Jérome Bonaparte, a younger brother of Napoleon, had married a Protestant girl in the United States, and the emperor, who wished his brothers and sisters to make matrimonial alliances with the most powerful families of Europe, applied to the pope to annul the marriage. Pius VII. declared that he had no power in the case. Napoleon sought revenge by meddling still further with the affairs of the church in Italy, and by taking forcible possession of Ancona, a portion of the papal territory. The Holy Father protested in a letter dated the 13th of November, 1805, which Napoleon did not find time to answer till January 7, 1806. In those two months he had brought to a close one of his most brilliant campaigns, had conquered the emperors of Austria and Russia, and dictated terms to all Europe. In reply to the protest of the Holy Father Napoleon wrote to his ambassador at Rome in the following style: “The pope has written me a most ridiculous, a most foolish letter. These people thought I was dead.… Since these idiots do not object to the possibility of a Protestant occupying the throne of France, I will send them a Protestant ambassador.… I will change nothing outwardly, if people behave themselves with me; but otherwise I shall reduce the pope to be bishop of Rome. Really, nothing is so wanting in sense as the court of Rome.” Only the Emperor of Russia and the King of England he declared were masters in their own states, because they had no pope to trouble them. A month later (February, 1806) Pius VII. received another letter from Napoleon. “Your Holiness,” he wrote, “must profess the same regard for me in the temporal order as I profess for you in the spiritual order. All my enemies must be your enemies. That an Englishman, a Russian, a Swede, or a minister of the Sardinian king should henceforth reside in Rome or in any part of your states is entirely unfitting. No vessel belonging to any of these states should enter your ports.” The Holy Father replied that he was unable to assent to demands which were opposed to the character of his divine mission, “which owns no enmities, not even with those who have departed from the centre of unity.” Napoleon attributed the pope’s firmness to the counsels of Consalvi, and he determined to drive him from office. “Tell him,” he wrote to his ambassador, “that but two courses remain open to him: always to do what I wish or to quit the ministry.” He also informed the cardinal that none of his movements were unknown to him, and that for the first compromising act he should answer with his head; he would have him arrested in the streets of Rome. “These priests,” he said, “keep the soul for themselves and throw me the carcass.” All this storm of imperial rage had broken upon the Head of the church because he had dared defend the honor of a Protestant girl, the daughter of a simple American citizen, against the attacks of the most terrible monarch of Europe.