At the end of the same year Napoleon published at Berlin his famous decrees for the blockade of England, and the exclusion of all English merchandise.

Whether justly or unjustly, the Court of Rome was suspected by Buonaparte of not keeping up the blockade (the most unpardonable of all political offences in his eyes).
At last, by a decree of the 2nd of April 1808, he removed the Marches from the Papal Government, and annexed them to the Kingdom of Italy.

The legations, by the way, had formed part of that kingdom since the treaty of Tolentino.

This experiment proved unsuccessful.

Napoleon soon discovered, what his successor is also likely to learn, that the real evil of the Papal Government consisted not in its territorial extent, but in the admixture of temporal and spiritual authority; that, in fact, its power of working mischief was, if anything, in inverse proportion to its size.