For Glory and Bolívar: The Remarkable Life of Manuela Sáenz (review)

This long-awaited book from Pamela Murray traces the life of Manuela Sáenz, the lover and confidante of Simón Bolívar. Many historians have found this mercurial woman of little interest apart from her relationship with Bolívar. By contrast, Murray devotes half the book to Sáenz’s life in the 26 years after Bolívar’s death in 1830. She argues that Manuela occupied a space between the public life of politics and the private one of domesticity in the chaotic independence period.

Would Manuela Sáenz have risen to historical prominence without her association with Bolívar? Perhaps not, but her life was far from ordinary. Accident of birth gave her a tenuous elite status without embedding her in a watchful family. An illegitimate child born of a Spanish father and creole mother in 1797, she was raised in a convent in Quito. Her father recognized her and arranged a marriage with an English merchant, James Thorne, who allowed Manuela a power of attorney to manage some of his business affairs in Lima. In Lima, she became active in the patriot cause in the 1820s, driven perhaps, Murray suggests, by a desire to ingratiate herself with Lima’s creole elite and to secure a military promotion for her half-brother. She abandoned her husband for Simón Bolívar in 1822, but remained in contact with Thorne and even launched an unsuccessful suit in 1847 to demand an inheritance from his estate. Her flagrant affair with Bolívar brought her not dishonor, but a relatively high status as his mistress, archivist, spy, and go-between. All her life, Manuela used her association with the Liberator to beg for and do favors for Bolívar’s partisans and allies. She was especially close to Juan José Flores, the Venezuelan military officer who became the first president of Ecuador, and the conservative Ecuadorian Ascásubi family. Bolívar’s enemies—liberals like Francisco de Paula Santander— considered her at best a nuisance and at worst dangerous. They indicted her for conspiracy in 1830 and expelled her from Colombia in 1834. Ecuadorian Liberal President Vicente Rocafuerte forbade her to live in Ecuador. Her ally and patron Juan José Flores did not press her case strongly in Ecuador, and Manuela sought exile in Paita, Peru from 1835 until her death in 1856, in the company of other Ecuadorian exiles. For over 30 years, Manuela survived rather well on support from her father, husband, Bolívar, proceeds from her Quito inheritance from her mother’s family, the sale of Ecuadorian handicrafts in Peru, and loans from friends. She was a survivor who lived by her wits and tenacity.

Under Bolívar’s protection, the high-spirited woman often gloried in flouting convention. Bolívar acknowledged that some of her pranks were ill-considered, but he informed critics that he could not control the “loca.” Manuela’s most famous act of bravado came in 1828 when she assisted Bolívar to escape an assassination attempt and was herself beaten by the would-be assassins. Bolívar remained loyal to his “Libertadora” in spite of the problems she sometimes caused, perhaps because he was as restless and mercurial as she.

Sources on Manuela are limited enough that they do not allow Murray to get much below the surface of Sáenz’s behavior or to ascertain her true importance in various Bolivarian conspiracies. Was she an exploiter who used her relationship with her father, her husband, Bolívar, and Bolívar’s friends to advance her own personal interests? Was she engaged with the political debates of the day? She played a minor part in nurturing the networks of personalistic caudillos who competed for power in the post-independence period, but it is unclear whether she had any political principles beyond loyalty to Bolívar and his allies. Did she...