And So Was His Grandfather

Every so often, Americans become fascinated with royal lineage, family heritage and race.  The current craze is due to the recently televised interview of a couple of royal multimillionaires discussing oppression with a multibillionaire while comfortably seated in the garden of the billionaire’s estate.  

The story was titillating only because the royal family were supposedly horrified at the prospect of a black member of the royal family.  Why the royal family should be upset by this, when they so clearly are not bothered by the fact that somewhere in Prince Charles’ ancestry there is a horse, is never explained. 

Maybe I missed it, but the press never got around to reporting that according to some historians, the royal family already has a black member of the family, Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of mad King George III, was descended from Black Portuguese royalty.  Even the records of the queen’s private physician recorded that Her Majesty was a mulatto.  

Of course, all such nitpicking at our DNA is complete nonsense.  If you look at the history of royal families, it doesn’t take long to realize that monarchs were far more concerned with keeping property concentrated within a single family than about who actually descended from whom. 

The foolishness of ‘royal heritage’ was superbly caricatured by the great Spanish artist, Francisco Goya, in an etching he produced in 1797, which is number 39 in his “Los Caprichos”.  Titled, “Hasta Su Abuelo” (which means “So Was His Grandfather”), it shows a well-dressed royal jackass looking at what is presumably a collection of pictures of his ancestors, all of whom were also jackasses (albeit, not well-dressed, but resembling livestock).

 Goya used the recurring image of an ass to represent the aristocracy in Spain, and one possible interpretation of this etching is that it shows the general preoccupation of the aristocracy with establishing noble lineages.  Considering the power of the royalty when Goya produced this image, it represents an amazing act of courage for any artist—much less the official court painter to the king—to lampoon the aristocracy.

When Goya produced this etching, it was at the tail end of the Enlightenment, which marked a shift in the way most people thought. The Enlightenment was generally characterized by a growth of logical reasoning and a return to ‘naturalism’—but this arrived a little late in Spain.  There was a general awakening to the belief that the old, established ways of doing things—founded in superstition and questionable religious dogma that favored one group over others—needed to be reexamined under “the light” of logic and reason.  

This was, of course, a direct challenge to the status quo and to tradition, particularly for the Spanish Crown.  Remember the “divine right of kings”? Remember that the French Revolution was ongoing right next door was so popular that people were losing their minds.  Or at least their heads. The Spanish Crown’s fear was not that unreasonable, under the circumstance.

The causes of the Enlightenment were as numerous as they were varied.  Tens of thousands had traveled the world, and ironically, it was frequently the Spanish who brought back with them new ideas and observations.  Travel exposed people to other cultures—frequently those in which people placed less importance on ancestry.  They also brought the new fruit and vegetables of the New World back to Europe, dramatically altering diets and the ways agriculture had been done for millennia.  Merchants, miners, and tradesmen suddenly had wealth enough to challenge—if not exceed—that of some aristocrats.

The Spanish monarch, King Charles IV, was terrified of these new ideas—especially a philosophy that said the common men were equal to aristocrats—so he ordered his soldiers to inspect all mail coming south from France, seeking to keep the ideas of Rousseau, Locke, and Voltaire north of the border.  This attempt at censorship did not work, of course.

A plausible alternative explanation is that the ass depicted examining his heritage represents Manuel Godoy, the Spanish Prime Minister who had (by remarkable coincidence) just recently had his family lineage published, claiming to trace his noble ancestry back hundreds of years to the time of the Visigoths. 

 Godoy, the son of a noble but penniless family, had come to Madrid in 1784, at the age of 17 to join the palace guards.  Handsome and with a talent for singing and playing the Spanish guitar, he soon came to the attention of the Queen, Maria Luisa de Palma.  Godoy’s phenomenally rapid rise to power undoubtedly was the result of talents that, while understood by later historians, were nevertheless not fully documented.  

By the end of 1788, Godoy was the Captain of the palace guards and six months later, he had been promoted to the rank of colonel in the Spanish Army.  In rapid succession, he was promoted to general, he was knighted, he was made a Gentleman of the King’s Chamber and he was promoted to Field Marshall.  By the end of 1792, he was the nation’s Prime Minister at the tender age of twenty-five.  Godoy was a very talented young man!

As Prime Minister, Godoy involved Spain in several disastrous wars, eventually inciting the invasion by Napoleon that resulted in the abdication of King Charles and the destruction of the Spanish Empire.  Surprisingly, Charles IV remained a faithful friend of Godoy until the monarch’s death.

All of Godoy’s ministerial misadventures were done with the blessing of King Charles IV, who had neither any aptitude nor any interest in governing his realm.  This was a direct result of the long practice of limiting royal marriages to first cousins and nieces, in order to keep property inside the family.  After a surprisingly few generations of marriages where your own children were also your first cousins, you get a monarch who can sit in a corner and lick his own eyebrows.

Goya, who painted several portraits of Godoy and executed several commissions from him, was as openly contemptuous of the foolish aristocrat as possible—which was a remarkable act given that Goya depended on the favor of the court for the continued sales of his works.  Less remarkable was that within weeks of publication of Los Caprichos, Goya pulled all remaining copies from sale and ‘gifted’ them to the king.

Goya worked at the royal court, so he was well acquainted with the king and queen and the rest of the royal family.  Despite his background and the strict rules of society, Goya could recognize that the royal family were simply privileged jackasses.

So, three hundred years after the Enlightenment and more than two centuries since Goya so magnificently pointed out that all royalty are jackasses, why do we still give these fools so much of our attention, if not respect?