Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle

Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle
Paula Byrne

The extraordinary true story behind the film Belle. The life of Dido Elizabeth Belle – the first mixed race aristocrat who was brought up as the adopted daughter of Lord Mansfield – the Lord Chief Justice of England. Now a Major Motion Picture.Beautiful, wealthy and sophisticated, Dido Belle appears, in her famous portrait alongside her ‘sister’ and companion Lady Elizabeth Murray, a vision of eighteenth-century aristocratic virtue. But Dido Belle was no normal eighteenth century Lady, and this was no common painting. Adopted and raised by Lord Mansfield – one of the most powerful men of the day – Dido Belle’s mixed race and illegitimacy became the controversy of English high society. Born to a captured slave mother and a captain in the Royal Navy, Dido’s evident grace and adoption by the Mansfield family to be raised as a daughter in Kenwood House challenged English notions of race at their highest rank.Meanwhile, as Lord Chief Justice of England, Mansfield presided over the case that would come to be known as the Zong affair – a crucial legal ruling that would galvanise a nascent abolitionist movement and radically alter attitudes towards the barbarism of the Atlantic Slave trade. From the elegant surroundings of Kenwood (reopening after extensive renovation in November), Dido Belle and Elizabeth, to the economics of the Caribbean and the horrific journeys of African slaves to the New World, Paula Byrne vividly depicts for the first time the diverse contexts of this controversial painting. The portrait shocked its contemporary viewers but also resonated with the public of the time – the name of Lord Mansfield was synonymous with the great civil rights question of the age. Today the picture is presented as an icon of black female history.Telling the story behind the major new film starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Tom Wilkinson and Miranda Richardson, this book is the real life of Dido Belle.

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Dedication (#uc92078e7-50c6-5d08-9597-c91c509faee4)

For my godson Dominic

Contents

Cover (#u4eba1d7f-896a-5318-b437-a98fee9477ca)

Title Page (#ulink_18ce4245-70ae-5781-8999-6c8c7acf3e48)

Dedication (#ulink_a1814ed9-1c9a-5342-af24-2033696208de)

List of Illustrations (#ulink_629758ba-8d1d-5f6b-a147-8ef79ca474c1)

1 The Girl in the Picture

2 The Captain

3 The Slave

4 The White Stuff

5 ‘Silver-Tongued Murray’

6 The Adopted Daughters

7 Black London

8 Mansfield the Moderniser

9 Enter Granville Sharp

10 The Somerset Ruling

11 The Merchant of Liverpool

12 A Riot in Bloomsbury

13 A Visitor from Boston

14 The Zong Massacre

15 Gregson v Gilbert

16 Changes at Kenwood

17 The Anti-Saccharites

18 Mrs John Davinier

Appendix: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Connection

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Paula Byrne (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

List of Illustrations (#uc92078e7-50c6-5d08-9597-c91c509faee4)

1. (#u172ef0e1-7192-5e98-9463-09e5d713135b) The double portrait (By kind permission of the Earl of Mansfield, Scone Palace)

2. (#u8754d1d9-3903-54a4-a750-b4244e35fdd7) Captain Sir John Lindsay, Dido’s father (Burrell Collection, Glasgow)

3. (#u7eebda7b-3111-50c0-848f-801d35a37efd) ‘The Abolition of the Slave Trade’, by Isaac Cruikshank (Private collection)

4. (#ub3f7e063-cc28-5476-9db1-dcb4e007f9a2) Still life with meat, kettle, cup, sugar loaf and sugar lumps, by Jean-Baptiste Oudry (Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon/Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library)

5. (#u84bd155d-d098-560e-b102-c7357c8560e8) Elevations of the north and south fronts of Kenwood House, and the interior of Lord Mansfield’s Library, by Robert and James Adam

6. (#litres_trial_promo) Lady Mansfield, Dido’s adoptive mother, by Sir Joshua Reynolds (By kind permission of the Earl of Mansfield, Scone Palace)

7. (#litres_trial_promo) Detail from ‘Four Times of the Day: Noon’, by William Hogarth (Private collection)

8. (#litres_trial_promo) William Murray, by Jean-Baptiste van Loo (Kenwood House, courtesy of English Heritage)

9. (#litres_trial_promo) Granville Sharp, by George Dance (Frontispiece to Prince Hoare’s Memoirs of Granville Sharp, 1820)

10. (#litres_trial_promo) Report of the Somerset case (In T.B. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials, vol. 20, 1816)

11. (#litres_trial_promo) Wedgwood anti-slavery pendant (Kenwood House, courtesy of English Heritage)

12. (#litres_trial_promo) The Gordon Riots, 1780 (Private collection)