History, as it turns out, is nothing more than a series of poorly managed branding exercises. We are currently being treated to a saccharine retrospective on Francisco de Miranda, the so-called 'Precursor' of Venezuelan independence, and his English wife, Sarah Andrews. The narrative being peddled is one of 'love uniting worlds,' which is really just a polite way of saying a man with a messiah complex found a woman with enough patience and localized stability to fund his continental-scale mid-life crisis. It is a classic tale: the man dreams of grand, sweeping liberation from the comfort of a London armchair, while the woman—a shoemaker’s daughter—actually does the heavy lifting of maintaining a reality he was too busy 'liberating' himself from to notice.

Francisco de Miranda was the quintessential professional exile. Before Simon Bolivar arrived to claim the glory and eventually die in a state of terminal disillusionment, Miranda was the one wandering through the courts of Europe, trying to convince bored aristocrats that he was the key to unlocking the riches of the South. He was a man who lived in the perpetual 'almost.' He almost conquered, he almost governed, and he almost understood the people he claimed to represent. To the modern observer, he looks less like a revolutionary hero and more like a high-tier grifter with a really impressive CV. He fought in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and eventually his own, proving that he was never one to miss an opportunity to watch a social order collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy.

Then we have Sarah Andrews. The historical record, in its infinite laziness, treats her as a footnote—the 'shoemaker’s daughter' who provided the domestic anchor for the Great Man. In reality, she was the victim of a very old trick: the romanticization of the absentee revolutionary. While Miranda was busy playing 4D chess with Catherine the Great or getting himself embroiled in the messy theatrics of the French Terror, Andrews was the one managing the household in London, raising children who would barely know their father, and providing the social cover for a man whose life was a series of expensive failures. The 'love' that united them was likely the same kind of love a parasite feels for a particularly robust host. She gave him legitimacy in the eyes of the British establishment, and in return, he gave her the 'honor' of being associated with a man whose primary legacy was being betrayed by his own protégés.

Let’s look at the geopolitical comedy of the era. The British weren't supporting Miranda because they believed in the 'liberty' of the Venezuelan people. The British Empire wouldn’t know liberty if it came wrapped in a tea leaf. They supported him because he was a convenient weapon to use against the Spanish Crown. It was the original 'regime change' playbook: find a charismatic local, give him a bit of money and a few ships, and hope he creates enough chaos to open up new markets for your textiles. Miranda was a pawn who thought he was a king, funded by a woman who was probably just looking for a bit of excitement and ended up with a lifetime of political baggage.

When Miranda finally returned to Venezuela to actually do the thing he had been talking about for decades, the result was a predictable catastrophe. The First Republic of Venezuela lasted about as long as a modern celebrity marriage. It was a chaotic mess of internal squabbling, racial tension, and a devastating earthquake that the local clergy—always eager to maintain the status quo—claimed was divine punishment for defying the Spanish King. Miranda, the great intellectual, the man of the Enlightenment, was eventually handed over to the Spanish by none other than Simon Bolivar himself. There is no honor among thieves, and there is certainly no loyalty among revolutionaries. Bolivar, sensing the wind was changing, traded his mentor for a passport. It is the perfect distillation of political reality: today’s 'Precursor' is tomorrow’s sacrificial lamb.

Miranda died in a Spanish dungeon, a fitting end for a man who spent his life trying to escape the constraints of reality. Meanwhile, back in London, Sarah Andrews was left to pick up the pieces of a life spent in service to a ghost. We are told to find this story inspiring. We are told that their union represents a bridge between cultures. In reality, it represents the bottomless capacity of humans to sacrifice their actual lives for the sake of abstract ideals that never deliver on their promises. Venezuela did eventually get its independence, and look how that turned out. It traded a distant king for a succession of local caudillos, each more inept and rapacious than the last, culminating in the modern socialist-adjacent fever dream that has half the population looking for the exit.

This historical 'love story' is just another layer of paint on a crumbling wall. We celebrate the 'Precursor' because it’s easier than acknowledging that the entire project of 'liberation' was a vanity project for the 19th-century elite. Miranda and Andrews weren't building a new world; they were providing the prototype for the modern political couple—one person doing the talking, and the other person paying the bills. It’s not romantic; it’s a tragedy of errors, performed by people who were too arrogant to realize that the only thing worse than being ruled by a king is being 'saved' by a revolutionary.