Michel de l'Hôpital

Michel de l'Hôpital (or l'Hospital) (1507 – 13 March 1573) was a French statesman.

De l'Hôpital was born near Aigueperse in Auvergne (now Puy-de-Dôme).

His father, who was physician to the Constable de Bourbon, sent him to study at Toulouse. At the age of eighteen he was driven to leave Toulouse for Padua by the poor fortunes of the family patron. He studied law and letters for about six years in Padua, after which he joined his father at Bologna. He also studied law in Bologna. When Charles of Bourbon died, he went to Rome in the suite of Charles V. For some time he held a position in the papal court at Rome, but about 1534 he returned to France, and became an advocate. His marriage, in 1537, procured for him the post of counsellor to the parlement of Paris.

He held this office until 1547, when he was sent by Henry II on a mission to Bologna, where the Council of Trent was sitting; after sixteen months of wearisome inactivity there, he chose to be recalled at the end of 1548. L'Hôpital then held the position of chancellor to the king's sister, Margaret of France, Duchess of Berry. In 1553, on the recommendation of the Cardinal of Lorraine (Charles de Guise, brother of Mary of Guise, regent of Scotland), he was named master of the requests, and afterwards president of the chambre des comptes (treasury).

In 1559, sickly fifteen-year-old Francis II of France (married to the young Mary, Queen of Scots) succeeded to the throne; Mary's uncles François, Duc de Guise, and Charles de Guise may have held much of the true power in this period, and did much to persecute the French Protestants and reduce the power of the Bourbon and Condé princes. In an attempt to balance their power, the queen-mother Catherine de' Medici sent word to the more even-handed l'Hôpital in Nice (where he had accompanied the princess Margaret, now duchess of Savoy) that he had been chosen to succeed François Olivier in the chancellorship of France.

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