While the great powers of Europe were battling for the Rhine and the Pyrenees, the smaller nations of the north were struggling for the command of the Baltic. It was a contest in which Denmark played the part of the Empire, the traditional but feeble possessor of rightful authority, while Sweden, like another France, strong in her new-found national unity, was impelled by her geographical position to claim a freedom which could not fail to end in leadership. When Gustavus Adolphus fell on the field of Lützen in 1632 he had succeeded in winning for his country supremacy on the Baltic and a foothold on German soil; but his life had been too short, his career too meteor-like for him to have had time to consolidate by his statesmanship what he had won by his genius. [Sidenote: =Character and policy of Oxenstjerna.=] That task was left to his friend and confidant, Axel Oxenstjerna, during the minority of the young Christina who was only four and a half years old when her father died. The man was well fitted to the task. Cautious, deliberate, and cold-blooded, complete master of his emotions, he was a man of fixed ideas and tenacious policy. Nothing moved him, nothing changed him. Twice only in a long and anxious life did he know what it was to be sleepless, once after the battle of Lützen, once after the battle of Nördlingen. Patriotism in him took bodily form in the House of Vasa and Gustavus Adolphus. During the life of the king his whole energies were devoted to carrying out his master’s wishes, after his death to the completion of his master’s policy. In the Thirty Years’ War, as we have seen, he was the most strenuous and uncompromising enemy of peace. The miseries of Germany, the dangerous ambition of France, even the deterioration of his own country, were as nothing to him compared with the duty of obtaining for Sweden all that Gustavus might fairly have claimed. It required the personal intervention of the young queen herself to prevent her minister from ruining the country in order to preserve its dignity. At home his chief work was to place on a permanent basis the alliance of the crown with the official nobility, which it had been the special object of Gustavus Adolphus to create as a counterpoise to the influence of the hereditary nobility and the clergy. [Sidenote: =The Form of Government, 1634.=]