62. No Great Expectations
(After Dickens)
Monarchs apart, the early lives of the great of the medieval and early
modern periods are illuminated only in flashes, if at all, by the sketchy
records available to the historian. Wallenstein is no exception. We
know that Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius, as he was christened, was born on
24 September 1583, and that the happy event took place at the village
of Hermanitz (Herˇmanice), on the Elbe in north-east Bohemia, near the
border with Silesia. For his childhood only the barest facts are recorded,
and apart from a couple of striking incidents his adolescence is little
better documented.
The background can be quickly sketched. Bohemia was a Habsburg
province, albeit one with a nominally elective monarchy, and while
most of the people were of Czech stock there were many German influ-
ences. There were both Czech and German forms of the family name,
and indeed several variants in an age when spelling tended to be pho-
netic rather than consistent, but it originates from the German words
Wald, a wood or forest, and Stein, a stone. Its source was the name of a
thirteenth-century ancestral castle which indeed stood on a rock out-
crop in the forest, and it will have worried no-one at the time that a
culturally Czech family from the Bohemian aristocracy had a Germanic
name. Albrecht signed himself ‘Waldstein’ in his earlier years, con-
fining himself to initials in his later correspondence, by which time
his title had effectively replaced his family name in the wider world.
Illustrating the variability of contemporary spelling, one of his closest
associates and officials wrote ‘Waldtstein’, ‘Waldtsteyn’ and ‘Waldstein’
in various extant letters, while in a document of 1632 Albrecht him-
self referred several times to ‘the family of Waldtstein’ but neverthe-
less to his cousin and heir as ‘Wallenstein’. Clearly there is no right
spelling, but ‘Wallenstein’ is the variant which has passed into history,