On September 5, Marie de’ Medici instituted a Council of War, to which she summoned the Maréchal de Brissac, Praslin, Saint-Luc, Saint-Géran, and Bassompierre, and also the recently dismissed Ministers Villeroy and Jeannin, to discuss the means of raising an army to combat the fugitive princes, who had established themselves at Soissons, where their adherents were gathering round them. This Council, however, had only held one or two meetings, under the presidency of the Maréchal de Brissac, when a most embarrassing incident caused its sittings to be suspended. It will be remembered that, in 1605, the Comte d’Auvergne, Charles IX’s son by Marie Touchet, now Madame d’Entragues, had been condemned to death for high treason, a sentence subsequently commuted by Henri IV to perpetual imprisonment in the Bastille. This commutation, however, had not been a formal one, so that the death-sentence remained nominally suspended over the captive’s head. At the end of the previous June, the Queen-Mother had set Auvergne at liberty, with the object of opposing him to the cabal of the Princes; and when, a few weeks later, the news arrived that Longueville had seized Péronne, she sent him, at the head of two companies of the French Guards and a detachment of cavalry, to invest the place. But, by some extraordinary oversight, she had omitted to furnish Auvergne with the usual letters of _abolition_, and, in the absence of his sovereign’s formal pardon for his offences, he occupied a position somewhat analogous to that of a convict on ticket-of-leave.