I am always interested in the connections between different people, places, things - so my trips abroad can be like a game of “Six Degrees of Separation” in history!  Very boring for travelling companions, possibly, but it helps me place and understand the things I see. Recently, a friend’s Facebook posts on the fabulous Czech castle Nove Mesto nad Metuji  got me excited. It wasn’t just the beautiful interiors with painted ceilings and art deco bathrooms, or the circular tower room with windows on all sides and views for miles around. It wasn’t just the covered walkway in the perfectly-kept gardens. What caught my interest was the fact that the castle had once belonged to a Scot named Walter Leslie. 

  Walter Leslie, towards the end of his life, from Paul Tafferner, Caesarea legatio ... Walterus S.R.I. Comes De Leslie ... Succincta narratione exposita ...  (Vienna, 1672) British Library 1048.b.22

I have “met” Walter Leslie before. He was a Scottish aristocrat who crossed the Channel as a young man to become a mercenary in assorted continental armies. This was a popular choice of career for younger sons with few expectations of inheritance, and the rewards, as far as young Walter was concerned, were phenomenal.  By 1630, he was in the entourage of the Habsburg generalissimo, Albrecht von Wallenstein, fighting the Thirty Years’ War across Bohemia.  There was no chance of Leslie feeling isolated: entire regiments of Scots and Irishmen surrounded Wallenstein, and when his motivation and loyalty became suspect to the Emperor Ferdinand II, they decided to prove their own loyalty by murdering their boss. Walter Leslie did not issue the fatal blow, but he admitted to killing the bogyguard, allowing an Irishman named Devereux to kill the now-defenceless Wallenstein. The dramatic event gave rise to countless rumours and speculation about what exactly had happened and about the motives of the foreign killers. It is possibly best known as the subject of a play by Schiller, which, ironically, fails to name Leslie, alone among the ringleaders.

The murder of Wallenstein, from a contemporary broadside (ca. 1634)  1853.e.5.(34)

Leslie set off for Vienna to report, and was richly rewarded for his efforts. He became an imperial chamberlain and subsequently a count (Reichsgraf), receiving the estate at Nove Mesto (then Neustadt an der Mettau) and other lands around Hradec Kralove (Koeniggratz).  He engaged in much diplomatic work involving his native Britain, with a particular interest in promoting Stuart interests on the continent (he was involved with the so-called “Winter King”, Friedrich of Bohemia, and his wife Elizabeth Stuart, as well as with their famous son Rupert of the Rhine), and continued to work as a Habsburg commander, eventually taking charge of troops on the Military Frontier  against the Ottoman Empire. Leslie bought himself new lands convenient to his posting, in the Styrian cities of Graz and Ptuj (Pettau), and married Anna Franziska von Dietrichstein, a daughter of one of the Holy Roman Empire’s most powerful families.

It was at Ptuj castle in present-day Slovenia that I first encountered Walter Leslie’s name. Built on and around a hill overlooking the wide sweep of the Drava/Drau river and its plain, Ptuj occupies a prime defensive and trading position, and it was there in Roman times. The Romans left some interesting archaeological remains, including several Mithras shrines, and one particular legacy of continuing economic importance: miles and miles of vines, covering the rolling green hills all around the city and across eastern Slovenia. Later, Ptuj belonged to the Archbishops of Salzburg, and was as important in the Emperor’s internal power struggles with them as with the Ottoman invaders to the east. Leslie’s family would live there for two centuries, and are today the castle’s most “visible” owners, for they remodelled it extensively and left an art gallery full of their portraits of Habsburgs and Stuarts. The building is now part of Ptuj's regional museum. They continued to intermarry with the highest Habsburg nobility, and acquired several more castles in the Ptuj area (there were certainly plenty to go around, and all of them are highly evocative).

Ptuj Castle (photo, Janet Ashton)

I’ve also encountered Leslie family history in Moravia, at Mikulov, his wife’s family seat, for the Dietrichsteins eventually inherited the Leslie lands and titles as collateral descendants. This is yet another small, charming central European town built around a castle, and the terrain here is remarkably similar to Ptuj: rolling green hills covered in vines. What this says about the family’s tastes I am not quite sure!

Mikulov Castle (photo, Janet Ashton)

Walter Leslie was not particularly popular with contemporaries, who derided him as a boastful foreigner, but his story appeals to me as an instance of Britons’ cosmopolitan connections to Europe several hundred years ago. His castles aren’t too bad, either. Nor, it must be said, is the wine.

Janet Ashton, West European Cataloguing Team Manager

References:

David Worthington, Scots in Habsburg service, 1618-1648 (Leiden, 2004). ZA.9.a.9590

Polona Vidmar, ‘Under the Habsburgs and the Stuarts: the Leslies’ portrait gallery in Ptuj Castle, Slovenia’, in British and Irish emigrants and exiles in Europe, edited by David Worthington (Leiden, 2010). 6151.340000