Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie
Swedish count, general and politician (1622-1686)
Count Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie (15 October 1622 – 26 April 1686) was a Swedish statesman and military man. He became a member of the Swedish Privy Council in 1647 and came to be the holder of three of the five offices counted as the Great Officers of the Realm, namely Lord High Treasurer, Lord High Chancellor and Lord High Steward. He also served as Governor-General in the Swedish dominion of Livonia.
Birth and ancestry
Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie was born on 15 October 1622. The place of his birth was Reval (present-day Tallinn), Estonia, which at the time was a Swedish dominion where Magnus Gabriel's father Jacob De la Gardie served as governor. Jacob De la Gardie, Count of Läckö, was a prominent military commander who served as Lord High Constable of Sweden from 1620 until his death in 1652. Father of Jacob, and grandfather of Magnus Gabriel, was Baron Pontus De la Gardie, a French mercenary who had been in Danish service but made a career in Sweden after having been captured by Swedish troops in 1565. Pontus married Sofia Gyllenhielm, the daughter of King John III, in 1580.
Magnus Gabriel's mother was Ebba Brahe, daughter of Lord High Steward Magnus Brahe and Brita Leijonhufvud. Ebba had a relationship with young King Gustavus Adolphus, probably during the years 1613–1615.
“Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie” enters the record as swedish count, general and politician (1622-1686). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Magnus, Gabriel and Gardie can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q920243. VIAF identifies the subject as 13111366. The Library of Congress control number is n81120158. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1622, 1686, 1647 and 1620.
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This entry incorporates text from “Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.