136 Wallenstein
treated exiles who had been taken prisoner while fighting for the enemy
generously. Now, like most contemporaries, they assumed him to be
nursing his grievances against the emperor, so they sought to bring
him over to the Swedish side. Despite Wallenstein having neither men
nor money to contribute they imagined that Gustavus might be per-
suaded to provide troops, to which Wallenstein would add his name,
reputation and leadership, to create a Bohemian army of self-liberation.
Wildly improbable. Gustavus was not the man to detach a substantial
number of soldiers from his personal command and hand them over
to an unknown quantity at a critical point in his campaign, even had
he had them to spare, which he did not. The cautious Wallenstein was
not the man to burn his boats in Bohemia, where confiscation of his
properties would immediately have followed, even had he been ready
to abandon his loyalty to the emperor, which he was not. Nor would
a successful return of the Bohemian exiles have been in his interest, as
claimants to his lands would have been in the vanguard. Wallenstein’s
only hope of retaining his domains lay in an Imperialist victory. Before
Breitenfeld that still seemed feasible, and indeed at that stage Gustavus
himself was looking no further than securing Pomerania and the Baltic
coast for Sweden.
Nevertheless an attempt to suborn him was made, although details
are scarce, as plots by definition leave few traces in the archives. The
main participant in Wallenstein’s circle was his young brother-in-law
Count Adam Trcˇka, an Imperialist colonel who had married the third
of Harrach’s daughters a couple of years before. The Trcˇkas had always
been rich but had, like Wallenstein, grown richer through cheaply
bought confiscated Bohemian lands, but even so they had close connec-
tions with the exiles, one of whom was Adam’s own brother. Their main
contact in Gustavus’s camp was another Bohemian, the ubiquitous
Thurn, who was serving as the Swedish representative to the elector-
ate of Brandenburg. The go-between was an exiled minor Bohemian
nobleman, Sezyma Rasˇin, and almost all the information about this
strange episode stems from the highly suspect testimony he gave to
the Imperial investigation into Wallenstein’s affairs in 1635.^25 In return
he received a pardon, and he was allowed to return to Bohemia and to
recover his properties, as well as being paid an indemnity for his losses
while in exile. Slavata, one of Wallenstein’s principal enemies, made the
arrangements, and he admitted that he had prompted Rasˇin to add vari-
ous things ‘in order that his report should be more complete’.^26
Rasˇin went back and forth between Trcˇka and Thurn in the spring
of 1631, and Thurn informed Gustavus of an alleged connection with