she had left him. For another year he continued his life of a country-gentleman, and then considered himself wealthy enough to begin his military career. He raised a body of dragoons, and offered his services to a Duke of Styria, against the Venetians. He played host to his own soldiers, and was adored by them: his command increased accordingly; and he obtained rank and honours at the end of the war, in which his was the winning side. A second marriage, entered into with a view to the favour of the Emperor, gave him the rank of a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. When the Bohemians went to war with the Emperor, they reckoned on their countryman Wallenstein as a champion, and offered him a high command in their army; but he disappointed his Protestant country and clan, and took service on the other side. When the Emperor’s funds were exhausted, Wallenstein supported his cause by his own wealth; and when the war ended,—again favourably for him,—he found himself Lord of Friedland, and richer by three millions of our present money for this Bohemian war. He was not yet a prince; but in four years more he found that early dream, fulfilled. In the interval he relieved the Emperor from two rebellious vassals, one of whom he compelled to surrender his claim to the crown of Hungary; and he saved the imperial army in a critical moment. In consideration of these services, he was made Duke of Friedland, and a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. This was in 1624, when he was forty-one years old.
He had then only eleven years to live; and his greatest distinctions were yet to be won. He was the shield and weapon of the empire in the Thirty Years’ War; and in that conflict he soon won the reputation of the greatest of commanders. He began with raising and paying his own force; but he soon led them forth to subsist on conquered territories; and they found their warrior-life such a gallant one, and so extolled their captain, that soldiers flocked to him from all the countries of Europe. However wild they might be on arrival, he trained them into a pattern force. His marches and victories are a conspicuous feature of the history of his age. He drove the Danes across the Belt, and sat down to rest on the shores of the Baltic, the proprietor of new provinces, and Admiral of the Baltic and German Sea, with his head full of projects for creating an Imperial navy, in co-operation with the Hanse towns, to keep Gustavus Adolphus from obtaining a footing in Germany. He early warned the Emperor against the Protestant King of Sweden. But Wallenstein had many enemies; and never has any man been hated by a greater variety of foes at once. All who were envious or jealous of him—all whom he had eclipsed and mortified, and whom he had dispossessed of lands; all whom he had offended by his own haughtiness; all foreigners, because he openly disliked them; all priests, because he secretly distrusted them;—these and his Protestant countrymen joined in common action against him, under the lead of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. On their urgent appeal to the Emperor, to humble the great general who was too like a master, Wallenstein was dismissed from his command at the moment when Gustavus Adolphus was starting for the invasion of Germany.
All went wrong without him, and the Emperor had to sue to him to resume the command on his own terms. He was in no hurry; and the terms he imposed were abundantly galling. The campaign in which he and Gustavus Adolphus measured their forces against each other is one of the most interesting in military and political history. When his great antagonist had perished, the enemies of Wallenstein went to work again; and their hostility was aided by his intolerable haughtiness and perilous ambition. He was accused of conspiracy and treason: his appeals to the Emperor were intercepted, lest he should obtain a hearing. He was proclaimed a rebel, and his estates confiscated. He was betrayed in the castle in which he had taken refuge, a band of Irish mercenaries being admitted to murder his whole band at a banquet. Wallenstein was in bed, sick, instead of at table: but they went to him after killing his comrades. He met them in his night-dress; and some recoiled at the sight of his helplessness: but the leader, Devereux, lifting his partisan, called him a traitor who was going to ruin the Emperor. The great Captain disdained to reply, but opened his arms to the blow. He fell pierced through the chest, and died without speaking a word.
Much mystery invested his projects, if not his character, for two centuries: but documents have been brought to light which prove his innocence of any kind of unfaithfulness to the Emperor. As a man at once original and representative of his time and order, Wallenstein is an interesting study: but it is needless to enlarge on the difference in the emotions caused in us by the contemplation of a military career pursued from avowed personal ambition on the one hand, and devoted patriotism on the other. The story of Wallenstein falls cold on the heart after that of the Maccabees.
Of a widely different character from either is the model military career of our own time. Here we have again a band of warrior brothers, comrades in duty and honour, and in genius and heroism. The Napiers, adequate in all modern fitness and freshness, were the Paladins of the 19th century. They were the heroes, dauntless yet considerate, who showed us the old warrior type under the modifications caused by the changes in the art of war. In the ancient days men fought hand to hand, after the first flight of arrows; and the heroes of the battle-field were those who contended with and laid low the greatest number of individual antagonists. If such had been the method still, the Napiers would have been so many Maccabees. In Wallenstein’s time, the art of war had assumed a scientific appearance; the movement was ponderous, and the rules severe; and each antagonist understood the plans of his opponent almost as well as his own. Firearms took long to discharge; a very small per-centage of shots took effect; and to modern eyes, the great marvel of the campaigns of three centuries ago is that each produced usually so little result. In that age, the Napiers would, like Wallenstein, have astonished the world by miraculous marches, and a marvellous handling of the cumbersome baggage which was a dead weight upon everybody else.