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That she had an estranged husband she had been more or less sold to was
permitted by her to wreck her life obliquely.
She was too selfless to be real in all her very able plotting.
For this marriage problem she could have engineered any number of
actions.
She had the solid friendship of all his trusted advisers, even his old
tutor. Yet she arranged nothing for herself.
She was utterly devoted, completely brilliant and utterly incapable of
really bringing off an action of any final kind.
She violated the power formula in not realizing that she had power.
Manuela was up against a hard man to handle. But she did not know enough
to make her own court effective. She organized one. She did not know what
to do with it.
Her most fatal mistake was in not bringing down Santander, Bolivar's
chief enemy. That cost her everything she had before the end and after
Bolivar died. She knew for years Santander had to be killed. She said it or
wrote it every few days. Yet never did she promise some young officer a
nice night or a handful of gold to do it in a day when duelling was in
fashion. It's like standing around discussing how the plainly visible wolf
in the garden that's eating the chickens must be shot, even holding a gun,
and never even lifting it while all one's chickens vanish for years.
In a land overridden with priests she never got herself a tame priest to
bring about her ends.
She was a fantastic intelligence officer. But she fed her data to a man
who could not act to protect himself or friends, who could only fight
armies dramatically.
She did not see this and also quietly take on the portfolio of secret
police chief. Her mistake was waiting to be asked-to be asked to come to
him, to act. She voluntarily was his best political intelligence agent.
Therefore she should have also assumed further roles.
She guarded his correspondence, was intimate with his secretaries. And
yet she never collected or forged or stole any document to bring down
enemies either through representations to Bolivar or a court circle of her
own. And in an area with that low an ethic, that's fatal.
She openly pamphleteered and fought violently as in a battle against her
rabble.
She had a great deal of money at her disposal. In a land of for-sale
Indians she never used a penny to buy a quick knife or even a solid piece
of evidence.
When merely opening her lips she could have had any sequestrated
Royalist estate she went to litigation for a legitimate legacy never won
and another won but never paid.
They lived on the edge of quicksand. She never bought a plank or a rope.
Carried away by the glory of it all, devoted completely, potentially
able and a formidable enemy, she did not act.
She waited to be told to come to him even when he lay dying and exiled.
His command over her who never obeyed any other was too absolute for his
own or her survival.
Her assigned mistakes (pointed out at the time as her caprice and play
acting) were not her errors. They only made her interesting. They were far
from fatal.
She was not ruthless enough to make up for his lack of ruthlessness and
not provident enough to make up for his lack of providence.