At the Parting of the Ways 113stationed as it was mainly across the Protestant north of Germany, had
great coercive force, as well as preventing any serious thoughts of an
organised rebellion. For the time being Ferdinand and his fellow zealots
carried the day, regardless of the bitter hostility they were arousing and
oblivious to what it was to cost them when Gustavus Adolphus finally
invaded. Nor was the opposition confined to Protestants. Many of the
lay Catholic nobility were more inclined towards class solidarity with
fellow men of property, albeit of a different religion, than to aligning
themselves with the vindictive acquisitiveness of their own higher
clergy, and those appointed as commissioners often found excuses or
simply neglected to carry out their tasks.^16
Wallenstein made no secret of his disapproval, repeatedly com-
menting sharply on the edict and its consequences. In June 1629 he
complained that mobs were creating disturbances and attacking prop-
erty south of Hanover, noting that ‘the edict causes it’. In September
representatives of the Hanse cities met Wallenstein at Halberstadt and
reported him as saying that ‘the edict cannot be sustained. ... One
cannot simply scrap the religious peace [of Augsburg].’ In October
he informed Collalto, the president of the Imperial war council, that
he saw no possibility of dissuading the Hanse from supporting the
Swedes and the Dutch, all because of ‘the untimely and drastic reforma-
tion [recatholicisation], and the emperor’s Edict of Restitution of church
property and proscription of the Calvinists’. In November the elector of
Saxony’s envoy reported from Halberstadt that Wallenstein’s chancel-
lor had told him of the general’s ‘strong disapproval’ of the edict and
that he had no intention of allowing himself to be used to enforce it.
In the same month Wallenstein wrote to Collalto that ‘the emperor’s
edict has turned all the non-Catholics against us’, a point which he
repeated in February 1630, adding that ‘their embitterment is so great
that they are all saying that if only the Swede [Gustavus] would come
they would gladly die with him, even if he cannot help them’. In April
he complained of wishful thinking at the court, where ‘they believe the
situation to be what they would like it to be, and think about recatholi-
cisation and not about recruitment’.^17 In a nutshell, Wallenstein saw
what Ferdinand and his party could not or would not see, namely the
folly of giving hostages to fortune by creating new internal enemies on
a large scale at a time when there were still more than sufficient external
enemies to be faced. Unfortunately for the Empire and its people the
emperor paid more attention to his confessor than to his general. Not,
it may be added, that Ferdinand was entirely unworldly in his approach.
A planned side benefit of the edict was the restitution to the church