Of Peace and Other Demons 183a commission and convert to Catholicism ‘or quit the hereditary king-
dom and lands within the short space of three days or even 24 hours’,
as one of those affected wrote. This was the inauspicious background
to the first peace contacts of 1633. In March, after first conferring
with Wallenstein, who emphasised to them and to the court that no
opportunity should be neglected, Imperial delegates met Georg of
Hesse-Darmstadt, who was acting as an intermediary for the Protestant
electors, but the discussions did not proceed beyond non-committal
explorations of position. Brandenburg and Saxony held somewhat
different views, although they agreed on such fundamentals as the
repeal of the Edict of Restitution and equal treatment for Calvinists,
concessions which remained unacceptable to the emperor and the zeal-
ots around him. Danish mediation was accepted in principle, but the
talks became bogged down in arguments about procedure.^9 Although it
was eventually agreed to meet in Breslau (Wroclaw) the delegates were
still waiting in the autumn, and the conference never took place. That
was the official way of conducting peace diplomacy at the time, and for
most of the next fifteen years.
Two decidedly unofficial approaches to Wallenstein personally fol-
lowed. In April Thurn, ambiguously both a Swedish officer and a Bohe-
mian exile, sought to renew the contacts made in 1631 following the
general’s Regensburg dismissal. This time Wallenstein agreed to a meet-
ing, specifying that the envoy should be Johann Bubna, a long-stand-
ing Bohemian acquaintance serving as a Swedish major-general, and
this took place at Gitschin on 16 May 1633, following which Bubna
wrote an account of the discussion.^10 Thurn’s contention, which he
delivered to Wallenstein, was that the Swedish side had concluded that
there was no possibility of negotiating with the emperor because of
the clerical influences which dominated him, but that if Wallenstein
were to take the crown of Bohemia there would be better prospects of
peace. Wallenstein responded that any attempt on the crown would
be ‘gross villainy’, but that those who had the armies in their control
could negotiate and reach a conclusion which others would perforce
have to accept. This was not the answer Bubna was looking for, but he
agreed to take it back to his principals. He was then sent to report to
Oxenstierna, who pointed out the lack of clarity about what Wallenstein
meant and the inconsistency of his implied position, as he had either
to be a loyal Habsburg officer or a rebel. Were he willing to seek the
Bohemian crown through the old electoral procedure, and thereafter to
restore Bohemian political and religious liberties, as well as being pre-
pared to acknowledge Sweden’s legitimate claims in a settlement to the