Part 26

The peace of Arnay-le-Duc succeeded, and then the fatal Bartholomew marriage with the Messalina of Valois. The faith taught in the mountains of Béarn was no buckler against the demand of “The mass, or death!” thundered at his breast by the lunatic Charles, as he pointed to thousands of massacred Huguenots. Henry yielded to such conclusive arguments, and became a Catholic. Four years of court-imprisonment succeeded, and the young king of Navarre, though proof to the artifices of his gossip Guise, was not adamant to the temptations spread for him by Catharine de Medici. In the harem entertained for him in the Louvre, many pitfalls entrapped him, and he became a stock-performer in the state comedies and tragedies of that plotting age.

A silken web of palace-politics, palace-diplomacy, palace-revolutions enveloped him. Schemes and counter-schemes, stratagems and conspiracies, assassinations and poisonings; all the state machinery which worked so exquisitely in fair ladies’ chambers, to spread havoc and desolation over a kingdom, were displayed before his eyes. Now campaigning with one royal brother against Huguenots, now fighting with another on their side, now solicited by the queen-mother to attempt the life of her son, now implored by Henry III to assassinate his brother, the Bearnese, as fresh antagonisms, affinities, combinations, were developed, detected, neutralized almost daily, became rapidly an adept in Medician state-chemistry. Charles IX in his grave, Henry III on the throne, Alençon in the Huguenot camp--Henry at last made his escape. The brief war and peace of Mercœur succeeded, and the king of Navarre formally abjured the Catholic creed. The parties were now sharply defined. Guise mounted upon the League, Henry astride upon the Reformation, were prepared to do battle to the death. The temporary “war of the amorous” was followed by the peace of Fleix.

Four years of peace again--four fat years of wantonness and riot preceding fourteen hungry, famine-stricken years of bloodiest civil war. The voluptuousness and infamy of the Louvre were almost paralleled in vice, if not in splendor, by the miniature court at Pau. Henry’s Spartan grandfather would scarcely have approved the courses of the youth whose education he had commenced on so simple a scale. For Margaret of Valois, hating her husband, and living in most undisguised and promiscuous infidelity to him, had profited by her mother’s lessons. A seraglio of maids of honor ministered to Henry’s pleasures, and were carefully instructed that the peace and war of the kingdom were playthings in their hands. While at Paris royalty was hopelessly sinking in a poisonous marsh, there was danger that even the hardy nature of the Bearnese would be mortally enervated by the atmosphere in which he lived.

The unhappy Henry III, baited by the Guises, worried by the Alençon and his mother, implored the king of Navarre to return to Paris and the Catholic faith. M. de Segur, chief of Navarre’s council, who had been won over during a visit to the capital, where he had made the discovery that “Henry III was an angel, and his ministers devils,” came back to Pau, urging his master’s acceptance of the royal invitation. Henry wavered. Bold D’Aubigné, stanchest of Huguenots and of his friends, next day privately showed Segur a palace window opening on a very steep precipice over the Bayse, and cheerfully assured him that he should be flung from it did he not instantly reverse his proceedings and give his master different advice. “If I am not able to do the deed myself,” said D’Aubigné, “here are a dozen more to help me.” The chief of the council cast a glance behind him, saw a number of grim Puritan soldiers, with their hats plucked down upon their brows, looking very serious; so made his bow, and quite changed his line of conduct.

But Henry--no longer the unsophisticated youth who had been used to run barefoot among the cliffs of Coarraze--was grown too crafty a politician to be entangled by Spanish or Medician wiles. The duke of Anjou was now dead. Of all the princes who had stood between him and the throne, there was none remaining save the helpless, childless, superannuated youth who was its present occupant. The king of Navarre was legitimate heir to the crown of France. “_Espoir_” was now in letters of light upon his shield, but he knew that his path to greatness led through manifold dangers, and that it was only at the head of his Huguenot chivalry that he could cut his way. He was the leader of the nobles of Gascony, and Dauphiny, and Guienne, in their mountain fastnesses; of the weavers, cutlers, and artisans in their thriving manufacturing and trading towns. It was not Spanish gold, but carbines and cutlasses, bows and bills, which could bring him to the throne of his ancestors.

And thus he stood the chieftain of that great, austere party of Huguenots, the men who went on their knees before the battle, beating their breasts with their iron gantlets, and singing in full chorus a psalm of David before smiting the Philistines hip and thigh.

Their chieftain, scarcely their representative--fit to lead his Puritans on the battle-field--was hardly a model for them elsewhere. Yet, though profligate in one respect, he was temperate in every other. In food, wine, and sleep, he was always moderate. Subtle and crafty in self-defence, he retained something of his old love of truth, of his hatred for liars. Hardly generous, perhaps, he was a friend of justice; while economy in a wandering king like himself was a necessary virtue, of which France one day was to feel the beneficent action. Reckless and headlong in appearance, he was in truth the most careful of men. On the religious question most cautious of all, he always left the door open behind him, disclaimed all bigotry of opinion, and earnestly implored the papists to seek, not his destruction, but his instruction. Yet, prudent as he was by nature in every other regard, he was all his life the slave of one woman or another; and it was by good luck rather than by sagacity that he did not repeatedly forfeit the fruits of his courage and conduct in obedience to his master-passion.

Always open to conviction on the subject of his faith, he repudiated the appellation of heretic. A creed, he said, was not to be changed like a shirt, but only on due deliberation and under special advice. In his secret heart he probably regarded the two religions as his chargers, and was ready to mount alternately the one or the other, as each seemed the more likely to bear him safely in battle. The Bearnese was no Puritan, but he was most true to himself and to his own advancement. His highest principle of action was to reach his goal, and to that principle he was ever loyal. Feeling, too, that it was for the interest of France that he should succeed, he was even inspired--compared with others on the stage--by an almost lofty patriotism.

Amiable by nature and by habit, he had preserved the most unimpaired good-humor throughout the horrible years which succeeded St. Bartholomew, during which he carried his life in his hand, and learned not to wear his heart upon his sleeve. Without gratitude, without resentment, without fear, without remorse, entirely arbitrary, yet with the capacity to use all men’s judgments; without convictions, save in regard to his dynastic interests, he possessed all the qualities necessary to success. He knew how to use his enemies. He knew how to use his friends, to abuse them, and to throw them away. He refused to assassinate Francis Alençon at the bidding of Henry III, but he attempted to procure the murder of the truest of his own friends, one of the noblest characters of the age, whose breast showed twelve scars received in his service--Agrippa D’Aubigné--because the honest soldier had refused to become his pimp, a service the king had implored upon his knees.

Beneath the mask of perpetual, careless good-humor, lurked the keenest eye, a subtle, restless, widely combining brain, and an iron will. Native sagacity had been tempered into consummate elasticity by the fiery atmosphere in which feebler natures had been dissolved. His wit was as flashing and as quickly unsheathed as his sword. Desperate, apparently reckless temerity on the battle-field was deliberately indulged in, that the world might be brought to recognize a hero and chieftain in a king. The do-nothings of the Merovingian line had been succeeded by the Pepins; to the effete Carlovingians had come a Capet; to the impotent Valois should come a worthier descendant of St. Louis. This was shrewd Gascon calculation, aided by constitutional fearlessness. When dispatch-writing, invisible Philips, star-gazing Rudolphs, and petticoated Henrys sat upon the thrones of Europe, it was wholesome to show the world that there was a king left who could move about in the bustle and business of the age, and could charge as well as most soldiers at the head of his cavalry; that there was one more sovereign fit to reign over men, besides the glorious virgin who governed England.

Thus courageous, crafty, far-seeing, consistent, untiring, imperturbable, he was born to command, and had a right to reign. He had need of the throne, and the throne had still more need of him.

WALLENSTEIN, DUKE OF FRIEDLAND.

BY FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER.

[Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, a distinguished Austrian general, the most noted opponent of Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years’ War, born 1583, assassinated 1634. Wallenstein had already achieved the most brilliant rank among the Imperialist generals, except Tilly, when the defeat of the latter made the ambitious soldier, whose great wealth and unscrupulous daring had excited the jealousy of the Emperor Ferdinand, again a necessity to the Catholic cause. Wallenstein, who had raised and subsisted an immense army at his own expense at a time of pressing imperial need, had afterward been retired from command. When called again to the help of the imperial cause, Wallenstein dictated his own terms, which practically left Ferdinand a mere puppet in his hands. Though Gustavus Adolphus was victor at the battle of Lützen, it was at the cost of his own life, a result welcomed by the Catholic league as a great victory. Wallenstein reorganized his army, and was again ordered by the emperor to lay down his baton on the just suspicion that he was negotiating with the Swedes disloyally. His official removal was made known to his principal generals, and Wallenstein, deserted by a large portion of his troops, was assassinated by a conspiracy of his minor officers, who had become satisfied that it would be impracticable to secure his person alive, or to prevent his immediate junction with the advancing Swedes.]

Count Wallenstein, afterward Duke of Friedland, was an experienced officer, and the richest nobleman in Bohemia. From his earliest youth he had been in the service of the house of Austria, and several campaigns against the Turks, Venetians, Bohemians, Hungarians, and Transylvanians had established his reputation. He was present as colonel at the battle of Prague, and afterward, as major-general, had defeated a Hungarian force in Moravia. The emperor’s gratitude was equal to his services, and a large share of the confiscated estates of the Bohemian insurgents was their reward. Possessed of immense property, excited by ambitious views, confident of his own good fortune, and still more encouraged by the existing state of circumstances, he offered, at his own expense and that of his friends, to raise and clothe an army for the emperor, and even undertook the cost of maintaining it if he were allowed to augment it to fifty thousand men.

The project was universally ridiculed as the chimerical offering of a visionary brain; but the offer was highly valuable, if its promises should be but partly fulfilled. Certain circles in Bohemia were assigned to him as depots, with authority to appoint his own officers. In a few months he had twenty thousand men under arms, with which, quitting the Austrian territories, he soon afterward appeared on the frontiers of Lower Saxony with thirty thousand. The emperor had lent this armament nothing but his name. The reputation of the general, the prospect of rapid promotion, and the hope of plunder, attracted to his standard adventurers from all quarters of Germany, and even sovereign princes, stimulated by the desire of glory or of gain, offered to raise regiments for the service of Austria.

The secret how Wallenstein had purposed to fulfill his extravagant designs was now manifest. He had learned the lesson from Count Mansfeld,[25] but the scholar surpassed his master. On the principle that war must support war, Mansfeld and the Duke of Brunswick had subsisted their troops by contributions levied indiscriminately on friend and enemy; but this predatory life was attended with all the inconvenience and insecurity which accompany robbery. Like fugitive banditti, they were obliged to steal through exasperated and vigilant enemies; to roam from one end of Germany to another; to watch their opportunity with anxiety, and to abandon the most fertile territories whenever they were defended by a superior army. If Mansfeld and Duke Christian had done such great things in the face of these difficulties, what might not be expected if the obstacles were removed; when the army raised was numerous enough to overawe in itself the most powerful states of the empire; when the name of the emperor insured impunity to every outrage; and when, under the highest authority, and at the head of an overwhelming force, the same system of warfare was pursued which these two adventurers had hitherto adopted at their own risk, and with only an untrained multitude?

Wallenstein was at the head of an army of nearly a hundred thousand men, who adored him, when the sentence of his dismissal arrived. Most of the officers were his creatures--with the common soldiers his hint was law. His ambition was boundless, his pride indomitable, his imperious spirit could not brook an injury unavenged. One moment would now precipitate him from the height of grandeur into the obscurity of a private station. To execute such a sentence upon such a delinquent seemed to require more address than it cost to obtain it from the judge. Accordingly, two of Wallenstein’s most intimate friends were selected as heralds of these evil tidings, and instructed to soften them as much as possible by flattering assurances of the continuance of the emperor’s favor.

Wallenstein had ascertained the purport of their message before the imperial ambassadors arrived. He had time to collect himself, and his countenance exhibited an external calmness while grief and rage were storming in his bosom. He had made up his mind to obey. The emperor’s decision had taken him by surprise before circumstances were ripe or his preparations complete for the bold measures he had contemplated. His extensive estates were scattered over Bohemia and Moravia, and by their confiscation the emperor might at once destroy the sinews of his power. He looked, therefore, to the future for revenge, and in this hope he was encouraged by the predictions of an Italian astrologer, who led his imperious spirit like a child in leading-strings. Seni had read in the stars that his master’s brilliant career was not yet ended, and that bright and glorious prospects still awaited him. It was, indeed, unnecessary to consult the stars to foretell that an enemy, Gustavus Adolphus, would ere long render indispensable the services of such a general as Wallenstein.

“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.