Go, Captain, Greet the Danish King 103and it is to Wallenstein’s credit that he was prepared to accept a tactical
set-back rather than sacrifice many more lives in order to gain an objec-
tive of little practical importance.
His enemies of course saw it differently, both in the anti-Habsburg
camp and in Vienna and Munich. The Protestant side had had little
enough cause for rejoicing over the past years, and now they made the
most of this first defeat for the great Wallenstein, celebrating Stralsund’s
heroic resistance in a flood of mocking pamphlets. Their satisfaction
did not last long. On 11 August Christian landed with some 7000 men
on the offshore island of Usedom, little more than 30 miles south-east
of the city. What exactly he hoped to achieve with this small force,
even had they been able to join up with the Stralsund garrison, is far
from clear, and in the event he achieved nothing apart from seizing
the town of Wolgast, on the mainland opposite the island. Wallenstein
and Arnim were soon there, and on 2 September 1628 they stormed the
defences and comprehensively defeated the Danish force, although the
king himself escaped again by sea.
Christian was still not ready to give up, but in the end the decision
was effectively taken out of his hands. Peace negotiations had been
under way in Lübeck for many months, but negotiations after the fash-
ion of the times, whereby each side made wildly unrealistic demands,
responded to proposals only after the maximum possible delay, and pre-
ferred to argue over protocol rather than substance, all the while hop-
ing that some success of their commanders in the field might improve
their negotiating positions. Manoeuvres of this kind in Westphalia
lasted for five years before finally bringing the Thirty Years War to an
end in 1648. In Lübeck the parties to this stately quadrille were theo-
retically Wallenstein, Tilly, Christian, and his Danish council, but in
practice diplomats representing them. Wallenstein was well aware that
the severe terms being sought by Vienna and Munich were unlikely
to produce a settlement, as despite Wolgast Christian was as secure
as before on his Danish islands, and moreover his allies were belat-
edly rallying round in an effort to keep him in the war.^39 The Danish
council, on the other hand, particularly those members with lands in
occupied Jutland, were tired of what they regarded as Christian’s per-
sonal war in his capacity as duke of Holstein, rather than Denmark’s
affair. Hence Wallenstein used the lack of progress in Lübeck to press a
more realistic approach on the emperor, and he initiated secret diplo-
macy in parallel to the formal negotiations.^40 In these private contacts
an agreement was reached whereby Christian would keep his lands