Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The war was by now hydra-headed. While Wallenstein negotiated the terms of his recall, Gustavus Adolphus once again defeated Tilly, this time actually in Bavaria. The “good old man” was wounded in the thigh. Two weeks later he died. His employer, the Elector Maximilian, was driven from Munich, his capital, and “crept with a stick around the church like a shadow on its wall, so cast down that he could scarce be recognised.” Gustavus Adolphus took up residence in Maximilian’s palace and ordered his men, as he bluntly informed the French ambassador, to “scorch and ravage the land.” The elector, who had so recently brought about Wallenstein’s fall from office, wrote to him beseeching him “that in accordance with the kind affection and care ever displayed by you for me … you will at this present most dire pass and need not leave me defenceless.” Wallenstein ignored the cant about kind affection. Bavaria was lost. Before attending to it he proposed to drive the emperor’s Saxon enemies, led by Arnim, out of Bohemia.

  He did so promptly. Gustavus Adolphus, alarmed, turned back northwards. The Bavarian army, now led by the elector in person, marched to join the imperial one. The once-haughty Maximilian, thoroughly humbled, was obliged to place himself and his army under the restored generalissimo’s command. The two men met on July 1. “All eyes,” writes Count Khevenhüller, “were on them.” Personal antagonists but political and military allies, they greeted each other with decorum, but observers noted that “His Electoral Highness has learnt the art of dissimulation better than the Duke” and fancied that they could read Wallenstein’s hatred and fierce triumphant joy in the flashing of his eyes.

  Gustavus Adolphus found his way barred by their combined forces. He fell back on Nuremberg and set twenty thousand soldiers and as many more peasants to work surrounding the town with ditches and ramparts. Wallenstein encamped his armies to the southwest of the town, cutting off its lines of supply, and set himself to wait. His camp extended for miles. It contained villages, woods, a river, and a hill surmounted by a ruined castle, the Alte Veste, and it was as grimly defended as Nuremberg now was. For two months he waited while Maximilian, his unwilling assistant, fretted and chivvied him, longing for action. The Swedish chancellor Oxenstierna was approaching with a second army to reinforce Gustavus Adolphus’s. Neither the Swedes nor Wallenstein’s allies could understand why the generalissimo did not move to prevent its coming. But he had foreseen that Oxenstierna brought disaster, not salvation, to the Swedish king. He was showing them all, as he curtly told Maximilian, a new way to make war.

  It was high summer. Inside Nuremberg food was running out, and so was water. The horses died first. Their carcasses rotted in the streets. Then came disease. A contemporary chronicler records that over twenty-nine thousand people died inside the city. In Wallenstein’s camp men were dying too, but not so fast. There was no way that Gustavus Adolphus could accommodate another thirty thousand men. As soon as his reinforcements arrived he was obliged to come out from behind his ramparts and fight. For two days he bombarded the imperial camp but Wallenstein did not respond. On the third day Gustavus Adolphus ordered a general assault, and this time Wallenstein fought back. “The combat started right early,” he reported to the emperor, “and lasted most hotly all day. Many officers and men of Your Majesty’s army are dead and wounded … but in this encounter the King of Sweden hath mightily blunted his antlers.” He himself had been commanding the troops from the Alte Veste, visible from all sides in his scarlet cloak.

  There was a pause. It was August. The Swedish army melted away ever faster in the disease-fostering sun. Wallenstein still had food. In the two weeks after the battle Gustavus Adolphus lost another fifteen thousand men, many of whom simply crossed over to the imperial camp to save themselves from starvation. He sent an emissary proposing to Wallenstein that they should meet to discuss terms for peace. Wallenstein sent word back that he (the generalissimo in assolutissima forma) was not authorized to do any such thing. At last Gustavus Adolphus led his surviving troops out of Nuremberg and marched away. Wallenstein sent scouts after them, but he let them go. The Elector Maximilian, beside himself with frustration, stormed at him: Why this endless waiting? Why not more fighting? Why had he not pursued the Swedes? “’Twas all to no avail,” he reported bitterly. “We had to experience how the Duke gibed at us, as though we had not experience enough in these matters.” Wallenstein was perfectly satisfied with his own performance. Thirty years earlier William Shakespeare had written his Troilus and Cressida, in which Achilles, paragon of warrior-heroes, is reimagined as a vain, delinquent bullyboy and in which the foul-mouthed truth teller Thersites mocks him as one of the “oxen” with whom the clever men, Ulysses and Nestor, “plough up the wars.” Wallenstein was no ox. It was not his way to fight needless battles. What traditional commanders achieved with dash and bravado and violent action, he achieved by more modern methods, by patience and foresight, and by letting the awful weight of his army lie like an incubus on the Swedes, as it had for so long lain on the empire’s own people.

  Gustavus Adolphus marched south. Wallenstein went north, headed for Saxony. Gustavus Adolphus turned around and followed him. In November the opponents closed on each other again near Lützen. “We expect tomorrow already to meet the king,” wrote Wallenstein on the 10th. But four days later, when the king of Sweden continued to evade a battle, he resolved to disperse his troops for the winter. It was a disastrous mistake. On the morning of the 15th his invaluable General von Pappenheim left with eight thousand men, and so did other smaller divisions.

  Around midday one of them found itself riding into the entire Swedish army, on its way to Lützen to fall upon Wallenstein’s depleted forces. Cannon were fired as a signal to all who could hear to race back and rejoin Wallenstein. Messengers galloped after Pappenheim. At about four o’clock, mercifully too late on a November day to do battle, the Swedes marched into view and took up their positions across a stream from the imperial army. All through the night Wallenstein’s men came straggling back in to be led to their battle stations while the generalissimo, whose gout, by this stage of his life, caused him almost perpetual pain, was carried up and down the torchlit lines in a crimson litter borne by mules. Pappenheim and his men would not return until the next day. By his own error Wallenstein found himself outnumbered.

  When morning came both armies were shrouded in fog, but by eleven the fighting had begun, by Wallenstein’s own account “with such a fury as no man hath ever seen or heard.” Overcoming the pain in his legs and feet, he led his men on horseback. The battle lasted all day and deep into the night. “Whole regiments of the enemy were slain,” wrote Wallenstein, “whilst on our side sundry thousand men too were left upon the field.” Hour by hour the lines fluctuated as positions were taken and retaken, and all the time the killing went on until, according to an eyewitness, the entire plain was covered with piles of the dead. Among them was King Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of Midnight, the second Gideon. Unable to control his great white horse after a shot in the arm, too nearsighted to be sure in which direction safety lay, he blundered into a group of imperial soldiers who shot and stabbed him repeatedly, dragged him from his horse, made off with his gold watch and silver spurs, stripped him naked, and left his corpse among the thousands on the battlefield.

  Afterwards the imperial generalissimo received letters of hyperbolical congratulation. “Beloved Son and Noble gentleman,” wrote the Pope. “Thy bravery has liberated not only Germany, nay the whole of the Christian globe from its most dangerous enemy.” Te Deums were sung in thanksgiving in all the Catholic capitals of Europe, and in Madrid a twenty-four-act drama representing the battle was staged to great applause. Wallenstein expressed himself glad of his formidable rival’s death. “It is well for him and me that he is gone: there was not enough room in Germany for both our heads.” But the day itself was a triumph for no one. Most historians account it a Swedish victory, despite the king’s death, because at nightfall Wallenstein withdrew, leaving his artillery on the field and (as usual) aband
oning his wounded, but neither side gained any lasting advantage from the slaughter. The day’s action is best summed up in the bald, exhausted words of the imperial army’s Colonel Holk (who, like thousands of the other combatants, was disinclined from partisan heroics by the fact that he had, in his time, served on both sides): “The blood-bath lasted seven hours and, after both sides had suffered unheard-of ravage, the one withdrew along the one route, the other along the other route.” Wallenstein never fought such a battle again.

  He led his army into Bohemia. Khevenhüller is one of several of his contemporaries who attest to the munificence with which he rewarded good service, but remarks as well that he was “cruel, and famous for saying ‘Let the beast hang!’ ” In Prague that winter those of his officers who had performed well were lavishly paid. Ottavio Piccolomini, who had had three horses killed under him at Lützen, received a fortune in ready money. Holk, a Dane who had fought against Wallenstein at Stralsund but was now his trusted deputy, was granted four great Bohemian estates, each including eighteen villages. But the punishments Wallenstein meted out were as great as the rewards. A scaffold was erected on the same spot where the Bohemian rebels had been executed twelve years before, in a deliberate echo of that grisly performance. Seven officers accused of cowardice had to stand by and watch their swords broken on the scaffold in a public ritual of disgrace. Fourteen more were beheaded. Wallenstein was not present. Holk was in charge. The last man to die seemed to all observers especially pitiful. Even Holk, who was noted for his icy-heartedness and who had seen thousands upon thousands of young men killed for no good reason, was moved, noting the condemned was a mere “child.” He changed the order of execution so as to give him every hope of a last-minute reprieve. When none came Holk halted the killing, to the crowd’s vociferous approval. While the condemned remained kneeling on the scaffold Holk rode over the bridge to Wallenstein’s palace to ask if an exception could be made. The answer came that it could not: “Non si puó.” The young man’s head was hacked off. It was his twentieth birthday.

  That winter Wallenstein was more aloof, more choleric than ever. He shut himself up in the recesses of his palace in Prague. Few people had access to him. “His Princely Grace keeps himself very rare,” reported a Bavarian agent. Even senior officers had to wait weeks for an audience. He had long felt himself to be immured in a labyrinth. Now he was taking on the characteristics of the Minotaur, a fabulous monster, seldom seen, pathetic but greatly to be feared. Those who did gain admittance were shocked by how ill he looked. He was emaciated. His face, ineffectually half-hidden by a silk scarf, was yellowish green and blotched with black. Something—gout, arthritis, or perhaps tertiary syphilis—was progressively crippling him. He never mounted a horse again after Lützen. There were weeks when he could not even sign his name.

  As he declined physically his political stature grew ever greater. Ambassadors traveled from all over Europe to court his favor. Imperial ministers came to seek his advice. Letters passed between him and all his potential opponents and allies. He was functioning now as an all-but-independent potentate, almost as far from the emperor in Vienna as Rodrigo Díaz in Valencia had been from Alfonso in Castile. Nearly twenty years earlier Kepler had seen in the stars that his independence of mind would predispose him to insubordination and a “contempt and disregard for human precepts and practices.” After his death his chief secretary testified that in Prague that winter he received letters from Ferdinand with apparent distaste. He pushed them aside, left them unread for days, and frequently failed to reply.

  That February the last year of his life began. Later, after he had been killed, the imperial commissioners published a “Detailed and Thorough Report of the Abominable Treason Planned by Friedland and his Adherents,” a retrospective justification of his murder in which it was alleged that he had been the instigator and chief intended beneficiary of a treacherous conspiracy against the emperor. But try as they might, and urgently though they needed to do so in order to clear their master of the charge of having unlawfully murdered his loyal servant, the emperor’s officials were unable to find conclusive proof of Wallenstein’s guilt. Unquestionably, during the winter and spring of 1632–33 a plan was formed by others—notably by Richelieu and by those among the Bohemian émigrés who still hoped for an independent homeland—that Wallenstein should use the imperial army against the emperor, make himself king of Bohemia, and ally himself with the French, the Swedes, the Saxons, or a combination of all three. Whether or not Wallenstein ever assented to the scheme is a question on which historians are still unable to agree, not because there is any lack of documentation, but because what there is is so contradictory. Wallenstein’s motives were at the time, and are therefore likely perpetually to remain, obscure. He said one thing to this emissary, another to that. He listened to proposals, he read letters, but he responded only equivocally and seldom in writing. It was in this last phase of his life that he acquired his reputation for inscrutability. “One of the maxims of the Duke of Friedland,” wrote Priorato, “was to give out one thing and to perform the other.” Even Arnim, his one-time deputy who knew him as well as anyone, was baffled. He who had always been so brusque, so shockingly careless of the niceties of diplomatic speech, so prone to ungovernable rage, began to be talked of as an enigma, a master of deception.

  Schiller, the most brilliant author yet to have told his story, produced two almost diametrically opposed interpretations of the last phase of Wallenstein’s life. In his History of the Thirty Years’ War, completed in 1797, he followed the imperialist line. He described Wallenstein as a man with an insatiable appetite for power who “concealed under a glittering and theatrical pomp the dark designs of a restless genius.” He imagined that the unforgivable insult of Wallenstein’s dismissal at Regensburg must have been welcome to him “as it seemed to tear in pieces the record of past favours, to absolve him from every obligation towards his former benefactor.” Thenceforward everything he did was done for vengeance’s sake. He accepted the command for the second time so that he could call up an army to use against the emperor, and for the rest of his life he was planning his treachery.

  So Schiller wrote, but he could only make the facts fit the theory by some strenuously tortuous reasoning. He alleged that the good service Wallenstein had done during his first generalship had been done with the wicked intent of alienating the German princes from the emperor in order to make the emperor dependent solely upon Wallenstein himself—but it is much easier to suppose that he gave good service because he was a good servant. To reconcile the contradictions between Wallenstein’s actual behavior in his last year and his supposed motives, Schiller fell back on the conventional solution of proposing that Wallenstein was indeed a man of almost unfathomable mystery. “Torn by burning passions within, while all without bespoke calmness and indifference, he brooded over projects of ambition and revenge and slowly but surely advanced towards his end.” But even as he was writing it, honest historian that he was, Schiller had to acknowledge he could not believe what he wrote. In his final summing-up of Wallenstein’s career he admitted that he had been able to find no definitive evidence of his treachery (nor, despite exhaustive archival searches, has any subsequent historian), and he concluded: “Wallenstein fell not because he was a rebel, but he became a rebel because he fell.” Two years later Schiller embarked on his tripartite tragedy, Wallenstein’s Camp, The Piccolomini, and Wallenstein’s Death, taking that conclusion as his cue. The Wallenstein of Schiller’s plays is far from being one who “slowly but surely advanced towards his end.” Rather he is one who, entangled in a web of intrigue and counterintrigue, finds himself obliged, willy-nilly, to play for real a role he had only assumed as a stratagem; one who, like most of Schiller’s heroes, is a helpless and ultimately blameless victim of historical forces far beyond his control.

  Among Wallenstein’s closest associates were two families of the Czech nobility, the Trckas and the Kinskys, who still dreamed of reversing the defeat of the Wh
ite Mountain and of installing a native-born, non-Hapsburg king in Bohemia. These powerless people had powerful connections. Encouraged by what he heard from them, Cardinal Richelieu sent his ambassador to Wallenstein proposing an alliance and assuring him the king of France was prepared to afford him armed support “in mounting to the throne of Bohemia, or even higher.” Wallenstein heard the proposals, read personal letters from the great cardinal and from his adviser Father Joseph, but made no reply. What he thought of the proposition we do not know. Nor did his contemporaries. The French ambassador, baffled and frustrated, eventually gave up trying to guess. “The Duke of Friedland’s game is too subtle for me,” he reported. The Swedish chancellor Oxenstierna, also prompted by Czech émigrés, made a similar offer. He would welcome Wallenstein as an ally and would give him every support, but only if he would unequivocally declare himself, by word or deed, to be no longer the emperor’s man. Once more, Wallenstein made no reply. He was associating with politically compromising people, but they were people with whom, as the emperor’s representative, he had legitimate cause to negotiate. As he had written to Arnim years before, when the latter was his deputy, “those to whom we entrust the command of armies may surely be allowed to hold conversation with an adversary.” He was listening to proposals which it would have been safer not to have heard, but as far as anyone has ever been able to discover he did not give them his assent. In May he went forth to war once more as the imperial generalissimo.