92 Wallenstein
Imperial war council both before and afterwards, managed well enough
for three months before resigning in a huff over a row about discipline.
Wallenstein’s nomination for his successor was turned down because
he was a Protestant, a fact which mattered to the court but not to their
general, who already had many Protestants, and even Protestant princes,
among his colonels.^19 The replacement eventually sent from Vienna
was none other than the Spaniard Marradas, who had been second-in-
command at Göding. Again he managed well enough, but without pro-
viding Wallenstein with the full level of support which he needed.
Wallenstein complained repeatedly of being tired, overburdened
and ill, chiefly with gout, a painful and debilitating condition. There
are reports of him flying off the handle in public and carrying reproof
over what he saw as deficiencies beyond the normally accepted limits.
His correspondence contains caustic assessments of officers whom
he regarded as incompetent or more interested in unscrupulous self-
enrichment than in military duty, which while possibly true were
certainly immoderate, particularly as in some cases he later reversed
his opinions. The symptoms of stress are easy to see, even without the
repeated statements of his wish to give up the command, at the latest at
the end of the 1626 campaigning season, which he made in his letters
to Harrach.^20
His biggest worry was money, as the imprecise financial arrange-
ments which had enabled him to secure approval for the creation of his
army quickly came back to haunt him. ‘It is sufficient for the emperor’,
wrote Wallenstein, ‘that I have provided him with an army the like of
which no-one has had before, and for which he has still not laid out a
single farthing.’ He had fulfilled his side of the bargain in raising the
army and putting it into the field without making any call on the treas-
ury, but he had not intended to finance it indefinitely thereafter, and
nor was he capable of doing so. That was beyond the capacity of any
private individual no matter how wealthy. Unfortunately it was also
beyond the capacity of the emperor and his exchequer, and the result
was that there was frequently no money to pay the troops. This had
military significance, as Wallenstein complained: ‘It is not possible to
do with an unpaid army what a paid one will do.’ It also had a direct
significance for Wallenstein himself, as it appears that by the end of
the 1626 campaign he was near exhausting not only his own credit but
also that of his banker and collaborator Hans de Witte. His lament that
his time in the emperor’s service would leave him a pauper was doubt-
less an exaggeration, although possibly not very much of one.^21 But he
was effectively trapped. He had raised the army with the defence of his