126 Wallenstein
promised to be the social event of the year. Ferdinand himself arrived
on 19 June, with a huge escort befitting the Holy Roman Emperor, and
the Catholic electors also came in person. On the other hand John
George of Saxony refused to attend, fearing that the Protestant electors
would come under heavy pressure, outnumbered five to two, as the king
of Bohemia – that is Emperor Ferdinand – was also an elector, and he
persuaded the elector of Brandenburg to do likewise. The most talked-
about prince of the Empire and the centre of the meeting’s attention
also did not come to Regensburg, but Wallenstein chose that moment
to move his headquarters three hundred miles south. He arrived at
Memmingen, a hundred miles from Regensburg, ten days before the
emperor reached that city.^5
Wallenstein was well aware of the princely animosity towards his
army and himself, and that the objective of the Catholic electors at the
meeting was to secure his dismissal. Like Maximilian, he made it his
business to be well informed, and as early as 1623 he had an established
network of representatives and informers, ‘for which I have certainly
already laid out several thousand gulden’. The Catholic electors started
complaining bitterly to Ferdinand about Wallenstein’s recruiting activi-
ties early in 1627, and they kept up a constant campaign thereafter. In
late 1628 he did make some concessions towards limiting his forces,
consolidating or disbanding under-strength units, only to be faced with
demands for troops in Italy and the Netherlands in 1629. The conse-
quence of maintaining his army, as he wrote in October of that year,
was that ‘I have had to make enemies of all the electors and princes,
indeed everyone, on the emperor’s account. ... That I am hated in the
Empire has happened simply because I have served the emperor too
well, against the wishes of many.’^6
Wallenstein was not the only item on the electoral meeting agenda. In
fact he was not on Ferdinand’s agenda at all. Instead the emperor’s open-
ing paper of 3 July addressed first the question of a universal peace, but
implicitly assuming that this could not be achieved went on to consider
war against the Dutch, war against the Swedes should they invade, and
war against the French in Italy.^7 A final reckoning with Frederick of the
Palatinate was also mentioned, as was – almost as an afterthought – the
possibility of improving the Empire’s military organisation, but there was
no suggestion of replacing Wallenstein. Nor was the election of Archduke
Ferdinand as King of the Romans overtly proposed, so that both the
emperor and the Catholic electors had principal objectives of their own
underlying the formal agenda.