The Emperor Karl seems to have left almost no impression on anyone who met him – a banal, peevish, stroppy figure, his best chance was to decorate his audience chamber with the portraits of any number of comparably unengaging ancestors, and argue that the dynastic principle had at regular intervals thrown up make-weights even more helpless than himself. Sadly, his ineffective predecessors were propped up by a royal framework designed to maintain the dignity of even the least dignified.
