150 Wallenstein
Well beforehand Maximilian had begun making plaintive appeals to
Wallenstein for help, professing his personal friendship and his loyalty
to the Imperial cause as though he had taken no part at Regensburg or
in earlier moves against the general, still less tried to desert the emperor
and take refuge in French-protected neutrality.^13 Wallenstein sent him
sound military advice but no more troops, and this Maximilian, most
contemporaries and many subsequent historians have attributed to
his vindictive desire for revenge on his principal political opponent.
Whatever Wallenstein may have felt, however, his decision was
unquestionably correct from a military point of view. One need only
consider the opposing forces at Rain. According to Guthrie, Gustavus
had 38,000 men and 72 guns, Tilly 22,000 men and only 20 guns, and
over half of Tilly’s men were partially trained recruits or militia, while
his guns were of lighter calibre.^14 To redress this balance Wallenstein
would have had to send not a couple of regiments but a full-scale army
complete with artillery train. He did not have it. His operational forces
were already deployed far and wide countering other threats to the
Imperialist position, while his new army in Bohemia was not ready.
A more political general might have despatched a few thousand men as
a gesture, while privately recognising this to be pointless. Wallenstein
was gathering his strength for a decisive campaign against Gustavus,
and he did not intend Maximilian, or even Gustavus himself, to divert
him from his preparations, still less to induce him to squander his
resources before he was ready.
Gustavus took the opportunity to capture Augsburg, which he did a
few days later rather than following hard on Maximilian’s heels, and
given this respite the Bavarians not only strengthened their position
at Ingolstadt, where Tilly died, but also occupied Regensburg and dug
in most of their army around it. These two important fortress cities
controlled the Danube and threatened Gustavus’s proposed route into
Austria, and by the time he reached Ingolstadt at the end of April, and
Horn reached Regensburg shortly afterwards, it was too late. Neither
place could feasibly be taken by storm, nor induced to surrender with-
out a siege which might have lasted months. Although Gustavus had
another of his lucky escapes while he was assessing the situation person-
ally at Ingolstadt, when a cannon ball from the defences killed his horse
under him, his campaign was not going well. He had intended to inflict
a heavy defeat on Tilly’s army at Rain, thus eliminating it as a factor to
be reckoned with in the future. Instead it had not only slipped away,
but had secured itself and two key strategic points against him. Nor
had Wallenstein been induced to move before he was ready in order to