24015. But Brutus Says He Was Ambitious
( Julius Caesar)
The aura of myth surrounding this lord is so strongly
imbued that I can often scarcely prevent myself from
believing the tales which are told in such great detail
about him, even when I was actually with him at the
very moment which is being described.^1Thus wrote no less a person than Field Marshal Count Gottfried Heinr-
ich Pappenheim about Wallenstein early in 1630. His problem is under-
standable, because while Gustavus Adolphus became a legend in his own
lifetime Wallenstein had already long since become more myth than
man to many of his contemporaries. Tales accumulated around him.
He was, so it was claimed, bulletproof, a common soldiers’ superstition
about those who always seemed to emerge unwounded from the thick
of the fray. The story was that he had turned Catholic after miraculously
escaping unhurt from a fall, having dozed off on a high window-ledge
while serving as a page in the household of the margrave of Burgau. His
first wife Lucretia had been, it was incorrectly mooted, much older than
him, so that she had resorted to love potions to keep him faithful. It was
rumoured that he could not stand the least noise, and even dogs had
to be cleared from the district while he was in residence. His tempers
were said to be terrible to behold, but he was supposedly submissive to
the dictates of the stars due to an obsession with astrology. He was even
blamed by some for the outbreak of fires in Prague and Vienna shortly
after his arrival in the respective cities early in 1627.^2
Such colourful details added to the actual drama of his demise to
make him an attractive subject for writers, and within a year or two
of his death plays appeared on the stages of Madrid and elsewhere,
including Henry Glapthorne’s Tragedy of Albertus Wallenstein in London.