The Edict of Restitution set hard on the Lutheran churches of Saxony and Brandenburg, yet these rulers looked upon Gustavus more as a rival than as a friend, so that they may be said to have forced Gustavus into an alliance with France. The treaty with France was signed at Baerwalde, in the Duchy of Brandenburg, January 13th, 1631. The contracting parties entered into an alliance offensive and defensive to protect their common friends, to restore the deposed Prince to the Empire, and as nearly as possible to restore Church and State possessions to the conditions existing before the disturbance began in Bohemia, and before the Edict of Restitution. France now agreed to furnish Gustavus for the payment of his troops four hundred thousand dollars annually, and paid one hundred thousand dollars cash for the year past, the object of France being to check the House of Austria and to retain what is called in Europe "the balance of power." Gustavus agreed to keep an armed force of not less than thirty-six thousand in Germany till peace should be agreed upon, and to leave Catholics alone where he found that religion prevailing. Gustavus had not the slightest reverence nor patience with the worn out idea of the Holy Roman Empire. With him religion was an intense incentive to action, and sloth, indifference, laziness were qualities which made him angry to intolerance. But there was a curious allegiance of the smaller German States to that name—the Holy Roman Empire. It was only after two centuries of having their territory sacrificed again and again to uphold a crumbling dynasty that they began to center their eyes on North Germany for a union. Had Ferdinand turned Lutheran a truly united Germany would have been made in the seventeenth instead of the nineteenth century, for he came to an empire in which the majority of his subjects were Protestants. He had said that he preferred to rule in an uninhabited wilderness rather than to have a prosperous nation of heretics. When he left it the wilderness was over what had been a prosperous State. John George, the Elector of Saxony, was the leader and most powerful Protestant ruler in North Germany. He was a Protestant, but he announced that he preferred an alliance with the Emperor. Then George William, Elector of Brandenburg, was slothful, and although a brother-in-law of Gustavus, was jealous of the hard-won laurels of the Swedish king. The jealousy of those Protestant princes show that whatever religion they may have professed they had very little of the grace of God in their hearts. The King of Denmark may be ranked with these. He was anxious to have Gustavus wrecked even as he had been, in order to curtail the power of the Swedish kingdom.