§ 185.4. =The Prisoner of the Vatican, A.D. 1870-1878.=--The dethroned papal king could only protest and utter denunciations. No result followed from the adoption of St. Joseph as guardian and patron of the church, nor from the solemn consecration of the whole world to the most sacred heart of Jesus, at the jubilee of June 16th, A.D. 1875. The measures of A.D. 1871, by which Cavour sought to realize his ideal of a “free church in a free state,” were pronounced absurd, cunning, deceitful, and an outrage on the apostles Peter and Paul. By these measures the rights and privileges of a sovereign for all time had been conferred on the pope: the holiness and inviolability of his person, a body-guard, a post and telegraph bureau, free ambassadorial communication with foreign powers, the _ex-territoriality_ of his palace of the Vatican, embracing fifteen large saloons, 11,500 rooms, 236 stairs, 218 corridors, two chapels, several museums, archives, libraries, large beautiful gardens, etc., as also of the Lateran and the summer palace of Castle Gandolpho, with all appurtenances, also an annual income, free from all burdens and taxes, of three and a quarter million francs, equal to the former amount of his revenue, together with unrestricted liberty in the exercise of all ecclesiastical rights of sovereignty and primacy, and the renunciation of all state interference in the disposal of bishoprics and benefices. The right of the inferior clergy to exercise the _appellatio ab abusu_ to a civil tribunal was set aside, and of all civil rights only that of the royal _exequatur_ in the election of bishops, _i.e._ the mere right of investing the nominee of the curia in the possession of the revenues of his office, was retained.--To the end of his life Pius every year returned the dotation as an insult and injury, and “the starving holy father in prison, who has not where to lay his head,” received three or four times more in Peter’s pence contributed by all Catholic Christendom. Playing the _rôle_ of a prisoner he never passed beyond the precincts of the Vatican. He reached the semi-jubilee of his papal coronation in A.D. 1871, being the first pope who falsified the old saying, _Annos Petri non videbit_. He rejected the offer of a golden throne and the title of “the great,” but he accepted a Parisian lady’s gift of a golden crown of thorns. In support of the prison myth, straws from the papal cell were sold in Belgium for half a franc per stalk, and for the same price photographs of the pope behind an iron grating. As once on a time the legend arose about the disciple whom Jesus loved that he would not die, so was it once said about the pope; and on his eighty-third birthday, in A.D. 1874, a Roman Jesuit paper, eulogising the moral purity of his life, put the words in his mouth, “Which of you convinceth me of sin?” But he himself by constantly renewed rescripts, encyclicals, briefs, allocutions to the cardinals and to numerous deputations from far and near, unweariedly fanned the flame of enthusiasm and fanaticism throughout papal Christendom, and thundered threatening prophecies not only against the Italian, but also against foreign states, for with most of them he lived in open war. A collection of his “Speeches delivered at the Vatican” was published in 1874, commented on by Gladstone in the _Contemporary Review_ for January, 1875, who gives abundant quotations showing papal assumptions, maledictions, abuse and misunderstanding of the Scriptures with which they abound. On the fiftieth anniversary of the pope’s episcopal consecration, in June, 1877, crowds from all lands assembled to offer their congratulations, with costly presents and Peter’s pence amounting to sixteen and a half million francs. He died February 8th, 1878, in the eighty-sixth year of his age and thirty-second of his pontificate. His heirs claimed the unpaid dotations of twenty million lire, but were refused by the courts of law.[543]--His secretary Antonelli, descended from an old brigand family, who from the time of his stay at Gaeta was his evil demon, predeceased him in A.D. 1876. Though the son of a poor herdsman and woodcutter, he left more than a hundred million lire. His natural daughter, to the great annoyance of the Vatican, sought, but without success, in the courts of justice to make good her claims against her father’s greedy brothers.