184 Wallenstein
war, then he could count on Swedish support. Otherwise not.^11 This
reply reached Wallenstein at the end of June, but it elicited no further
response from him.
At around the same time another scheme was being concocted to
persuade Wallenstein to break with the emperor. This time one of
the prime movers was a French roving ambassador, the Marquis de
Feuquières, who spent some weeks at the Saxon capital. There he met
the wealthy Bohemian exile Count Wilhelm Kinsky, who was then
living in Dresden, and who was married to the sister of Wallenstein’s
young brother-in-law Adam Trcˇka. Kinsky had been peripherally
involved in the exile schemes to link Wallenstein with the Swedes in
1631, together with Trcˇka, Rašin and Thurn. Now, claiming to be well
connected to Wallenstein, he tried again. In May he met the Swedish
ambassador, and he asked him whether Sweden was still interested, but
it seems that the response was cautious. A few days later Feuquières
showed more interest, helping Kinsky to draft a letter to Wallenstein
from ‘loyal friends’, noting his difficult situation with an ungrateful
court in Vienna, drawing attention to the strength of the gathering
military alliance against the emperor, and urging him to consider an
attractive alternative personal opportunity which could carry him to
a yet higher position. The text of the letter is in Feuquières’s memoirs,
but whether Wallenstein actually received it is unknown, although it
seems certain that he did not respond. Nevertheless the French per-
severed, and having drawn the conclusion that no direct contact was
to be expected from Wallenstein unless there was a specific offer they
formulated one, which Louis XIII himself signed on 16 July. The central
points were that Wallenstein was to become king of Bohemia and an
ally of France, which would provide him with a subsidy of a million
livres a year to maintain an army of 35,000 men in order to join in the
war against the emperor. There were a variety of other promises and
conditions, but they were all irrelevant as once again Wallenstein did
not respond, even when, according to Richelieu’s confessor, the cardinal
wrote personally to him. Kinsky was forced to admit to his contacts that
he did not in fact know what was in Wallenstein’s mind, but that per-
haps he was more interested in an alliance with the Protestant electors
than with either France or Sweden.^12
These two approaches are important only in that they are the basis for
rumours at the time and various claims subsequently that Wallenstein
aspired to the Bohemian crown. In both cases the suggestion came from
the other side, and the proponents relied on the completely unproven
assumptions that he was both boundlessly ambitious and still bitterly