On the death of Gustavus the supreme direction of Swedish affairs passed into the hands of Oxenstjerna, whose one object was to carry out the policy of his dead friend and king; but Oxenstjerna was no general, and being without the supreme authority which Gustavus wielded, had often to persuade where he would have commanded. His first step showed the change which had taken place. Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, like other military adventurers, required his reward before he would venture his life further in the cause, and a duchy had to be carved for him out of the bishoprics of Bamberg and Würtzburg. It was the first confiscation of Catholic lands by the Protestant forces, the first forcible subjection of a Catholic population to a Protestant ruler. However justifiable it might be as an act of retaliation for the Edict of Restitution, it was but too evident a proof of the increasing tendency to consider the interests of the German people as of no value in comparison with the political and military necessities of their so-called saviours. [Sidenote: =The League of Heilbronn, 1633.=] Sure of the assistance of Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, Oxenstjerna was enabled to unite the circles of Swabia Franconia and the upper and lower Rhine to Sweden by an offensive and defensive league, which was signed at Heilbronn in April 1633. Bernhard took command of the forces raised by the circles, and prepared in conjunction with the Swedish army to resume the attack on Vienna. The supreme word on military affairs for the moment lay not with Bernhard or with Oxenstjerna but with Wallenstein. [Sidenote: =Schemes of Wallenstein.=] The death of Gustavus left him, as he well knew, without a rival in Germany, and retiring slowly from Lützen behind the mountains of Bohemia, he surrendered himself to the illusion that he could now dictate peace to Germany on his own terms. Secure, as he thought, of the support of his army, contemptuous of the politics both of Ferdinand and of Oxenstjerna, he prepared to enforce his own conditions of peace upon the Emperor and upon the Swedes alike. The Edict of Restitution was to be withdrawn, the Swedes to be compensated by some places on the Baltic coast, while he himself, the peacemaker, would exchange the duchy of Mecklenberg for the Rhenish Palatinate, or possibly the crown of Bohemia. During the summer of 1633 he was pressing these terms upon Oxenstjerna and upon John George. In June he had almost obtained the consent of the latter, but Oxenstjerna, cautious and hostile, would not trust him. Couriers went quick and often between the two, and rumours of treachery were beginning to be heard behind Wallenstein’s back, not merely at Vienna, but, a far more serious thing, in the camp. The more they were canvassed the more did Wallenstein’s proposals seem hateful to important interests in Europe. [Sidenote: =Opposition of the Jesuits, the Spaniards and the army.=] The Jesuits and the Catholics were not willing to give