Ill-success dogged their well-meant efforts from the first. In the previous year, Louis had at the last moment found reasons to recall his verbal permission to Mansfeld to cross the soil of France, and the troops had been sent instead into the Low Countries, where, unpaid and unprovided with necessaries, they fell victims to disease. The naval expedition, which, under Wimbledon’s leadership, arrived at Cadiz in the October of 1625, achieved nothing but disaster and contempt. In England quarrels broke out between Charles and his Parliaments, which effectually prevented the payment of the promised subsidies to Christian IV. [Sidenote: =Difficulties of Ferdinand.=] Nevertheless the united forces of Mansfeld, Christian of Brunswick, and Christian of Denmark, ill provided as they were, far outnumbered the army of Tilly and the League, and it was clear to Ferdinand and Maximilian that with discontent seething in Silesia, Bohemia, and Austria, with Bethlen Gabor again threatening the frontiers of Hungary, and the Danish forces invading upper Germany, it was absolutely essential to place another army in the field. Yet where was it to come from? The Emperor could not stoop to employ a brigand army paid by plunder like that of Mansfeld, but the resources of Maximilian and the League were strained to the utmost. Spain, threatened alike by England and France, could spare nothing, and Ferdinand’s treasury was as usual empty. [Sidenote: =Wallenstein.=] It was in this crisis that a man stepped forward to the help of Ferdinand, who is in some ways the most interesting figure of the Thirty Years’ War. Albert von Waldstein, or Wallenstein, was the younger son of an illustrious Bohemian family of Sclavonic blood. Educated partly by the Moravian Brethren and partly by the Jesuits, he never surrendered himself dogmatically to either creed, but out of the mysticism of both constructed for himself a religion, which, not unlike that of Napoleon afterwards, chiefly expressed itself in an unfailing belief in his own star. Thus removed somewhat apart from the controversies of the day, he was able to see more clearly through the mists which darkened the eyes of ordinary politicians. Statesmanship as well as interest and tradition led him to devote himself to the cause of the Emperor, as the one stable element in Germany among the disintegrating influences of rival religions and personal jealousies. True patriotism made common cause with ambition to urge him to risk much to keep the foreigner out of Germany. Common sense allied with dogmatic indifference made him see more clearly than others, that in toleration for all creeds lay the only possibility of civil unity. But statesman and patriot though he was in his conception of the real needs of Germany and the necessity of resisting foreign interference, his statesmanship and his patriotism were never allowed to free themselves from the trammels of an overmastering ambition. In the settlement of