Assassination Is the Quickest Way 235to depend on her relatives for two years, until after eventually making
an appeal for clemency rather than justice she was allowed to recover
a couple of small properties. Max Waldstein came off better by playing
the political game and distancing himself from his dead benefactor.
He too was barred from inheriting, but he managed to retain what
Wallenstein had already given him, to remain in Imperial service, and
to return sufficiently into favour to be allowed a couple of years later
to buy Wallenstein’s Prague palace at an advantageous price.^25 This,
and many of Wallenstein’s properties granted to those involved in his
death, remained in the respective families for centuries, until they were
themselves expropriated by the communist regime after the Second
World War.
But of course Wallenstein had not been properly tried and con-
demned, and a flood of criticism soon arose not only on the enemy side
but in Vienna itself. This worried Ferdinand and his councillors enough
for a legal commission to be set up to advise on the possibility of a
posthumous trial.^26 Its members reported in April 1634, noting in their
preamble that Kinsky’s widow had written to the emperor demanding
legal action against her husband’s killers, no doubt motivated, they said,
‘by evil people who want only to vilify Your Imperial Majesty’. They
rehearsed the accusations against Wallenstein publicised in the patents
of 24 January and 18 February, as a result of which and on the emperor’s
command the people concerned had been executed, ‘as being manifestly
and permanently engaged in lèse-majesté, rebellion and treason ... and
by that very fact they have been shown before the world for what they
were’. The lawyers contended that the executions and confiscations
which followed were justified by ‘natural reason’, although conceding
that ‘it might have an appearance more of an authoritarian than a lawful
act when a man is executed without trial or sentence’. The core passage
in their opinion is worthy of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland
(‘sentence first, verdict afterwards!’). ‘Because Friedland was so malicious,
wanting not only to deprive Your Imperial Majesty and your esteemed
House, without lawful grounds or process, of crown, sceptre, land and
people, but also to completely eradicate you all, and to subvert the entire
commonwealth; and because he was already at the final stage and in the
last act of execution, with the necessary means to hand, had he not been
prevented by the special providence of God; so it was completely unnec-
essary to hold a trial or process of law to charge, try or sentence him.’ For
good measure they quoted Cicero. They also exonerated the killers, on
the grounds that in such circumstances any private citizen was entitled,
without higher orders or the declaration of a court, to avert the danger