122 Wallenstein
of 1629, and moreover his disapproval was ignored. If this illustrates
his lack of political power, it also shows the limits of his power in the
military field. In both cases he started with the clear intention of keep-
ing himself and his army out of the resulting operations, but in both
cases he was eventually forced to give way. In assessing this reality the
elaborate style of the correspondence of the day can be very misleading.
The emperor’s letters to his general were often exquisitely polite, omit-
ting none of the courtesies of title and form due to one who was not
only commander-in-chief but also among the foremost princes of the
Empire in his own right. Even so these were orders, not of the kind
requiring instant and unquestioning execution, but also not of the
kind which, when repeated and persisted with, could be indefinitely
evaded or ignored. Wallenstein recognised this situation in a letter
of August 1629: ‘I have received four different strict orders from the
emperor to lose no time in despatching troops to Italy, and even though
I do not think it advisable I have obediently complied, because His
Majesty has commanded it.’^25 Ultimately Wallenstein was a soldier, and
ultimately he had to obey the emperor’s orders.
By the middle of 1630 it was becoming increasingly obvious to
Wallenstein that he was no longer directing the strategy underlying the
operations of the army he commanded. Meanwhile the voices of his
enemies were becoming louder and more influential, gaining strength
from the widespread hostility created by troop movements, licentious
soldiery, billeting, contributions, and all the other evils stemming from
the war which were increasingly laid at Wallenstein’s door, as though
he personally were their source. For a time this had been useful to the
emperor, acting as a lightning conductor in diverting attention from
their real root causes, but as pressure mounted so did the possible
advantages of sacrificing the scapegoat. Wallenstein’s own successes
meant that he no longer seemed militarily indispensable, and when
his most influential opponents, the Catholic electors, attacked him by
pressing Ferdinand at his weakest spot, the position of the supposedly
all-powerful general suddenly looked very vulnerable. Wallenstein had
a good intelligence system and he could probably read the writing on
the wall. When in mid-1630 he moved his personal headquarters south
to Memmingen, officially to be nearer to the operations in Italy, he may
already have had a suspicion that he might leave the town still a prince
but no longer the emperor’s generalissimo.