Of Peace and Other Demons 181Wallenstein’s duty as commander-in-chief was to confirm the sen-
tences, despite representations from high places on behalf of the aris-
tocratic colonel who was the most senior of those condemned, while
an eighteen-year-old cavalry captain attracted particular sympathy,
reportedly including a plea for clemency from Piccolomini, which
Wallenstein also refused. They were harsh times, and war then, as later,
was a harsh business. Eighteen-year-olds were still being executed for
cowardice in the face of the enemy during the First World War almost
300 years later. As for the proceedings turning hard-bitten career offic-
ers against Wallenstein, they will have expected nothing less, as such
measures were deemed necessary to ensure that men did their duty in
combat. Moreover they were normal practice. Three months earlier
a colonel in Swedish service who surrendered the town of Rain was
court-martialled and executed after Gustavus Adolphus re-took it a few
days later, and the Saxon officer who surrendered Leipzig to Holk was
executed at Dresden.^7 Nevertheless the numbers involved after Lützen
were unusually high, reflecting the exceptionally hard-fought nature of
the battle, while the fact that the sentences were carried out in the same
Prague square where leading Bohemian rebels had been executed twelve
years before has given the event a particular notoriety.
In military terms 1633 was a year in which neither side achieved
much of consequence, as although the war did not by any means come
to a standstill it was effectively relegated into second place by a con-
voluted series of attempts to find some basis for peace. Nevertheless
Swedish progress in both political and military matters early in the year
confirmed the fears so recently set out by the peace party in Vienna.
Oxenstierna became head of the regency government, with 100,000
men still in Swedish service in Germany, and in order to provide a
sounder basis for continuing the war he concluded a new alliance with
France, as well as pursuing a scheme already initiated by Gustavus for
forming a tighter union of Protestant German princes and cities. Hence
the Heilbronn League was formally constituted in April 1633, with its
members drawn mainly from the Franconian, Swabian and Rhine circles
of the Empire, and with Oxenstierna as its director, although it did not
include the important electorates of Saxony and Brandenburg, neither
of which he could regard as fully reliable. His personal diplomacy was
required to secure their commitment to campaigning in 1633, and
then only on condition that the main focus was to be Silesia and that
the Swedish commander there was to be nominated by Saxony. The
elector’s strange choice was the Bohemian exile Thurn, who was then
serving as a Swedish general. Such compromises were necessary, but by