How ever did the inbred Habsburgs control their vast empire?

In 1960, Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo tell us, Lucian Freud went to the Goya Museum in Castres in search of a particular painting. He wanted to create portraits that were character studies and ‘not mere likenesses’, and Goya’s collective portrait ‘La Real Compañía de Filipinas’,a study in human nullity that represented ‘absolutely nothing’, was just what he was looking for. Fernández-Armesto explains:

The work belongs in the tradition of what might be called Spanish ‘anti-portraiture’, from Velázquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ to Goya’s own devastatingly candid royal family group, ‘Familia de Carlos IV’, moral as well as physical delineations of regal vacuity. King Ferdinand VII appears amid the company’s directors, who, enveloped in shadow, seem to ignore him while they talk among themselves, apparently clueless as to why they are there or whether it matters.

It came as something of a relief – justification, even – to arrive at this perfect vignette, because for the previous 283 pages the one question that would not go away was how on earth did the vacuous halfwits of Goya and Velázquez’s portraits ever manage to do anything? How did a monarchy – Habsburg or Bourbon – ruled by such a poor, pitiful inbred as Charles II control an empire that straddled the world? How did a navy that the English had always thought there for the taking dominate its Atlantic and Pacific trade? How did engineers who for 300 years dodged the challenge of a Panama canal leave such a rich physical inheritance? How did a martyr-intoxicated clergy (shades of the English College, Rome, in the Elizabethan age), whose chief instrument of moral correction was the lash, leave behind them such a profoundly Catholic legacy? And...