No Great Expectations 13The Counter-Reformation changed that, but it was as yet barely under
way and no provincial nobleman in his early twenties can reasonably
be assumed to have foreseen its progress.
Viewed as a matter of personal faith things may have looked differ-
ent. Ninety years after Luther published his Theses Protestantism was
no longer modern, dynamic and progressive. Instead it had split into
two major and many minor variants, often more hostile to each other
than to Catholicism, and divided by bitter arguments about what to the
layman must have appeared abstruse or even incomprehensible points
of doctrine. Against that the Catholics offered the spiritual security of
the age-old faith and a monolithic establishment in which it was nec-
essary only to believe, not to make difficult choices. At the individual
level that was arguably the basis of the Counter-Reformation, and like
many others Wallenstein may have been attracted by it. Certainly he
was by no means the only young Bohemian nobleman to convert in
this period. In his childhood and youth he had been brought up in
two different forms of Protestantism, and Goldberg and Altdorf were
Protestant establishments, but on the grand tour in France and Italy
Wallenstein will have been exposed, perhaps for the first time, to
strong Catholic influences. Padua was a centre of Catholic humanism,
and if he did in fact serve the margrave of Burgau he will have been
in a household which was both Catholic and Habsburg. Some reports
ascribe Wallenstein’s conversion to the influence of a particular Jesuit
priest, but whatever the mechanism it can be said with certainty that he
remained a practising Catholic and a generous benefactor of the church
for the rest of his life.
When Wallenstein sought a post at court it was to Archduke Matthias
that he looked. Given that Matthias was next in line to the Imperial
throne this was arguably the best choice he could have made were
ambition his motive, although as Matthias was only five years younger
than Rudolf this was not an assured or long-term prospect. Possibly
equally interesting to the young Wallenstein was that Matthias kept
court in the major cosmopolitan city of Vienna rather than in some
provincial backwater, but it may also have been a question of the
availability of a sponsor highly enough esteemed at that particular
court for his recommendation to carry the necessary weight. Matthias
was of course a Catholic, but to place the religious question in per-
spective Wallenstein’s sponsor was not, and although the latter men-
tioned that Wallenstein went to Mass he also noted that it was well
known that this would make no difference to Matthias’s decision. Not
that Wallenstein was aspiring to an important, influential or lucrative