Axel, Count Oxenstierna

Axel, Count Oxenstierna (born June 16, 1583, Fånö, near Uppsala, Swed.—died Aug. 28, 1654, Stockholm) was the chancellor of Sweden (1612–54), successively under King Gustav II Adolf and Queen Christina. He was noted for his administrative reforms and for his diplomacy and military command during the Thirty Years’ War. He was created a count in 1645.

Rise to chancellorship.

Oxenstierna was born of a noble family that had played a considerable part in Sweden’s history. After receiving his education at Rostock and other German universities, he was appointed to a post in the exchequer and later he was made a member of the council of state. He soon established an ascendancy in that body, and on the death of Charles IX in 1611, it was he who extorted from the new king, Gustav II Adolf, a charter guaranteeing the nation against the royal abuses that had latterly prevailed. One of Gustav’s first acts was to appoint Oxenstierna chancellor (January 1612).

Oxenstierna had emerged as the champion of the aristocracy against the violence of the monarchy, and the charter might well have initiated a constitutional struggle if strong ties of respect and affection had not soon developed between the King and Chancellor. They became, indeed, ideal collaborators and share the credit for the achievements of the reign. Oxenstierna’s contributions were in the spheres of administrative reform and diplomacy.

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He drafted the riksdagsordning (“parliamentary law”) of 1617, which stabilized the constitution of the Riksdag; he drew up the ordinance of 1619 on the development of the towns; he carried through a reform in local government in 1623; and he issued a chancery ordinance in 1626 that organized the business of that office. He was mainly responsible for the building of the house of the nobility in Stockholm and for the riddarhusordning (“upper house law”; 1626), which divided the nobility into three classes and specified the members of each. As a diplomat he was entrusted with a long succession of major negotiations, including the Peace of Knäred (with Denmark, 1613), the Truce of Ogra (with Poland, 1622), and the negotiations with Denmark at Sjöaryd (1624).

When Gustav transferred his war against Poland to Prussia in 1626, Oxenstierna was brought over and installed as governor general, and it was he who negotiated the advantageous Truce of Altmark with Poland in 1629. In November 1631 the King called him to Germany.

Oxenstierna had been more reluctant than Gustav to intervene in Germany and would probably have preferred, in the first instance, a final settlement with Denmark—always, in his view, Sweden’s main enemy. Moreover, he disliked the French alliance, considered that Gustav made a capital error in not marching on Vienna after the Battle of Breitenfeld, disapproved the King’s candidature for the Polish throne in 1632, and tacitly opposed the project for marrying Christina to the electoral prince of Brandenburg, Frederick William. His removal to Germany placed the main burden of Swedish diplomacy again on his shoulders, but the King also now entrusted him with military commands, such as the formation and leadership of the army that relieved Gustav at Nürnberg in August 1632.

The war after Gustav’s death.

The death of Gustav, in November 1632, put the supreme direction of the Swedish cause in Germany into Oxenstierna’s hands. Preserving to himself much of the king’s authority and prestige, he negotiated with electors as an equal, and the project of making him elector of Mainz was canvassed. In the League of Heilbronn (1633), he created a corpus evangelicorum of the kind that Gustav had planned, with himself as its director, but he never managed to persuade the North German princes to join it. The disaster at Nördlingen (1634) destroyed his hopes of keeping Sweden’s allies loyal, and many of them made peace at Prague in 1635. The renewal of the truce with Poland was purchased (to Oxenstierna’s indignation) only by sacrificing the tolls that the Swedes had been levying in the Prussian harbours from 1627. Faced with overwhelming financial and military difficulties, he was for a time the virtual prisoner of his mutinous unpaid soldiery. He hesitated long between buying a peace on the best terms that he could get and accepting a French alliance and indefinite continuation of the war; it was not until 1638 that the intransigence of the Holy Roman emperor, Ferdinand III, forced him to the second alternative. Thenceforward he was the strongest advocate of fighting on until peace could be had on really favourable terms. Political enemies at home accused him of prolonging the war for his own ends, but the terms obtained by Sweden under the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, justified his obstinacy. Meanwhile, he had launched the sudden attack on Denmark in 1643; the morality of it was dubious, but at Brömsebro in 1645 he was able to dictate a peace that wiped out the humiliations suffered at Knäred in 1613.

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Oxenstierna and Queen Christina.

As chancellor, Oxenstierna was one of the five regents who were to govern Sweden during Christina’s minority; he also drew up (probably with Gustav’s approval) the regeringsform (“form of government”) accepted by the Riksdag in 1634. It was not until his return to Sweden in 1636 that he participated in the regency’s government, but for the next eight years or so he was the real ruler of the country. His relations with the Queen, after she attained her majority (1644), were never as cordial as with her father; she saw in him the leader of an aristocracy anxious to limit the crown’s powers and perhaps even to set up a republic. Others disliked him as the defender of noble privileges and noble encroachments on the liberties of the peasantry, though he repeatedly urged moderation on his colleagues in this regard. He had to face the intrigues of a hostile party at court, and he clashed with Christina on foreign and ecclesiastical policy, on the question of the succession, and on her proposal to abdicate. After 1650, however, relations improved, and he was as firmly established in office as at any time in his career when he died in 1654.

Sagacious, imperturbable, courageous, and industrious, unhurried in negotiation, and not without a pungent humour, Oxenstierna felt the service of the state to be equally congenial and obligatory. Though he never forgot the interests of his class, it may fairly be said that as a rule his single-minded patriotism transcended them.