Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Piccolomini’s allegations, now backed up by Aldringen (who had not been at Pilsen or laid eyes on Wallenstein that winter) and so enthusiastically promoted by Count Oñate, had proved sufficient to persuade the emperor of Wallenstein’s guilt, but the emperor’s descendants were to continue to doubt it. Ferdinand’s grandson, the Emperor Leopold, visiting Prague, asked the gentleman who pointed out Wallenstein’s palace to him, “Do you know for certain that Wallenstein was a rebel?” For certain no one ever knew, or knows now. In the next century Frederick the Great of Prussia asked the Emperor Joseph II “how it really stood with that story of Wallenstein’s death.” The emperor replied, “I cannot possibly doubt the honour and integrity of my ancestor,” an answer so evasive that it can only be understood to signify the exact opposite of what it ostensibly said. Ferdinand had plenty of motives other than a sincere belief in his commander in chief’s treachery for wanting to be rid of him. Wallenstein had become increasingly insubordinate, more and more difficult to control. There was also the question of money. Only two days after his proscription was made public the emperor decreed that Wallenstein’s estates were to be seized. The stupendous debt the empire owed him was annulled and the richest land in all Bohemia, the terra felix, was once more in Hapsburg hands.

  Communications were slow. For two days after all Vienna had been apprised of his “perjured disloyalty and barbaric tyranny,” Wallenstein continued to write on routine matters to imperial ministers. But gradually, insidiously, the news seeped into the camp. Gallas remained inexplicably absent. So did Aldringen and Piccolomini. More people leaked away. A colonel sent to see what had happened to Gallas did not return. Wallenstein’s nephew, who had gone to Vienna taking a letter to Councillor Eggenberg (one of those supposed friends of Wallenstein who had pronounced him guilty), never came back either. One Colonel Diodati suddenly left the camp, without orders, taking his regiment with him. The officer sent after them was not seen in Pilsen again. These silent exits were eerie, disquieting. Ten years earlier Kepler had warned Wallenstein that the month of March 1634, now only a few days off, was one of immense but ominous significance for him. On February 19 Wallenstein—uneasy but still unaware of his own dismissal—invited the assembled officers into his quarters. This time he received them in bed.

  Once more they were asked to swear their loyalty to him. They did so, each with their own private provisos. Colonel Walter Butler, an Irishman with plausible manners but no fortune as yet, was among those who bound themselves “to live and die at His Princely Grace’s side.” On the 20th Wallenstein sent another messenger to Vienna. The messenger, arrested by Gallas, vanished along with the rest.

  The “traitors,” Ilow, Trcka, and Kinsky, planned to march on Prague and to establish a base on the White Mountain, as though to raise an independent Bohemia, phoenixlike, from the battlefield where it had been immolated fourteen years before. There perhaps Wallenstein would have been proclaimed king in defiance of the Hapsburgs, as Piccolomini and the others claimed he intended. Whether in fact he had assented to the plan, whether he even knew about it, is unproven. A Saxon emissary who saw Wallenstein on February 19 reported that he looked “like a corpse.” It is possible that Ilow and the Bohemians judged he was by now so ill he could be used as the Cid’s corpse was in the 1961 film, as the inert but symbolically potent figurehead for a campaign over which he had no control. In any event, the plan was aborted. On the 21st Trcka set out towards Prague at the head of a column of troops. He had traveled only ten miles when he met an officer on the road who was able to tell him what was happening in the world. The revelation was devastating. Wallenstein was deposed. Prague was in the hands of troops who took their orders from Gallas and Piccolomini, Wallenstein’s trusted deputies who had denounced him and usurped his place. The troops stationed in Austria had all renewed their oaths to the emperor, vowing to obey Wallenstein no more. Piccolomini was less than a day’s march away with forces outnumbering those at Pilsen and with orders to overpower Wallenstein and carry him to Vienna.

  So many had left the camp to disappear silently; Trcka came back to Pilsen with his dreadful news. At last Wallenstein awoke to what had happened to him. Alcibiades, when condemned in his own city, went over to the Spartans. So now, probably for the first time and with no other option available to him, Wallenstein resolved to effect the change of sides he had been suspected for years of contemplating. He decided to retreat immediately, that night, to the frontier fortress of Eger, there if possible to unite his troops with those of the Saxons under Arnim, or with the Swedes under the Duke of Weimar.

  No one slept. Messengers were sent at the gallop to those of Wallenstein’s officers stationed in the countryside round about on whom he thought he could still rely. One of them was Colonel Walter Butler.

  Wallenstein’s servants worked feverishly. His household in Pilsen, albeit greatly reduced from the splendor of his glory days, comprised two hundred people. There was gold plate to be stowed away, hangings and candlesticks, fur coverlets and tooled leather screens, washbowls of silver and porcelain and fine tablecloths to be laid in chests and loaded onto wagons. And while the servants packed, the soldiers looted. Trcka and Ilow, knowing that their estates would surely be confiscated, grabbed what they could before leaving Bohemia: they gave orders that the townspeople were to be forced at pistol point to hand over any cash or gold or jewelry they possessed. All through the night Wallenstein worked, sequestered with his secretaries, firing off letter after letter in a vain attempt to close the wound through which his power was bleeding. His efforts were unavailing. Around him in the darkness his army leaked away. Officers who three days earlier had signed an oath to serve him to the death scrambled to desert him, taking their regiments with them. At first light next morning, “in the greatest disorder” and “indescribable panic,” the remnant got under way.

  Wallenstein had once had a hundred thousand men under arms. Scarcely fourteen hundred followed him to Eger. Of all his senior officers only the three faithful “traitors,” Kinsky, Trcka and Ilow, remained. The march was slow and wretched. The snow was turning to slush. Wallenstein was lifted repeatedly from his carriage into a litter slung between horses, and then back into his carriage; in neither conveyance could he escape from pain. En route Colonel Butler, who had obediently brought his regiment to join the forces of the commander in chief, fell into line. Wallenstein, to whom so few had proved true, was touched by his loyalty. He invited Butler to ride in his coach, an extraordinary favor from one who so disliked promiscuous friendliness, and assured the Irishman that henceforth he would command not one regiment but two, both financed by himself, Wallenstein, the munificent plutocrat and generalissimo. (As he spoke imperial officials were already in possession of Gitschin, of Sagan, and of his palace in Prague.) Butler expressed his gratitude politely, but somewhere along the way it struck him that there might be a surer way of growing rich. The journey took three days. In the darkness of the second night on the road Butler dispatched his chaplain to Piccolomini with a secret message. Before Wallenstein arrived in Eger, Gallas was able to tell Aldringen, “I hope, and I believe it to be certain, that Colonel Butler will deal the blow.”

  Eger lies in a bend of the river Elbe on Bohemia’s northwest frontier. On a hill behind it rises a castle of black rock. Wallenstein and his train reached it on the evening of Friday, February 24. The commander of the imperial garrison there, Colonel Gordon, received them. The common soldiers were to encamp outside the town. The officers and their households were lodged within, Gordon giving up his own house in town to Wallenstein and settling for the night in the castle. That night Colonel Butler invited Gordon and his deputy, Major Leslie, another Scotsman, to dinner. At 11 p.m. a messenger arrived from Pilsen, bringing a copy of the imperial proclamation of January 24. Leslie escorted the messenger to Wallenstein, who now read the words of his dismissal for the first time. All but incoherent with exhaustion, pain, and fury, Wallenstein raved of what he had done for the emperor, of how churlis
hly he had been rewarded, of how bitterly he resented the injustice done him, of how he would make the emperor repent. Leslie listened meekly, and later wrote down what he heard. Then he returned to Butler’s lodging. Some time that night he, Gordon, and Butler, “the three heroes” as they later termed themselves, agreed what must be done.

  On Saturday morning the two triumvirates—Kinsky, Ilow, and Trcka, who would die with Wallenstein; and Gordon, Leslie, and Butler, who would kill him—were all summoned to Wallenstein’s room. The latter three were persuaded by the former to swear that they would obey Wallenstein, and him alone. (Despite the events of the previous week Ilow seems to have clung to his faith in the efficacy of oaths.) They did so, and then withdrew. A little later Gordon sent to invite Kinsky, Ilow, and Trcka to dine with him in the castle above the town at six o’clock. They accepted. That afternoon one of Wallenstein’s officials read out for his approval a draft order to all officers in the field in which the customary fiction that “we do naught other than to perform the service of his Imperial Majesty” was reiterated. The man had served Wallenstein long enough to know what the generalissimo’s rage was like, but the one that ensued was the worst he had endured. “With the most frightful maledictions and fulminations…. Tormented by all the Furies, he ordered me to go to Hell.” Wallenstein had crossed his Rubicon. The officers must know now that it was not for the emperor they fought, but for him alone, “für mich.”

  Darkness fell. Kinsky, Ilow, Trcka, Trcka’s adjutant, and a handful of attendants went up the hill to the castle to keep their dinner engagement. Gordon, Leslie, and Butler received them and escorted them to a wainscoted chamber with doors at either end, while their attendants were led to the kitchen to eat. There was good food on the table and plenty of wine. The guests relaxed. They did not know that after they were all seated, and their plates and glasses filled, the kitchen door was locked on the outside imprisoning their servants, seventy of Butler’s Irish troops entered the castle and were stationed by the gates and the drawbridge was drawn up behind them. The wine was poured copiously. The party became noisy. Ilow was especially boisterous, bragging that within days Wallenstein would have an army greater than any he had commanded before. Then, at a signal from Leslie, the room’s two doors were thrown open and seven swordsmen rushed in through each one shouting, “Who is a good Imperialist?” Gordon, Butler, and Leslie rose, overturning the table and yelling, “Vivat Ferdinandus!” Kinsky was killed almost at once. Ilow and Trcka managed to draw their swords. It was dark, all the lights having been knocked out. Plates and windows were smashed. Ilow and the hapless adjutant were slaughtered where they were. Trcka, a famed warrior (and one who, more prosaically, was protected by his leather coat), managed to force his way out of the mêlée and make his way to the gate, where Butler’s seventy Irishmen brought him down with their spears.

  No musket had been fired. No one in the town below had heard anything. Gordon remained in the castle to see to the disposal of the bodies. Leslie led a troop of men through the streets to forestall any disturbances. Butler, who had pledged himself anew that morning to be Wallenstein’s obedient servant, led the swordsmen, already blooded that night, to the house where Wallenstein lay. They had no difficulty gaining entrance. No special guard had been placed, only the usual patrols to keep away noisy dogs and traffic, and Wallenstein, again as usual, had chosen the most secluded apartments in the house, out of earshot of most of his household. Butler waited by the gate. Seven men barged through the courtyard into the house and up the stairs, shouting, “Rebels!” They shoved aside Wallenstein’s cupbearer who was coming down with a gold beaker. They killed the groom of the chamber who tried to hush them. They broke down the barred door to Wallenstein’s bedroom. Wallenstein had dragged himself out of bed. When they crashed in, their torches flaring, he remained tottering upright and spread his arms wide. He said something, perhaps a plea for “quarter.” The leader killed him with one hard thrust of his spear. Later the killers stressed what courage and resolution it had taken to accomplish the death of “so heinous, vengeful a man, feared by all the world.” In the actual event the ease of it seemed to have made them giddy. One of them picked up the body and made to toss it out the window. Another stayed him. Wallenstein’s corpse was wrapped in something red, not one of his famous scarlet cloaks but a bedspread or hanging, and dragged, thudding and jolting, down the stairs. Afterwards the killers stripped it naked, clothes being, in seventeenth-century Europe as in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, too expensive to waste on the dead.

  In 1630, when Wallenstein accepted his dismissal and—instead of raising the insurrection so many had been dreading—went quietly into retirement, observers were nonplussed, their relief tinged with a kind of disappointment that the diabolical warlord of their imagination was as easily cast down as any other man. His mortality was the second shocking disillusionment his life’s story afforded. It was a time when people readily believed that a man might be, if not actually immortal, at least invulnerable. Many of those who fought in the Thirty Years’ War carried amulets for which they paid large sums on the understanding that these would ensure their survival. Few people were surprised to hear that it had taken spearmen to kill Count Trcka—it was well-known that he had magical protection from wounds by sword or musket. And of course Wallenstein himself, the genius of war, could not be killed like any other mere mortal. At Lützen he wore no armor, evidence, said his critics, that he had supernatural, probably infernal, protection. (Nor, as it happens, did Gustavus Adolphus, but in his case his preference for less cumbersome clothing was taken to demonstrate his courage and his pious trust in God.) During the battle every single one of Wallenstein’s attendants was killed but he himself passed unscathed through the fighting. It was said that one of his spurs was shot away by a cannonball, and at the end of the day, when he removed his shirt, dozens of bullets fell from its folds but not one had so much as grazed his flesh. Volcanoes spat fire when he took the field. Cities burned as he rode into them. It seemed absolutely incredible that simply by shoving a piece of barbed and pointed metal into his chest one could kill such a man.

  His death was hailed by those who had desired it as a miracle. When the news reached the Jesuits’ superior general he jubilantly gave thanks to the Most High, noting that the “marvellous deed” had been effected in response to the thousands of masses said by members of the order all over Europe. That murdering Wallenstein had been God’s own work was confirmed by a near-contemporary painting of the killing in which the assassins wear haloes. Several reports presented his death as a kind of exorcism. In 1628 the mystic Christina Poniatowska had had a premonitory vision of his end: “As he [Wallenstein] lay stretched upon the ground flames belched with a horrid roar from his mouth while poison and pitch were ejaculated from his heart until this was pierced by a bolt sent from Heaven”—a vision which closely corresponds with some of the murderers’ own accounts of his actual death. One of them said that as he fell he belched prodigiously “so fearful a noise that hearers were amazed,” emitting a terrible stink of tobacco. Tobacco was the devil’s weed, and its ashes were associated with those of sacked and burning cities. Gallas was told that as the spear drove into him a great cloud of smoke erupted from his breast, with a noise of a musket firing. “Presumably it was the Devil who departed from him,” said Gallas.

  Many were excited by the drama of Wallenstein’s end. Prints depicting the murders at Eger sold by the hundred. Plays and poems about Wallenstein were published all over Europe. The downfall of one so high and mighty afforded a nasty satisfaction to those low enough to have envied and feared him. A “Farewell to Wallenstein” circulating at the time is charged with the combination of pious disapproval and greedy schadenfreude with which the tribulations of the rich and famous have been greeted by hoi polloi from that day to this:

  That’s what happens when

  a man is too ambitious.

  The Devil silently comes

  and trips him
up.

  No tree grows up to Heaven.

  The axe is always ready to fell it to the ground.

  The spin put upon the story in contemporary reports varied according to the reporter’s politics. Loyalist broadsheets published grotesque caricatures of the fallen potentate, and a Zurich weekly news sheet carried a derisive epitaph on the “Admiral of ships and sailors short / General without open battle fought.” With equal gusto oppositional voices, both internal and foreign, used the murder as an example of Hapsburg wickedness. The Swedes magnified Wallenstein, partly in order to foster anxiety and divisions in the imperial ranks, partly (as the Spanish had magnified Drake) in order to excuse themselves for having failed to defeat him. “Who but Wallenstein broke at Nuremberg that most victorious and great force drawn together by Our Most Gracious King and Master, now resting in God?” asked the author of a Swedish broadsheet. “I gladly laud the enemy’s valour.” Protestants acclaimed Wallenstein as a martyr, killed for his faith by scheming papists. Butler, Gordon, and Leslie were compared with Ravaillac, assassin of Henry IV of France, and demonized as “perjured, godless, disloyal, ignoble knaves.” To nationalists he became the victim of the Spanish influence at court. “He was German!” exclaimed one pamphleteer inaccurately. “That was his crime. Thence flowed his affliction and all calamity.”

  His posthumous reputation, though, was too important a matter for its formation to be left to the spontaneous workings of popular prejudice. As the loyal Count Khevenhüller records, there were mischievous people ready to call “the prompt and noble execution at Eger a wicked and infamous murder.” To correct such an impression the emperor needed to demonstrate that Wallenstein was indeed a traitor, and one so dangerous that he could not possibly have been allowed to survive long enough to stand trial.