A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery inside an Enigma 3Early in 1634 a secret report claimed that Wallenstein was preparing
a coup d’état against the emperor, and that he had already planned
the division of the Imperial lands among his allies and supporters.
He himself, so it was said, was to become king of Bohemia. The men
around the increasingly ill Wallenstein persuaded almost all of the
army’s generals and colonels to swear an oath of loyalty to him in an
inept attempt to shore up his position, a move which was interpreted
at the court as a further sign of imminent rebellion. A secret tribunal
was convened and hastily condemned Wallenstein, without charge or
trial and in his absence, whereupon the emperor authorised four senior
officers to arrest him, dead or alive. Realising the danger only at the very
last moment, Wallenstein and his closest associates sought to escape
towards Saxony, their flight taking them to the Bohemian border town
of Eger (Cheb). There the garrison commanders received them with a
pretence of loyalty, but over dinner armed men set upon and murdered
Wallenstein’s officers, following which the invalid general was assas-
sinated in his bedroom.
Subsequent Imperialist propaganda and the undoubtedly dubious
contacts of some of Wallenstein’s circle combined to turn unsubstanti-
ated suspicions into received wisdom. More paradoxes appeared. The
man who had twice been the saviour of the Catholic cause became
the object of Catholic vilification. A pamphlet written anonymously
by the emperor’s Jesuit court preacher described him as ‘repudiated by
the church, arrogant, wild, mad and vindictive’, and claimed that he
dealt with the issues of war and peace according to the position of the
stars.^1 A body of sober-sided Imperial lawyers pronounced that he had
been ‘manifestly and permanently engaged in lèse-majesté, rebellion
and treason’, arguing that because of his ‘incontestable notoriety’ there
had been no need for any kind of trial to establish his guilt. The offic-
ers who in January 1634 had sworn to ‘stand by him honourably and
faithfully, and to offer their all with and for him, down to the last drop
of blood’ deserted him in February, and by March many were eager
to testify against him, even though they had nothing of substance to
report.^2 One of the main stumbling blocks in the peace attempts of 1633
was Wallenstein’s insistence that the armies of Saxony and Brandenburg
should join with his to drive the Swedes out of the Empire. Now it was
taken as proven that he had been planning to combine with those
same Swedes to drive out the emperor. The Saxon army commander,
who had played a central part in the negotiations, was appalled at
Ferdinand’s authorisation of the murder of his own general. ‘I know’,
he wrote, ‘of no instance where such a thing has happened in the realm