Wallenstein Assassinated at Cheb

FEB 25 1634 · 12:00

Wallenstein cut down in his chamber at Eger by his own officers, 25 February 1634. Place: Pachelbel House, Cheb (Eger), western Bohemia Figures: Albrecht von Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland, Imperial generalissimo (killed) · Emperor Ferdinand II, who signed the order · Colonel Walter Butler, Irish dragoon · Captain Walter Devereux, Irish dragoon (struck the blow) A Private Army of a Hundred Thousand Wallenstein, born minor Bohemian gentry, has by 1634 made himself the largest single military entrepreneur in European history. His estates in Bohemia, consolidated after White Mountain at distressed prices, finance an army that at peak fielded 100,000 men under contract, equipped from his own foundries at Jičín. The Emperor pays him in titles (Duke of Friedland, of Mecklenburg, of Sagan) and in the right to tax his own occupation zones. For Ferdinand II, he is the indispensable man and the most dangerous subject the Habsburgs have ever had. After Lützen, Wallenstein retires to Bohemia and begins separate negotiations: with the Saxon court, with the Swedes through Oxenstierna's agents, with the Bohemian exiles. His exact intentions remain disputed by historians and were probably also disputed by Wallenstein. The Emperor, in any case, has heard enough. On 24 January 1634 Ferdinand signs a secret patent stripping Wallenstein of command and authorizing his arrest, alive if possible. In His Nightshirt On the night of 25 February at the Pachelbel House in Cheb, Wallenstein's senior officers are dispatched first at a banquet given by Colonel Butler: Trčka, Kinsky, Ilow, Neumann, hacked down between courses. The Irish dragoon captain Walter Devereux then leads a small party up to Wallenstein's chamber. The Duke of Friedland, woken by the noise, comes to the door in his nightshirt. Devereux runs him through the chest with a partisan. There are no last words on record. The estates are confiscated within months and redistributed to the men who killed him. Ferdinand orders three thousand Masses said for his soul, which is the seventeenth century's way of acknowledging that the killing was unclean. The structural lesson is harder to ritualize. The Emperor has demonstrated that a general too useful, too rich, too independent, with too much of his own diplomacy, will be removed by the sovereign he serves. Fourteen years before the Settlement, the principle that sovereignty does not share itself even with its own indispensable instruments has been established in a Bohemian nightshirt. Video: Bohemian-born generalissimo, killed at Cheb on his emperor's order. The Thirty Years War's most powerful private subject.