and imperial nobles, repeatedly observed. “He holds the entire court in contempt and quarrels openly with ministers … He insults ruling sovereigns,” wrote one. Another reported “that Friedland has so far divested the Emperor of his power as only to leave him with the name.” In a confidential report prepared for Maximilian of Bavaria he is compared to Attila, Theodoric, and Berengar, “those ancients, amazing to history, who as simple leaders of armies attained to kingdoms and”—a pointed addition this—“strove after the Imperial dignity.”

  Count Khevenhüller records that when Wallenstein was made duke of Mecklenburg a group of conservative princes (jealous of their own hereditary privileges and unsettled by the spectacle of two of their number being dispossessed in favor of the upstart from Bohemia) protested. Latter-day Catos indignant at the prospect of a second Caesar’s taking to himself the power that had long been vested in their own aristocratic oligarchy, they warned the emperor that “when sovereigns have granted their servants more authority than is meet, they have often regretted it, with all too belated remorse.” The emperor took note. In 1628, even as he was conferring new honors on Wallenstein, Ferdinand had seemed to the Spanish ambassador “extremely apprehensive on account of the Duke of Friedland’s capricious disposition.” The ambassador asked why in that case he had not “dared” to relieve the duke of his command. “He opines that this would have for its consequence greater evils than if for the while a good mien is shown him.” For all the gracious business with the hat and the hand towel, for all the dukedoms and high titles he granted him, what the emperor felt for his generalissimo was not favor but fear.

  Wallenstein knew that his prodigious success was a provocation, but he did nothing to mollify those outraged by it. The splendor in which he lived was a kind of insolence: he had taken for his motto Invita Invidia—“defying (or inviting) envy.” The prince of Hohenzollern marveled at his personal guard, six hundred men “whose clothes were thickly sewn with gold thread, their bandoleers stuck with embossed silver and the iron points silvered on their pikes, in such sort that no Emperor ever had a like bodyguard.” The electors complained that “not one of them, neither King nor Emperor, had ever had a court to compare.”

  Had he taken the trouble to do so Wallenstein could perhaps have stopped the growing faction determined to bring about his dismissal. When he was in Vienna the Venetian ambassador noted, “Before Wallenstein arrived at court everyone spoke ill of him. Today none lets his voice be heard.” But he never deigned to defend himself. He was too arrogant to dance attendance on those he despised, too contemptuous of others’ ill-informed opinions to bother trying to change them. In holding aloof from the court he allowed rumors and irrational fears to flourish. One of his own generals said of him, “The common false repute of this lord is so imbued into folk that I can often only with difficulty prevent myself from believing all tidings of the like … although I was by him at the very time and hour as that which is narrated was happening.” Absent and invisible to the eye, he grew to monstrous size in the minds of those who feared him.

  A majority of the electors, led by Maximilian of Bavaria, resolved to be rid of him. Their objection to him, and his army, was not based simply on envy of his inordinate power. It was a part of a long-running political debate about monarchy in general, and the nature of the empire in particular. In 1619 Professor Reinking of the University of Geissen had published a thesis drawing on the Institutes of the Roman Emperor Justinian to demonstrate the emperor to be “the greatest authority in the Christian world” and a
n absolute monarch whose wishes had the power of law, a doctrine which unsurprisingly found favor with Ferdinand. But other theoreticians differed. In 1608 a Dr. Horleder had written that the empire (an abstraction represented by the electors and princes) was superior to the emperor who was its servant, and in 1603 Althusias declared that the emperor was the steward, not the possessor, of supreme power. Most dangerous of all, the half-Swedish political philosopher Chemnitz expressed the opinion that if the emperor were to threaten the sovereignty and liberty of the empire, then the empire’s representatives would be duty-bound to combat him, and if necessary depose him by force. Ferdinand had Chemnitz’s book burned.

  To the electors and princes it appeared that Wallenstein had handed Ferdinand the power to make himself a tyrant. As long as the emperor was still dependent for his military security on the cooperation of his princely subjects his power was limited by his incapacity to enforce his will. By 1630, with Wallenstein’s army at his disposal, he could defy them. Besides, it was Wallenstein who had benefited when the emperor, against all precedent, had stripped the hereditary dukes of Mecklenburg of their titles. It was Wallenstein who was now, so improperly, a prince and duke himself, having been granted those titles by an emperor whose disregard for venerable tradition showed him reprehensibly careless of ancient rights. And it was Wallenstein who was to be held responsible for the empire’s agony. Maximilian and the other electors had identified him as the scapegoat onto whom all responsibility for the war could be loaded, and the imperial representative against whom they could vent their hostility to the emperor without overt treason.

  In July 1630 there was to be a session of the Electoral Diet, the most august and influential of the empire’s governmental institutions. The diet was a great occasion, politically, diplomatically, and socially. The emperor with all his court, the electors with theirs and legions of observers, courtiers, spies, and hangers-on all came to Regensburg for it. The city was packed. The emperor’s retinue alone numbered over three thousand people. There were banquets, tournaments, wolf hunts. People traveled across Europe on the flimsiest pretext to be there.

  Wallenstein was not present. A month earlier he had taken up residence in Memmingen, four days’ journey from Regensburg. Like Julius Caesar receiving envoys and agents in Ravenna in the months before he finally led an army against Rome, he was a menacing offstage presence. Maximilian had written that to displace him from his command would be “intensely hazardous.” There were plenty of people in Regensburg who imagined him to be ready to follow Caesar’s lead and stage a coup d’état rather than yield up his command.

  That hot and anxious summer Wallenstein’s reputation grew ever more diabolical. The potentate whose power he was thought to envy was not entitled “Holy” as an empty courtesy: Ferdinand saw himself, and was seen by many Catholics, as the true Church’s secular guardian. To defy or, worse, to usurp his power would be not only a political crime but also a mortal sin. A generation later John Milton, having participated in a prolonged and successful rebellion against divine monarchy, was to write the story of the ruined archangel, “who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.” Wallenstein, whose piety was so questionable, who held court in such insolent grandeur at Memmingen, resembled the Miltonic fiend whom “transcendent glory raised / Above his fellows, with Monarchal pride / Conscious of highest worth.” He was suspected of disloyalty, and disloyalty to Heaven’s anointed representative was tantamount to Satanic revolt.

  The diet opened and the emperor invited his electors’ advice on a wide range of matters of policy. Led by Maximilian of Bavaria they answered as though there were only one issue to be resolved. Wallenstein and his army, they said, had become a curse. They asserted that “the soldiery, now become unspeakably numerous, served no other purpose than to lay waste the common fatherland.” They rehearsed in gruesome and heartbreaking detail the sufferings of their subjects. They talked of “cruel and unnecessary exactions,” of churches despoiled, of the starving reduced to eating grass, of food and property “wrung from the people in barbarous ways,” and they asserted that “the whole blame for the misery, disgrace, and infamy … rested with the new Duke in Mecklenburg who as commander of the imperial forces had been invested, without the consent of the states, with such powers as no one before him had ever exercised.” Wallenstein’s army must be reduced to a third of its size and Wallenstein himself, “a man of restless and ferocious spirit,” one who “sickens and is abominated by the entire human race” and, not only that, a foreigner, a Czech, must be replaced with “such a captain-general as is indigenous to the Empire and an eminent representative of it” (someone, in fact, just like Maximilian).

  The emperor hesitated and equivocated. There were long hot days of talk, of petitions and evasive answers, of proposals and counterproposals. For the emperor to sacrifice his military commander on the electors’ say-so would be humiliating for him, but he wanted them to acknowledge his son, the king of Hungary, as his successor and he needed their support for the Edict of Restitution. In exchange he might be prevailed upon to make this concession. Perhaps, too, though he never acknowledged it, he would be glad to be rid of his generalissimo. If he were to divest himself of Wallenstein, perhaps he could simultaneously divest himself of the odium Wallenstein’s great success in his service had brought upon them both. His contemporary, King Charles I of England, would soon agree to the impeachment and execution of his right-hand man, the Earl of Strafford, in a futile attempt to restore his own popularity. Charles sacrificed Strafford even though he had loved and trusted him. There is no evidence to suggest that Ferdinand felt any affection for Wallenstein, the high-handed, unbiddable subject who addressed him so “roughly,” to whom by now he owed sums so vast there was no prospect of his ever being rid of the debt, whose ultimate ambitions could not be read.

  On August 13 the emperor told the electors that he had resolved on “a change in the direction of his armed forces.” His capitulation, his abject failure to stand by his own commander, was muffled up in euphemism. He composed a letter assuring Wallenstein of his “abiding favour” and “high esteem” and concern for his “safety, honour and good name” and entrusted it to the two of his councillors who had always been on best terms with the generalissimo. They were to carry it to Wallenstein in Memmingen and “persuade him to resign, at the same time assuring him of the Imperial favour.” To ask Wallenstein—a man notorious for his hauteur and for the violence of his rage—to abjure his power struck all who contemplated it as a task of dangerous presumption. A chronicler records that the two emissaries made their four-day journey with fear knocking at their hearts. To their amazement Wallenstein received them calmly. According to one account he told them, “Gladder tidings could not have been brought me. I thank God that I am out of the meshes.” According to another he produced an astrological chart. He had known what was to be, he said, for it was written in the stars that the elector of Bavaria was bound to dominate the emperor at this period and so, “though it grieves me that his Majesty has shown me so little grace, yet will I obey.”

  The electors were incredulous. The man they had so feared, from whose baleful power they had despaired of ever ridding themselves, had gone quietly, for no apparent reason other than that he had been asked to go. It was the first of the three bathetic surprises Wallenstein’s story was to afford those who participated in it, surprises which derived their power to shock from the superhuman status he had acquired in the imaginations of those around him. He was only a man, but they thought him an evil genius, Mephistopheles to Ferdinand’s Faust. Had Wallenstein really been an unholy spirit he would have imposed an awful punishment upon his pusillanimous employer. He would have ignited the heavens, scorched the earth, and dragged Ferdinand off to perdition. He would never have done what in fact he did, which was to send word to von Taxis, his governor at Gitschin, that he would soon be home. “Make provision of all things against my coming.” He ordered that the stables, the riding school, and the tennis court should
be made ready and supplies of wine and vermouth laid in. Making no attempt to appeal his dismissal or even to reproach the emperor, he withdrew with quiet dignity to his estates in Bohemia and settled down to the life of a wealthy landowner, serenely detached from affairs of state.

  After Wallenstein’s death imperial propagandists asserted that his calm was a mask, that, furious, he at once began to plot his revenge. Many people, then and later, believed it. The theory is psychologically plausible. Wallenstein had done great things for Ferdinand. In The Tragedy of Albertus Wallenstein, written by the English dramatist Henry Glapthorne and first performed only five years after Wallenstein’s death, Glapthorne’s Wallenstein boasts of being the emperor’s eagle, who “snatched up his crown, that lay despised on earth / And heaved it up to heaven,” and the architect of his power: “I took the reeling pillars of his state and pitched them fair and even.” All the boasts the playwright puts in Wallenstein’s mouth are well founded in fact. Wallenstein had made Ferdinand secure and greatly extended his power at the cost of his own popularity. As he himself remarked: “That I am hated in the Empire results from this: that I have served the Emperor far too well, against the will of many persons.” He had good cause to feel betrayed, and to betray a betrayer is easily justified. No wonder so many people, including eventually Ferdinand himself, were to believe that he determined to avenge himself on his “insulting” and ungrateful master. But there are other, more convincing ways of explaining Wallenstein’s stoic acceptance of his fall from power.

  One is that he was so exhausted and depressed that he truly welcomed it. At Memmingen a groom reported that he “displays excessive melancholy, admits no one to his presence, treats his servants and attendants badly beyond bounds.” Throughout the first years of his command his letters to his father-in-law, Count Harrach, are full of complaints. He is so tired, so overworked. He is ill and in pain. There has been a radical misunderstanding: what he offered to do was to bring an army into being, not to support it at his own expense; now he is in trouble, “for I perceive the court thinks I should both wage this war and furnish its funds.” He can see no feasible way to continue the war, and no hope of ending it. In what was surely a piece of despairing hyperbole but has been taken for prophecy, he wrote that the fighting might “perchance continue for Thirty Years before something salutary may ensue.” Again and again he employs the image of the labyrinth: he feels that he is lost in it and that before he finds a way out he will, in every sense of the word, be ruined. He longs to “take my quittance, for by the God whom I worship I am no longer able to remain while I see myself scurvily used.”