He rode out in state. “All the court attendants were clad in uniforms of blue and scarlet, and ten trumpeters, sounding their silver gilt trumpets, opened the way.” There were fourteen coaches each drawn by six horses and a train of baggage wagons covered with gilded leather. “The train announced the man who, in power and splendour vied even with the emperor himself,” wrote an observer. Wallenstein is said to have remarked that it was “a pretty train, a brave sight, but our return shall be with one far comelier.” The promise was remembered (or invented) for its piquancy. That return never took place.
Arnim, still the elector of Saxony’s commander, was in Silesia along with the forces of the elector of Brandenburg, another of Sweden’s allies, and Swedish troops under the command of the Bohemian nationalist Count Thurn. Wallenstein’s forces easily outnumbered their combined armies. But instead of attacking them, he proposed an armistice.
He had seen at Lützen how little advantage could be gained from how much killing. His contemporary the Spanish ambassador wrote: “The wars of mankind today are not limited to a trial of natural strength, like a bull-fight, nor even to mere battles. Rather they depend on losing or gaining friends or allies, and it is to this end that good statesmen must turn all their attention and energy.” It was a lesson Wallenstein already knew by heart.
He apparently sought to isolate the Swedes by making a separate peace with their allies within the empire. It was a sound policy, and one for which he believed himself to have Ferdinand’s sanction. The Elector John George of Saxony, Arnim’s employer, the most powerful of the German Protestant princes, was one whose alliance he particularly sought. Back in 1626, when Christian of Denmark launched his foray into the empire, John George had urged his fellow members of the Lower Saxon Circle to remain loyal to the emperor rather than support their foreign coreligionist. Like Wallenstein, the elector was in favor of a strong, centralized imperial government, so long as it was perceived to be just and reasonable, and so long as it permitted religious freedom. After the Edict of Restitution and after the appalling sack of the Protestant city of Magdeburg by Tilly’s army, John George had entered into an alliance with the Swedes, but Wallenstein had good cause to see him as a natural ally. To a more amenable, less doctrinaire emperor than Ferdinand he could have been a loyal and vitally important subject, one whose allegiance would have secured that of many smaller powers. Wallenstein and Arnim met at Heidersdorf for extended talks. Arnim took Wallenstein’s proposed terms back to the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, who rejected them. The armistice was nominally over, but still Wallenstein did not attack.
This pacific dithering was not what most imperialists wanted of the man whose attendant spirits were supposed to be “storm, fire and terror.” Back in Vienna a pamphlet appeared, expressing grave doubts about Wallenstein’s health and his general competence and asking sarcastically, “Would it be better to bring down in ruin the House of Austria and shortly the whole of Christendom rather than to hurt the Generalissimo’s susceptibilities?”
At the end of August Wallenstein and Arnim—those old comrades—agreed to a second armistice. Emissaries galloped off to all interested parties to discuss a peace plan so vaguely formulated that no one seemed able to agree on what its main points were. Oxenstierna and Thurn both understood that Wallenstein had finally agreed to turn on his emperor. If they were right Wallenstein was indeed, at least ostensibly, contemplating treachery. But, if he was, when he and Arnim met again in September he had changed his mind. “With great vehemence,” he insisted that what he wanted was for the Protestant electors and their Bohemian allies to unite with him and his emperor in driving all the foreigners—Swedish, Spanish, and French alike—out of the empire. When Arnim’s representative protested that the Swedes were Saxony’s allies, Wallenstein was “seized by an ague” and broke off negotiations.
What he was thinking of in that last year is as hard to plumb now as it was for his contemporaries. His killers were to ascribe to him a will as unconquerable and courage as dauntless as those of Milton’s Satan, who boasted of the “fixed mind / and high disdain … That with the mightiest raised me to contend,” but a fixed mind was precisely what Wallenstein, towards the end of his life, most signally lacked. “Certain it is that no safe treaty can be concluded with the man,” wrote Arnim, exasperated, “for there is no steadiness in him.” Some saw in his apparent inconsistencies the devious machinations of a conspirator cunning past men’s thought; others saw the vacillations of one sick, or superstitious, or desperate.
Contemporaries, including Count Adam Trcka, his brother-in-law, who was at this period one of his most favored associates, and Arnim, who had been both his trusted lieutenant and his opponent, deplored the inordinate influence his astrologers had over him. At the end of the second armistice, when his policy seemed to have changed so abruptly and inexplicably, one of his colonels put it about that the alteration could be ascribed to an astrologer’s prediction that he would win a great battle in November. “Since he is so superstitious as to heed the influence of the stars and mostly to govern his actions by astrological reports,” he had therefore decided he could gain more by confrontation than by peace talks. He had always sought guidance from the stars. Kepler (who was more skeptical than his patron) once wrote irritably that Wallenstein had kept him for three weeks at work on updating his horoscope, “a waste of time for him and for me.” Kepler had repeatedly and sternly refused Wallenstein’s requests for precise predictions of terrestrial events. But Battista Senno was more obliging, and it is possible Wallenstein’s physical deterioration had rendered him at once less decisive and more credulous.
Certainly he was not well. When obliged to leave his couch he was carried everywhere in a litter. He was taking quantities of powders and potions to alleviate his suffering, drugs whose effect on his state of mind were probably little understood by contemporary physicians and are impossible to gauge in retrospect. He was seized by seismic rages over which he no longer seemed to have control. Besides, the decay of his body may have been accompanied by more than the inevitable exhaustion and irascibility of one in constant pain. One scholar, after studying his apothecary’s bills, has concluded that he may have been subject to a form of urine poisoning likely to induce hallucinations and other delusions. Those who spoke with him during these months refer repeatedly to his being taken ill in the middle of important conferences, suggesting that he was subject to some form of dementia.
He wanted peace. That much seems clear. He was not one to fight to the last man for a lost cause. He was no dogmatic, incorruptible Cato. There was no principle he would not concede, no alliance or concession he would not contemplate. He once said, “When all the land is in ruins, then we will have to make peace.” The words have been quoted by those who would make a desperate warrior of him as though they signified an indomitable resolve. But they were written in bitter irritation against the intriguing diplomats whose machinations threatened to prolong the war ad infinitum and the bigots whose intolerance made any agreement so hard.
He wanted, as he had always wanted, a unified empire and the expulsion of foreign meddlers. Everything he worked for would have benefited the emperor, but the emperor himself was a major obstacle to its accomplishment. In the course of his negotiations with Arnim that last summer, Wallenstein was several times to express his frustration with Ferdinand, and his hostility to the Jesuits and Spaniards who encouraged him in his militant Catholicism. Wallenstein worked for political unity, not religious uniformity. Ferdinand’s Edict of Restitution, the “root of all evil,” had riven apart the empire he was trying to weld into a whole. Before setting out in May he had said to two emissaries from Oxenstierna, “Are we not arch-fools to be knocking our heads for the sake of others when, since we have the armies in our power, we could arrange a peace to our liking?” There is no clear evidence that he ever thought of ousting the emperor, but there are plenty of indications that he did aspire to the role of independent arbiter, what Schiller calls �
�the man of destiny,” one with the authority to propose a peace settlement and force it on the emperor and his enemies alike.
Another cause of contention arose between emperor and generalissimo. The Spanish Hapsburg prince, the cardinal infante, was proceeding through the western empire towards the Netherlands. He asked for the loan of the imperial troops under Colonel Aldringen, which were stationed in Austria but under Wallenstein’s overall command. Wallenstein forbade Aldringen to move. At the beginning of August Ferdinand wrote to Wallenstein with a “request” that he should hand over the troops. Before the letter was sealed he changed the word “request” to “command.” So much for Wallenstein’s supremacy “in assolutissima forma.” Two weeks later an imperial minister came to Silesia with secret instructions to sound out some of Wallenstein’s senior officers “that his Imperial Majesty shall be assured of their steadfast loyalty and devotion in the case of a change pertaining to the Duke of Friedland by reason of his illness or otherwise.” The author of a contemporary French tract wrote that Wallenstein “was much honoured by his own and foreign soldiers by whom, once known, he was almost adored,” but perhaps his charisma was dwindling along with his health. Subsequent events suggest that the assurances given the emperor’s representative by at least two of those approached, Octavio Piccolomini and Matthias Gallas, were eminently satisfactory. Already Wallenstein’s second downfall was being encompassed.
When the second round of his talks with Arnim broke down, Wallenstein told the Saxon emissary darkly that when the armistice expired “I shall know what it is that thereafter I have to do!” He did. He marched on Steinau, a stronghold held by Count Thurn’s Swedes. So swift and surprising was Wallenstein’s aggressive move that the Swedes did not even attempt to defend themselves. Within half an hour they surrendered. Five thousand of them joined Wallenstein’s army. Thurn was captured (but subsequently released). Wallenstein swept on, the Swedish army fleeing before him from fortress after fortress.
It was good service, but it was not enough. In August, what purported to be word-for-word accounts of the meeting at Heidersdorf between Wallenstein and Arnim reached the emperor in Vienna. According to this secret, unverifiable account Wallenstein had promised independence for Bohemia and a pardon for all the exiled rebels, while hinting that he might make himself king of Bohemia and margrave of Moravia. He had railed against the elector of Bavaria and against the Jesuits. About Maximilian Wallenstein was quoted as saying, “The Bavarian started this game. No assistance shall I render him … Would that his land were already ruined. Would that he were long dead. If he make not peace I shall myself wage war against him.” About Ferdinand he is alleged to have said, “If the Emperor will not make peace and keep the agreement I shall force him to it.” As the report circulated even those ministers who had previously been considered part of the “Friedland faction” hastened to distance themselves from him. That autumn a courtier reported that in Vienna, despite his brilliant successes in the field, Wallenstein was spoken of “publicly and without shame … with incredible contempt and malice.”
While he chased the Swedes northwards their ally Bernard of Weimar was threatening Regensburg on the Bavarian border. Maximilian implored the emperor to send Wallenstein and his army to his aid. The emperor would gladly have complied but it was becoming exasperatingly, humiliatingly, even alarmingly obvious that he could not command his commander. Wallenstein refused to take the threat to Regensburg seriously, declared that he was unable to send troops there, then gave himself the lie by setting out in force but too late. Before he could reach the scene Regensburg had been taken by the Protestants. He had achieved nothing by his belated move except a demonstration of his own failing judgment. The emperor urged him to attempt to retake the city. But Wallenstein never deliberately engaged in a battle he could not win. It was getting cold, time to search for winter quarters. Ignoring the imperial orders Wallenstein led his army back into Bohemia to camp at Pilsen.
By the time he marched back into Pilsen he had no friends left at court. In 408 BC, after the defeat of his fleet at Notium, the Athenians drastically revised their estimation of Alcibiades. A few months before they had adored him and offered him unprecedented powers, but at his first failure they recalled all their grievances against him. So now Wallenstein’s whole career was being reviewed and reinterpreted as that of a traitor. It is a part of the price heroes pay for their heroic status that no allowance is made, by those who adore or fear them for their imagined superhuman capacities, for the fallibility inherent in their merely human nature. When Alcibiades took command of the Athenian fleet for the second time it was generally believed that he was omnipotent and invincible; therefore, if he lost a battle it must have been because he had deliberately and treacherously refrained from winning it. So too it was assumed of Wallenstein that nothing but treason could have prevented his career from being one long parade of victories.
His ambition, maintained his detractors, had always been insatiable, and since his dismissal at Regensburg it had been reinforced by his festering anger and his craving for revenge. It was said that in the period of his retirement he had sabotaged Tilly’s campaign by refusing to sell food and other material from Friedland to the army. A pamphlet revived the allegation that he had treacherously invited Arnim and his Saxons into Prague in 1631. It was suggested yet again that he had agreed to reassume his command only in order to undo the empire from within. People whispered that he had held back, deliberately and treacherously, from attacking the Swedish army in Nuremberg because a conclusive victory would not have been in his own personal interests. An imperial committee found that his withdrawal from Lützen was an act of cowardice. His recent release of Count Thurn constituted collusion with the enemy. Even his dislike for the noise of crowing cocks was adduced against him: like St. Peter he was a betrayer of his master. His failure to save Regensburg was deliberate and malicious, motivated by his hatred of Elector Maximilian. And his subsequent disobedience and withdrawal to Pilsen was—even in the opinion of Prince Eggenburg, who, among all the imperial councillors, had been the one most sympathetic to him—“the most pernicious, the most perilous, the most heedless thing that the Duke has ever done.” His entire course of action since his recall was shown to be a slow, devious, diabolically wicked progress towards the moment when he could avenge himself on his imperial master.
The emperor was afraid. Following the advice of his councillors and the urgings of Maximilian of Bavaria, he determined to test his authority. Wallenstein had announced his intention to settle his army in winter quarters in Bohemia. Ferdinand sent word that he was to do no such thing. He was to turn around and return to Bavaria, there to attack Bernard of Weimar, and afterwards to quarter his troops in Saxony or Brandenburg (hostile territories which would have to be made to admit the imperial army at the point of the sword). “This,” concluded the emperor, “is my definite decision on which I fully insist.”
It was the first time he had ever issued so peremptory an order to his generalissimo. Perhaps by ill luck, perhaps by design of those who longed for Wallenstein’s overthrow, the order on which he chose to “fully insist” was all but impossible to obey. It was December. Wallenstein had never attempted a military action so late in the year. It was bitterly cold. The ground was frozen hard. There was snow on the hills. To attempt to mount an aggressive campaign at such a season was to court mutiny, the rapid loss of men through desertion, illness, and exposure and—eventually—near-certain defeat.
It is at this point in Wallenstein’s career that the action of Friedrich Schiller’s great dramatic trilogy, Wallenstein’s Camp, The Piccolomini, and Wallenstein’s Death, begins. Schiller avails himself of poetic license to juggle a little with the actual course of events. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, at a time of emergent German nationalism, he picks as the breaking point an earlier order of the emperor’s, that requiring Wallenstein to place Aldringen and his troops under Spanish command, an adjustment which allows him to make t
he most of Wallenstein’s “patriotic” opposition to Spanish and Jesuit factions at court. But the essential shape of the historical drama played out at Pilsen is recognizable in the plays. Schiller knew what he was writing about, and both the historian and the dramatist in him perceived that from the point when Wallenstein was placed in a position where he could not but defy his emperor his downfall was inevitable. The rest of his story has the nightmarish shapeliness of tragedy, a course of events racing ineluctably to its ghastly end.
At Pilsen Wallenstein was isolated. His contemporary Robert Burton wrote that among those most gnawed by melancholy were “the mighty when they grow old, they who neither loved nor were loved, who only exploited others, sibi nati, those born for themselves.” Wallenstein was not old, but he was terribly aged: the description fits. Several of his officers had their wives with them at Pilsen, but his duchess stayed away. There was no one close to him who was not, in some measure, using him. Years earlier he had written to his father-in-law, “We must regard it as a maxim that we can trust absolutely no one.” He was right. Even his astrologer Senno, with whom, it was said, he sat up through long sleepless nights in a vain attempt to foresee his future, was taking money from one of his assassins-to-be to disclose the nature of their conversations. In recounting the last weeks of his life the language of fidelity and treason is turned upside down. The “loyalists” were those of his officers who, while apparently still deferring to him, were secretly reporting his every questionable saying back to the court. The “traitors” were those who stood staunchly by their commander, and in some cases died with him. “Loyalists” and “traitors” contributed in approximately equal measure to the digging of the pit into which he fell.
Heroes: A History of Hero Worship Page 43
