Go, Captain, Greet the Danish King 99Wallenstein himself went home in the late autumn, and it was early
summer 1628 before he took the field again. As before he maintained
his control over the army throughout the winter, as well as making sig-
nificant progress with the next stage of his private ambitions, a subject
which will be discussed in the next chapter. He also turned his attention
to the question of sea power in the Baltic, which would be essential if
it proved necessary for him to pursue Christian on to his islands.^31 The
Spanish also had a plan to develop trading links into the Baltic, hoping
to undermine the profitability of the long-established Dutch business
there as a form of economic warfare. The cities of the Hanseatic League
were envisaged as partners in this enterprise, and a naval presence
would be necessary to provide protection.
The idea was to establish a joint Spanish-Imperial fleet in the Baltic,
but ships and a suitable port proved difficult to find, while for the
Hanse the attractions of the prospective business opportunities were
outweighed by the threat to their existing trade if they incurred Danish,
Swedish and Dutch hostility. Even had the Spanish been able to transfer
warships to the Baltic – which was doubtful because of Dutch naval
superiority in the North Sea – they could not safely have passed through
the Sound, as this narrow passage controlling the access was effectively
closed by Danish guns. Wallenstein’s thought of bypassing this obstacle
by digging a canal was more than 250 years ahead of its time (the Kiel
Canal opened in 1895), although work was actually started. The Hanse
cities were unwilling to risk selling ships to Wallenstein, and although a
few were eventually obtained from Poland this was not enough, so that
his only alternative was to build first a shipyard and then the vessels.
A base was set up at the Mecklenburg port of Wismar, but he soon
realised that a navy could not be constructed in the short period in
which he had built his army. The project lingered on for a couple of
years, until the small fleet and its port were captured by the Swedes
in 1631, but it never matched up to the impressive title of ‘General of
the Oceanic and Baltic Seas’, which Wallenstein had acquired from the
emperor in order to ensure that any navy actually established would be
under his rather than Spanish control.^32
As soon as Christian’s forces had been driven back to Jutland
Wallenstein began pressing the emperor to make peace, but in Vienna
they were still insisting on punitive conditions which the Danes were
certain to reject. He also floated the idea that if peace were made in
the north his army could be released for a campaign against the Turks,
a concept to which he returned a number of times over the next couple
of years. In part this may have reflected the romantic attachment to the