No Great Expectations 15Briefly summarised, the progress of these conflicts led first to an armed
expedition into Bohemia by Matthias in the spring of 1608, where at
Lieben (Libenˇ), at the gates of Rudolf’s capital city of Prague, he and his
allies among the nobility forced Rudolf to cede to him the titles of king
of Hungary and margrave of Moravia. Then in July 1609 the Estates of
the Bohemian lands extorted from Rudolf a ‘Letter of Majesty’ of their
own drafting which granted them the liberties they sought. Finally in
March 1611, after much trouble and violence in between, Matthias
staged a coup and replaced Rudolf as king of Bohemia, following which
he was elected emperor when Rudolf died in early 1612. Wallenstein
played a direct if small part in only the first of these events, the armed
confrontation of 1608, during which he was recalled to service as a
captain in a Moravian regiment supporting Matthias, although he saw
no action. Instead he was used as a contact between his brother-in-law
Zierotin, who was much more involved, and Matthias, whom he still
served as a gentleman of the chamber.^17 It was presumably in this latter
capacity that he became one of Matthias’s representatives in negotia-
tions with a delegation sent by Rudolf in an effort to resolve the crisis,
a small part indeed, but significant enough to make it advisable to
seek security from reprisals. As a result Wallenstein was one of those
to whom Rudolf had to grant amnesty under the terms of the treaty of
Lieben.^18
Maturity
Nothing came of Wallenstein’s prospective military service in Flanders.
Instead, probably late in 1608, he went to Olmütz (Olomouc), one of
the principal cities of Moravia, to pursue plans for a possible marriage.
Aristocratic marriages were then, as long before and long afterwards,
principally business arrangements brokered by parents, relatives or
influential friends. In this case the link may have been provided by
the Jesuit seminary at Olmütz, which had many of the noble rich in
its spiritual care. One of these was the recently widowed Lucretia, born
a Landek but the last of this line, and owner of large estates which
dwarfed Wallenstein’s modest property at Hermanitz.^19 The Jesuits
doubtless wanted to find her a Catholic husband, not least because
she had no children and Protestant relatives had the next claim to
her lands. Wallenstein was 25 when they married in May 1609, while
Lucretia may have been a year or two older, but this was less surprising
than the difference in their financial standing, although even that was
not unique; in the relatively small Bohemian and Moravian aristocracy