There was nothing then left for Victor Emmanuel but to advance his troops, and take possession of the city of Rome, in the name of the new kingdom of Italy. He delayed no longer. After crossing the frontier of the papal territory, his army engaged in several skirmishes with the Zouaves of the pope, but met with no serious resistance. On the 20th of September, 1870, orders were given to attack the city. Two breaches were soon opened in the walls, and as the victorious Italians entered, the papal troops retreated, and Pius IX took refuge in the castle of St. Angelo as a fugitive from the city where, but a short time before, a decree of his personal infallibility had been forced through a packed Council by such methods as no other body of men in the world would have submitted to, and to which it is not likely they would have submitted but for the influences of the Jesuits. The pope having fled and made himself a voluntary prisoner in the castle of St. Angelo, the remaining duties pertaining to the papal Government devolved upon Cardinal Antonelli, who still called himself Secretary of State. This consisted of a formal and puerile protest in the name of the fugitive pope, wherein he declared that nothing done by the kingdom of Italy had conveyed any rights whatsoever against the dominion and possession of the pope, and that the pope "both knows his rights, and intends to conserve them intact, and _re-enter at the proper time into their actual possession_." All that can be said of this is, that, whilst practically it was mere unmeaning bravado, it fully set forth the policy and purposes of Pius IX, by which he expected, with the aid of the two hundred millions of Roman Catholics in the world, to destroy the new Italian Government, and bring the people again under papal dominion. Strange fatuity, made the more strange by the fact that these announcements proceeded from the first pope whose personal infallibility had been approved by conciliar decree!