70 Wallenstein
lands then deemed essential to sustain the relevant level of dignity.
Wallenstein was the first of the nouveau riche to accumulate a princely
estate, and his loyalty was unquestionable, so it followed that he became a
prince.
Ferdinand’s policy was not calculated to appeal to the hereditary
princes of the Empire, who resented upstarts and opportunists adopting
the airs and graces which were the birthright of the ancient aristocracy.
Such apparently trivial matters as the entitlement to particular forms
of address became bones of contention which dogged Wallenstein in
the following years.^3 They mattered to him, as they mattered to the
grandees who sought to withhold them, because they encapsulated
the distinction between the ‘real’ aristocracy and those who in their
view were merely the creatures and political creations of the emperor.
This was a widespread and long-standing attitude. A fifteenth-century
chronicler said of peers created by King Edward IV of England that
they were ‘detested by the nobles because they, who were ignoble and
newly made men, were advanced beyond those who far excelled them
in breeding and wisdom’. The hostility which Wallenstein later encoun-
tered, both at the Imperial court and among the princes of the Empire,
was aggravated by this simple but deep-rooted snobbery. Most could
have tolerated his power and influence as the emperor’s generalissimo,
but being forced to treat him as a social equal, or even as a superior, was
more than many could bear.
War without end
By the end of 1622 Ferdinand seemed to have weathered the storm
created by the revolt in Bohemia, whereas following the defeat at the
White Mountain things had gone from bad to worse for his opponent
Frederick, the ‘winter king’ of Bohemia. In January 1621 the emperor
placed him under the ban of the Empire on the grounds that he was
a ‘notorious rebel’. This was a move of sharply disputed legality, as
Ferdinand acted on his own authority and without any formal proceed-
ings or trial, but Frederick was effectively outlawed nevertheless. During
the same year a Spanish army under Spinola occupied most of his
Rhine Palatinate, while Tilly seized the Upper Palatinate, the detached
part of his lands on the Bohemian border. Far from helping him, the
German princes of the Protestant Union disbanded not only their
forces but the Union itself in an effort to keep out of the conflict. The
exception, Margrave Georg of Baden-Durlach, did recruit a small army,
but in May 1622 he was defeated by Tilly and the Spanish. Frederick’s