No Great Expectations 19concern us, other than to note that Ferdinand had been unable to per-
suade the cash-strapped governments of his cousin Emperor Matthias or
his Habsburg relative the king of Spain to provide him with sufficient
practical assistance, and his forces were by then struggling to hold the
fortress town of Gradisca, near the Slovenian border in modern-day Italy.
Having failed with governments, Ferdinand issued an appeal for help to
the nobility of the Austrian Habsburg lands, but he met with no better
response, other than from Wallenstein.
Wallenstein and his cavalry arrived at Gradisca in June. They were
too few to make a significant difference to the balance of forces, but
they took part in the fighting which lasted through into the autumn,
in course of which Wallenstein was twice mentioned in despatches for
personal valour and judicious command of his company.^29 At the end of
the campaigning season they returned home, while the peace negotia-
tions, which had been going on with Spanish mediation almost as long
as the war itself, eventually produced a settlement which departed little
from the status quo ante.
The key question is why Wallenstein undertook this surprising and
expensive expedition. To many biographers the answer has seemed
simple. Ferdinand was the rising star, soon to be king of Bohemia and
shortly afterwards Emperor Ferdinand II, while Wallenstein was inordi-
nately ambitious and hence seized the opportunity to earn the gratitude
of his prospective new sovereign. Strange, though, that he was the only
nobleman in the whole of Austria-Bohemia ambitious and astute enough
to see the chance and to act upon it, particularly as he had kept his ambi-
tion so well hidden in the past ten years. The truth is probably more
complicated than this.
The background was the growing sense of approaching crisis both in
Europe at large and in the Bohemian lands in particular. At the turn
of the century Sweden had ejected a Catholic king and replaced him
with a Protestant relative after a civil war. In 1606–07 sectarian riots in
the south German city of Donauwörth had escalated, leading shortly
afterwards to the formation of rival military alliances, the Protestant
Union and its counterpart the Catholic League, among the princes of
the region. In 1610 a dispute over the inheritance of the Rhine duchy
of Cleves-Jülich, although initially between two Protestants, had also
acquired a Catholic-Protestant dimension, and military intervention
by the king of France was only prevented by his assassination. In the
Netherlands the twelve-year truce had only five left to run, and both
sides, Catholic and Protestant, were seeking allies for a renewed and
possibly wider war. In their fraternal strife in the Bohemian lands Rudolf