Great leaders: Historic portraits from the great historians

by Unknown

“The Emperor is betrayed,” said Wallenstein to the messengers; “I pity but forgive him. It is plain that the grasping spirit of the Bavarian dictates to him. I grieve that, with so much weakness, he has sacrificed me; but I will obey.” He dismissed the emissaries with princely presents, and, in a humble letter, besought the continuance of the emperor’s favor and of the dignities he had bestowed upon him.

The murmurs of the army were universal on hearing of the dismissal of their general, and the greater part of his officers immediately quitted the imperial service. Many followed him to his estates in Bohemia and Moravia; others he attached to his interests by pensions, in order to command their services when the opportunity should offer.

But repose was the last thing that Wallenstein contemplated when he returned to private life. In his retreat he surrounded himself with a regal pomp which seemed to mock the sentence of degradation. Six gates led to the palace he inhabited in Prague, and a hundred houses were pulled down to make way for his courtyard. Similar palaces were built on his other numerous estates. Gentlemen of the noblest houses contended for the honor of serving him, and even imperial chamberlains resigned the golden key to the emperor to fill a similar office under Wallenstein. He maintained sixty pages, who were instructed by the ablest masters. His antechamber was protected by fifty life-guards. His table never consisted of less than one hundred covers, and his seneschal was a person of distinction. When he traveled his baggage and suite accompanied him in a hundred wagons drawn by six or four horses; his court followed in sixty carriages attended by fifty led horses. The pomp of his liveries, the splendor of his equipages, and the decorations of his apartments were in keeping with all the rest. Six barons and as many knights were in constant attendance about his person, and ready to execute his slightest order. Twelve patrols went their rounds about his palace to prevent any disturbance. His busy genius required silence. The noise of coaches was to be kept away from his residence, and the streets leading to it were frequently blocked up with chains. His own circle was as silent as the approaches to his palace. Dark, reserved, and impenetrable, he was more sparing of his words than of his gifts, while the little that he spoke was harsh and imperious. He never smiled, and the coldness of his temperament was proof against sensual seductions.

Ever occupied with grand schemes, he despised all those idle amusements in which so many waste their lives. The correspondence he kept up with the whole of Europe was chiefly managed by himself, and, that as little as possible might be trusted to the silence of others, most of the letters were written by his own hand. He was a man of large stature, thin, of a sallow complexion, with short, red hair, and small, sparkling eyes. A gloomy and forbidding seriousness sat upon his brow, and his magnificent presents alone retained the trembling crowd of his dependents.

In this stately obscurity did Wallenstein silently but not inactively await the hour of revenge. The victorious career of Gustavus Adolphus soon gave him a presentiment of its approach. Not one of his lofty schemes had been abandoned, and the emperor’s ingratitude had loosened the curb of his ambition. The dazzling splendor of his private life bespoke high soaring projects, and, lavish as a king, he seemed already to reckon among his certain possessions those which he contemplated with hope.

Wallenstein, at the age of fifty, terminated his active and extraordinary life. To ambition he owed both his greatness and his ruin. With all his failings he possessed great and admirable qualities; and, had he kept himself within due bounds, he would have lived and died without an equal. The virtues of the ruler and of the hero—prudence, justice, firmness, and courage—are strikingly prominent features in his character; but he wanted the gentler virtues of the man, which adorn the hero and make the ruler beloved. Terror was the talisman with which he worked; extreme in his punishments as in his rewards, he knew how to keep alive the zeal of his followers, while no general of ancient or modern times could boast of being obeyed with equal alacrity. Submission to his will was more prized by him than bravery; for, if the soldiers work by the latter, it is on the former that the general depends. He continually kept up the obedience of his troops by capricious orders, and profusely rewarded the readiness to obey even trifles, because he looked rather to the act itself than its object. He once issued a decree, with the penalty of death on disobedience, that none but red sashes should be worn in the army. A captain of horse no sooner heard the order, than, pulling off his gold-embroidered sash, he trampled it under foot. Wallenstein, on being informed of the circumstance, promoted him on the spot to the rank of colonel.

His comprehensive glance was always directed to the whole, and in all his apparent caprice, he steadily kept in view some general scope or bearing. The robberies committed by the soldiers in a friendly country had led to the severest orders against marauders; and all who should be caught thieving were threatened with the halter. Wallenstein himself having met a straggler in the open country upon the field, commanded him to be seized without trial, as a transgressor of the law, and, in his usual voice of thunder, exclaimed, “Hang the fellow,” against which no opposition ever availed. The soldier pleaded and proved his innocence, but the irrevocable sentence had gone forth. “Hang, then, innocent,” cried the inexorable Wallenstein, “the guilty will have then more reason to tremble.” Preparations were already making to execute the sentence, when the soldier, who gave himself up for lost, formed the desperate resolution of not dying without revenge. He fell furiously upon his judge, but was overpowered by numbers and disarmed before he could fulfil his design. “Now let him go,” said the duke, “it will excite sufficient terror.”

His munificence was supported by an immense income, which was estimated at three millions of florins yearly, without reckoning the enormous sums which he raised under the name of contributions. His liberality and clearness of understanding raised him above the religious prejudices of his age; and the Jesuits never forgave him for having seen through their system, and for regarding the pope as nothing more than a bishop of Rome.

But as no one ever yet came to a fortunate end who quarrelled with the Church, Wallenstein, also, must augment the number of its victims. Through the intrigues of monks, he lost at Ratisbon the command of the army, and at Egra his life; by the same arts, perhaps, he lost what was of more consequence, his honorable name and good repute with posterity.

For, in justice, it must be admitted that the pens which have traced the history of this extraordinary man are not untinged with partiality, and that the treachery of the duke, and his designs upon the throne of Bohemia, rest not so much upon proved facts, as upon probable conjecture. No documents have yet been brought to light which disclose with historical certainty the secret motives of his conduct; and among all his public and well-attested actions, there is, perhaps, not one which could have had an innocent end. Many of his most obnoxious measures proved nothing but the earnest wish he entertained for peace; most of the others are explained and justified by the well-founded distrust he entertained of the emperor, and the excusable wish of maintaining his own importance. It is true, that his conduct toward the Elector of Bavaria looks too like an unworthy revenge, and the dictates of an implacable spirit; but still, none of his actions perhaps warrant us in holding his treason to be proved. If necessity and despair at last forced him to deserve the sentence which had been pronounced against him while innocent, still this will not justify that sentence. Thus Wallenstein fell, not because he was a rebel, but he became a rebel because he fell. Unfortunate in life that he made a victorious party his enemy, but still more unfortunate in death, that the same party survived him and wrote his history.