attempts to thwart them. This was due in part, no doubt, to ill-health, in part to the fact that he trusted to the assurances of his astrologer, Battista Seni. He also felt confident that when the time came for his army to decide between him and the emperor the decision would be in his own favour.
His principal officers assembled around him at a banquet on the 12th January 1634, when he submitted to them a declaration to the effect that they would remain true to him. This declaration they signed. More than a month later a second paper was signed; but on this occasion the officers' expression of loyalty to their general was associated with an equally emphatic expression of loyalty to their emperor. By this time Wallenstein had learned that he must act warily. On the 24th of January the emperor had signed a secret patent removing him from his command, and imperial agents had been labouring to undermine Wallenstein's influence. On the 7th two of his officers, Piccolomini and Aldringer, had intended to seize him at Pilsen; but finding the troops there loyal to their general, they had kept quiet. But a patent charging Wallenstein and two of his officers with high treason, and naming the generals who were to assume the supreme command of the army, was signed on the 18th of February, and published in Prague.
When Wallenstein heard of the publication of this patent and of the refusal of the garrison of Prague to take his orders, he realized the full extent of his danger, and on the 23rd of February, accompanied by his most intimate friends, and guarded by about 1000 men, he went from Pilsen to Eger, hoping to meet the Swedes under Duke Bernhard, who, at last convinced of his sincerity, were marching to join him. After the arrival of the party at Eger, Colonel Gordon, the commandant, and Colonels Butler and Leslie agreed to rid the emperor of his enemy. On the evening of the 25th of February Wallenstein's supporters Illo, Kinsky, Terzky and Neumann were received at a banquet by the three colonels, and then murdered. Butler, Captain Devereux and a number of soldiers hurried to the house where Wallenstein was staying, and broke into his room. He was instantly killed by a thrust of Devereux's partisan. Wallenstein was buried at Gitschin, but in 1732 the remains were removed to the castle chapel of Münchengrätz.
No direct orders for the murder had been issued, but it was well understood that tidings of his death would be welcome at court. The murderers were handsomely rewarded, and their deed was commended as an act of justice.
Wallenstein was tall, thin and pale, with reddish hair, and eyes of remarkable brilliancy. He was of a proud and imperious temper, and was seldom seen to laugh. He worked hard and silently. In times of supreme difficulty he listened carefully to the advice of his counsellors, but the final decision was always his own, and he rarely revealed his thoughts until the moment for action arrived. Few generals have surpassed him in the power of quickly organizing great masses of men and of inspiring them with confidence and enthusiasm. But it is as a statesman that Wallenstein is immortal. However much or little motives of personal aggrandisement influenced his schemes and his conduct, “Germany turns ever to Wallenstein as she turns to no other amongst the leaders of the Thirty Years' War. … Such faithfulness is not without reason. … Wallenstein's wildest schemes, impossible of execution by military violence, were always built upon the foundation of German unity. In the way in which he walked that unity was doubtless unobtainable. … But during the long dreary years of confusion which were to follow it was something to think of the last supremely able man whose life had been spent in battling against the great evils of the land, against the spirit of religious intolerance and the spirit of division.”
See Forster, Albrecht von Wallenstein (1834); Aretin, Wallenstein (1846); Helbig, Wallenstein und Arnim, 1632-1634 (1850), and Kaiser Ferdinand und der Herzog von Friedland, 1633-1634 (1853); Hurter, Zur Geschichte Wallensteins (1855); Fiedler, Zur Geschichte Wallensteins (1860); L. von Ranke, Geschichte Wallensteins (3rd ed., 1872); Gindely, Geschichte des dreissigjährigen Kriegs (1869); J. Mitchell, Wallenstein (1840); S. R. Gardiner, Thirty Years' War.
WALLER, EDMUND (1606-1687), English poet, was the eldest son of Robert Waller of Coleshill (then in Herts, now in Buckinghamshire) and Anne Hampden, his wife. He was first cousin to the celebrated patriot John Hampden. He was born on the 9th of March 1606, and baptized in the parish church of Amersham. Early in his childhood his father sold his house at Coleshill and migrated to Beaconsfield. Of Waller's early education all we know is his own account that he “was bred under several ill, dull and ignorant schoolmasters, till he went to Mr Dobson at Wickham, who was a good schoolmaster and had been an Eton scholar.” His father died in 1616, and the future poet's mother, a lady of rare force of character, sent him to Eton and to Cambridge. He was admitted a fellow-commoner of King's College on the 22nd of March 1620. He left without a degree, and it is believed that in 1621, at the age of only sixteen, he sat as member for Agmondesham (Amersham) in the last parliament of James I Clarendon says that Waller was “nursed in parliaments.” In that of 1624 he represented Ilchester, and in the first of Charles I. Chipping Wycombe. The first act by which Waller distinguished himself, however, was his surreptitious marriage with a wealthy ward of the Court of Aldermen, in 1631. He was brought before the Star Chamber for this offence, and heavily fined. But his own fortune was large, and all his life Waller was a wealthy man. After bearing him a son and a daughter at Beaconsfield, Mrs Waller died in 1634. It was about this time that the poet was elected into Falkland's “Club.”
It is supposed that about 1635 he met Lady Dorothy Sidney, eldest daughter of the earl of Leicester, who was then eighteen years of age. He formed a romantic passion for this girl, whom he celebrated under the name of Sacharissa. She rejected him, and married Lord Spencer in 1639. Disappointment, it is said, rendered Waller for a time insane, but this may well be doubted. He wrote, at all events, a long, graceful and eminently sober letter on the occasion of the wedding to the bride's sister. In 1640 Waller was once more M.P. for Amersham, and made certain speeches which attracted wide attention, later, in the Long Parliament, he represented St Ives. Waller had hitherto supported the party of Pym, but he now left him for the group of Falkland and Hyde. His speeches were much admired, and were separately printed; they are academic exercises very carefully prepared. Clarendon says that Walker spoke “upon all occasions with great sharpness and freedom.” An extraordinary and obscure conspiracy against Parliament, in favour of the king, which is known as “Waller's Plot,” occupied the spring of 1643, but on the 30th of May he and his friends were arrested. In the terror of discovery, Waller was accused of displaying a very mean poltroonery, and of confessing “whatever he had said, heard, thought or seen, and all that he knew . . or suspected of others.” He certainly cut a poor figure by the side of those of his companions who died for their opinions. Waller was called before the bar of the House in July, and made an abject speech of recantation. His life was spared and he was committed to the Tower, whence, on paying a fine of £10,000, he was released and banished the realm in November 1643. He married a second wife, Mary Bracey of Thame, and went over to Calais, afterwards taking up his residence at Rouen. In 1645 the Poems of Waller were first published in London, in three different editions; there has been much discussion of the order and respective authority of these issues, but nothing is decidedly known. Many of the lyrics were already set to music by Henry Lawes. In 1646 Waller travelled with Evelyn in Switzerland and Italy. During the worst period of the exile Waller managed to “keep a table” for the Royalists in Paris, although in order to do so he was obliged to sell his while's jewels. At the close of 1651 the House of Commons revoked Walker's sentence of banishment, and he was allowed to return to Beaconsfield, where he lived very quietly until the Restoration.
In 1655 he published A Panegyric to my Lord Protector, and was made a Commissioner for Trade a month or two later. He followed this up, in 1660, by a poem To the King, upon his Majesty's Happy Return. Being challenged by Charles II. to explain why this latter piece was inferior to the eulogy of Cromwell, the poet smartly replied, “Sir, we poets never succeed so well in writing truth as in fiction.” He entered the House of Commons again in 1661, as M.P. for Hastings, and Burnet has recorded that for the next quarter of a century “it was no House if Waller was not there.” His sympathies were tolerant and kindly, and he constantly defended the Nonconformists. One
