Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle

13. (#litres_trial_promo) ‘Caen Wood in Middlesex, Seat of Earl of Mansfield’, engraving by James Heath, after a drawing by Richard Corbould (Private collection)

14. (#litres_trial_promo) The Zong: slaves being thrown overboard (Courtesy Everett Collection/REX)

15. (#litres_trial_promo) Mansfield as Lord Chief Justice, engraving after a portrait by Reynolds (Private collection)

16. (#litres_trial_promo) Dido Belle, amanuensis to the Lord Chief Justice (The Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, by kind permission of the Treasurer and Masters of the Bench of Lincoln’s Inn)

17. (#litres_trial_promo) ‘Anti-Saccharrites’, by James Gillray (Private collection)

18. (#litres_trial_promo) The marriage of ‘John Davinie’ and Dido Elizabeth Belle (Westminster City Archive)

19. (#litres_trial_promo) Eastwell Park (Private collection)

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1. (#u345091ca-98f4-50e9-8d0c-061177570daa) The Double Portrait

A portrait from the late eighteenth century, it depicts two beautiful young girls. The white-skinned, fair-haired one in the foreground sits on a large, green, high-backed bench, and is dressed in pink silk with intricate lace trimmings. She has a garland of pink flowers in her hair and a double strand of pearls around her neck. She is holding a book. She is reaching out to the girl behind her, taking her arm as if pulling her into the frame. She hardly needs to do so, as the eye is drawn irresistibly to this other girl, with the high cheekbones and the enigmatic dimpled smile.

The girl on the left is dressed in sumptuous white and gold satin, and wears a string of creamy large pearls around her neck. She has expensive-looking droplet pear and diamond earrings, and a white and gold bejewelled turban with an ostrich feather perching jauntily at the back. She carries a basket of fruit, and is wearing an exquisite blue and gold sheer shawl which floats in the breeze as she walks. She is in motion, bursting with vitality and energy. Her knee is bent forward beneath her dress, as if she is about to run as free as the wind. The girl in pink, by contrast, sits still.

The standing girl rests a forefinger quizzically on her cheek as she gazes confidently at the artist. She almost seems to be sharing a confidence. In the conventions of portraiture, a pointing figure may denote a mystery, an enigma, a secret withheld. That may well be the case here, given the knowing look that goes with it. But the gesture also says, ‘Look at me. Look at the colour of my skin.’ It is as if she is asking, ‘Who am I? And what am I, a black girl, doing here?’

The artist must have known that it was an unusual commission. The ‘double portrait’ has a long and distinguished tradition. Typically, the subject would be a husband and wife, a mother and child, or a pair of sisters. In its composition, this portrait conforms to the model for representing a pair of sisters. One could readily imagine the sitting girl as an older sister, studious, conventional and full of good sense. And the standing one as a younger sister, with a little bit of wildness or rebellion about her, and a great deal of passion – of ‘sensibility’, as they would have said in the eighteenth century. The rarity, however, comes from the colour of their skin. This is, as far as we know, the only portrait of its era to show a white girl and a black one together in a sisterly pose.

London is in the background. The viewer can readily make out the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Behind the girls is a garden of mature trees that leads down to a lake with a bridge. The season would appear to be high summer. This is clearly the estate of a wealthy man, of someone who would be proud to show off his daughters. A double portrait of this kind was often painted to commemorate a special occasion – a birthday, a coming of age perhaps, or a party or event held on the estate in the summer months when the gardens were at their very best. But surely if a wealthy man in eighteenth-century England really did have one daughter who was white and another who was black, he would have been ashamed of the fact? There would have been the stain not only of illegitimacy but, even more shockingly for the time, of inter-racial sex. You would have thought that the black girl would be concealed below stairs, not celebrated in a large portrait. To a contemporary viewer, the image would have been startling: a black girl, expensively dressed, and on an almost equal footing with her white companion.

Almost equal, because the white girl occupies the foreground of the painting. But the viewer is left with little doubt that it is the black girl who has captured the imagination of the artist. She is dressed in an exotic style, bearing colours that give the painter the opportunity to show off the full range of his palette. The dress, though as expensive and beautiful as the white girl’s, signals her difference. The sheer shawl looks Indian, as do the turban and feather. Intriguingly, a tartan or plaid shawl is tied around her waist. Could she have Scottish heritage?

The white girl is made to look demure – the wreath of rosebuds in her hair suggests virginity – while her black companion sports one of the most fashionable accessories of the day: an ostrich feather, as popularised by the leading fashion icon of the era, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Georgiana created her first great stir in 1775, when the British Ambassador in Paris, Lord Stormont, presented her with a four-foot-long ostrich feather, which she contrived to incorporate within a spectacular hairdo. From then on, every fashionable lady wanted an ostrich feather – to the extent that the poor bird was hunted almost to extinction in North Africa. Lord Stormont was the father of the white girl in the picture.

The language of painting in the eighteenth century was heavily symbolic. The basket of exotic produce points to the black girl’s foreign background, with the ripe fruits – grapes and figs and peaches – suggesting her lusciousness. At a literal level, she is carrying fruit that she has picked in the orangery or the hothouse for the dinner table of the big house. But at a metaphoric level she is herself being compared to a sweet foreign fruit flourishing on English soil (a wealthy man with an orangery or glasshouse could grow his own pomegranates and pineapples, but even a middle-ranking householder who was prepared to pay could go to Covent Garden market and buy exotic produce that had been cultivated in the Tarring Fig Gardens of Sussex). The grapes are a mix of black and white, happily entwined in what could be an allusion to some close bond between the girls. Though so physically different, could they share some of the same blood?

We will never know whether the black girl was happy to be dressed this way and to pose as she does. Nor will we know what inspired her pose. The idea seems to be that she is hurrying to the house with the basket of fresh fruit. As she brushes against the green bench on which the white girl sits reading, the latter reaches out a hand and takes her arm. Is she stopping her so as to give an instruction, or to have a sisterly chat? Was it the girls’ idea, or the painter’s, or the commissioner’s, to represent their relationship by means of this encounter? Wherever the conception came from, it is a brilliant evocation of an ambiguous relationship. On the one hand, the white girl is a member of the leisured classes (she sits, she reads, she does not have to work), while the black girl is a servant (she must pick the fruit, take it into the house and then hurry on to her next job). On the other hand, the two girls are companions, at ease in each other’s company and equal in their finery. It seems unlikely that an ordinary servant girl, of whatever skin colour, would wear such clothes when picking fruit.

The dark-skinned girl’s eyes are shiny and expressive. Whatever she was really feeling, the painter has made her look happy. There is a playfulness to her expression that the white girl lacks. Her hair is sleek, not curly, tamed beneath the turban. The silk of her dress clings to her lower body as she moves. The trace of her thigh seen under the fabric is highly erotic in an age when even the outline of women’s legs was rarely seen in public (except on the stage, when actresses were crossed-dressed in ‘breeches’ parts). If you look closely, you can see that the girl’s left hand rests between her thighs in a provocative gesture, offering a whiff of Georgian England’s stereotyping of black women as sexual creatures.

By contrast, the white girl’s stiff hoops and petticoats conceal her body. The tight bodice imprisons her. The extra layer of gauze over her full skirt gives a strange, cage-like effect. Her open book suggests that she is fond of reading. It might be a commonplace book with choice extracts pasted into it, or a conduct book, a work of religious piety or a collection of sermons, though one would like to imagine that it is a volume of poetry or a play, or even an example of that very daring and new genre of literature, the novel. The eighteenth century was the first great age of female reading. Young women devoured Samuel Richardson’s best-seller Pamela, with its daring depiction of a young servant girl who resists her master’s sexual advances and eventually becomes his wife. Not to mention his tragedy of Clarissa, who is raped by her aristocratic lover and dies. Or Fanny Burney’s Cecilia, a troubled novel about a wealthy young girl who is badly exploited by her male guardians and temporarily goes mad. The latter part of the eighteenth century witnessed a flourishing of heroine-centred novels that explored female consciousness and identity. Questions of marriage and money, propriety and property, were constant themes. Some of the fictional heroines were low-born, lacking in wealth and status and connections; but all were white. It would take a little while longer for a pioneering novelist to depict a mixed-heritage girl, a ‘mulatto’: that is what Jane Austen did during the Regency years in her final, unfinished novel, Sanditon.

The white girl’s open book is a hint of her education and gentility. Few women in the eighteenth century went to school, but well-born girls were educated at home. A good library was an essential room in a gentleman’s country house: the book perhaps also serves to flatter the commissioner of the painting by implying that he has a particularly well-stocked collection.

The sitting girl holds her book in one hand, but our attention is drawn more to the other hand, the one that is stretched out: a white hand gripping the black arm of her companion. In the age of slavery-abolitionist fervour, the motto ‘Am I not a sister and a friend’ was often emblazoned on ladies’ pincushions and hair ornaments. Some modern spectators might feel that the black girl’s ‘ethnic’ costume, her basket of fruit and her sexually charged demeanour are degrading. But the hand gesture suggests affection and equality between the girls. For all the ambiguity of the image, the standing girl is ultimately represented as sister, cousin or friend, not as a servant, slave or inferior being. She is drawn into the picture as a cherished member of the family.

Portraits tell stories, and this one tells a story of love and sisterhood, unity between black and white, illegitimacy and gentility, vitality and virtue. A story, furthermore, that brings us to the very heart of a larger historical story: the abolition of the slave trade.

In the course of the last two and a bit centuries, this double portrait has moved between Kenwood House on the northern boundary of Hampstead Heath in London, where it was painted, and Scone Palace just outside Perth in Scotland. Kenwood House was, and Scone Palace is, the seat of the Earls of Mansfield. The portrait was commissioned some time in the late 1770s or early 1780s by William Murray, the first Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice and the most admired judge in eighteenth-century Britain. His name was by this time irrevocably linked with the question of slavery and abolition, as a result of his judgement in a famous case of 1772.

But these are not Lord Mansfield’s daughters. He and his wife Elizabeth (née Finch) were childless. The girl in the foreground of the picture is Lady Elizabeth Murray, his great-niece, who was brought up at Kenwood following the death of her own mother when she was a young child. For much of the twentieth century, the Mansfield descendants believed that the other girl was some kind of household servant. In an inventory of Kenwood taken in 1904, the portrait was described as ‘Lady Elizabeth Finch-Hatton with a Negress Attendant’, and attributed to the great society artist Johann Zoffany.1 (#litres_trial_promo) There was a tradition of portraits of masters or mistresses with a servant or slave in the background. It was assumed that this was a variation on the theme, though with unusual prominence given to the servant. The family did not stop to consider the irony of Lord Mansfield, forever seen as a key figure in the abolition of slavery, commissioning a portrait that might seem to imply that he kept a slave himself. The painting remained little-known.

The old portrait plate at the bottom of the frame is still there today. It records the name of only the white girl – ‘The Lady Elizabeth Finch Hatton’. The black girl remains nameless, a blank.

It was only in the 1980s that she was identified. Her name was Dido Elizabeth Belle, and this book tells her story. She was a blood relative of the white girl in pink and the Mansfield family. The outline of Dido’s life has been pieced together, but details in the surviving archives are sparse. For a fuller picture of her life, we need to set her story in the wider context of slavery and abolition. The only way of glimpsing her life is through the lives of others.

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2. (#ulink_c068a21a-b623-57dc-b744-dfb4868fb438) Captain Sir John Lindsay, Dido’s father

On 1 June 1760, HMS Trent was docked in Portsmouth harbour. Captain John Lindsay, commanding officer, oversaw her substantial refitting.1 (#litres_trial_promo) Over the course of the following weeks provisions were brought aboard, the ship’s pine was varnished and there were some short trips into the English Channel to test the new rigging. At the end of the month, the Trent moved out to Spithead. Lindsay had to deal with a few men for drunkenness and insubordination. Extra sails and small arms were taken on board. An unknown sail was spotted off Portland Bill, and the Trent gave chase. She proved herself fully seaworthy. Preparations were finalised for a long voyage. In August she set sail for Porto Santo, then Madeira, then Tenerife. By the end of the month she was at anchor off Senegal, on the west coast of Africa.

Then to Cape Verde, where Lindsay moored in Gorse Road while the crew dried the sails and aired the bread. Soon they would be off the Gambia, and then out into open water, heading across the Atlantic in squally weather. On 18 October they approached the Caribbean island of Montserrat, and a pilot from a Bristol-based privateer came on board. Five days later the Trent engaged with a schooner in French colours and boarded her, only to find the crew gone, but the ship laden with sugar and coffee. They sent the prize to St Kitts. Captain Lindsay and his crew had undergone their initiation on the Caribbean front in the worldwide war between the great colonial powers of Europe.

John Lindsay was born in the year 1737, in the bracing climate of the Easter Ross district of the Scottish Highlands. He was the younger son of a baronet, Sir Alexander Lindsay, who had made a very good marriage to Emilia, daughter of the fifth Viscount Stormont. Emilia was the sister of William Murray, who would later become the first Earl of Mansfield. The choices for the younger sons of the gentry were fairly limited: the Church, the armed forces or a life of idleness. Lindsay went into the navy, which carried more opportunity for adventure than his other options. It was a good decision. He quickly proved himself a fine sailor and a leader of men.

Before the age of twenty he was made a lieutenant and put in command of the fireship Pluto. This was a hazardous occupation: fireships were converted merchantmen, filled with flammable materials and explosives, intended to be sent into enemy lines with the purpose of setting the enemy’s wooden vessels on fire. Sister vessels of the Pluto included the aptly named Blast, Blaze, Etna and Vesuvius. The danger of accidental combustion was great enough in peacetime, but Lindsay got his first command in the midst of the Seven Years War, arguably the first global war, during which the European powers – most notably Britain and France – played out their rivalries in their colonial and trade empires. Lindsay’s first expedition aboard the Pluto was as part of a fleet sent to capture the French Atlantic naval port of Rochefort. The mission was not a success, but Lindsay’s contribution earned him a new posting just a few weeks later. Now he had command of the twenty-eight-gun frigate Trent, recently constructed out of pine, which was quicker to build with but less durable than the traditional English oak. He served on the Trent for the rest of the war, first in home waters and then from the West Indian station.

Reports of his exploits were soon reaching the Admiralty. In February 1759 the Trent joined the Vestal in giving chase to an enemy ship at the western end of the English Channel. This was a French frigate, La Bellone, en route to Martinique. They engaged in a four-hour battle at close quarters. La Bellone was duly captured, taken into service and renamed the Repulse.2 (#litres_trial_promo) After various further exploits, the Trent was taken back into dock. A report was filed in the Admiralty: ‘The Portsmouth Officers inform us the Trent is touched with the worm but she does not make water and can be repaired and used for about 9 or 10 months on Channel Service. Have approved the Officers’ proposal but if she is to go on foreign service she will have to be resheathed.’ The need for comprehensive repairs was the reason the Trent did not sail for the West Indies until the late summer of 1760.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

The refit was clearly an outstanding success. The Trent proved herself as fast and effective as any frigate in the fleet. Captain Lindsay’s daily log reveals a succession of chases and prizes. On 1 November, a sloop en route from St Eustatia to Martinique; a few days later a Dutch schooner; and on Thursday, 20 November, a sail to the south which proved to be ‘a Spanish sloop from Teneriff to St Domingo with Settlers’.

Just before Christmas, the Trent joined the Boreas in attacking a sloop that was at anchor under the mangroves in Cumberland Harbour, St Iago Island. She was a French privateer, the Vanquier. Lindsay and the captain of the Boreas sent in a small boat with marines who boarded her after sharp resistance. The French captives were sent on shore a week later at Grand Cayman, where they were exchanged for English prisoners.

All through the following year, Lindsay continued his patrols, sailing hundreds of miles around the Caribbean basin. One day he gave chase to a Spanish man-of-war bound from St Domingo to Havana, the next he attacked Le Bien Aimé, a French merchant frigate from Martinique with twenty-two guns, eighty-four men, and a heavy load of sugar and coffee. He took her with only one man killed and five wounded, to the enemy’s twenty killed or wounded.4 (#litres_trial_promo) The French prisoners were transferred to HMS Cambridge.

There were occasional weeks of respite, when the Trent would be moored off Port Royal, Jamaica, for cleaning, caulking, rerigging, the removal of ballast, the supply of fresh water and provisions. Time spent at anchor was troublesome from the point of view of discipline. On one occasion at Port Royal a midshipman was punished for embezzlement, receiving nine lashes alongside every ship in the harbour, with a halter around his neck. Another time, Lindsay had to punish some men for insubordination, making them run the gauntlet through the ship. Then they would be off again: in April 1761 they took a Spanish sloop from Port au Prince laden with sugar; in August a Dutch schooner; in September La Donna de la Providence, bound for France – her crew were dispatched to a plantation, where they would be held until the opportunity arose for an exchange of prisoners.

Captain Lindsay’s exploits were celebrated in the press back home in England. In January 1762 the London Chronicle printed a front-page report from Kingston in Jamaica, dated 31 October 1761 (news travelled slowly in the days before the invention of the telegraph). It announced that:

Thursday arrived from a cruise, his Majesty’s ship Trent, John Lindsay, Esq; Commander, and brought in two prizes, said to be a Dutch schooner and sloop, both from Cape Francois, which he took in the Bite of Leogan, and were part of a fleet of about fifteen sail, who had been assisting our enemies at the Cape; they are both richly laden with indigo, etc. etc. It is reported, the poltroon commanders of these vessels, had the impudence to give out they would take the Trent; though when within sight of their enemy, they thought proper to fly away with all speed, and leave their friends a sacrifice for their presumption.5 (#litres_trial_promo)

Clearly, Captain Lindsay was a man of courage and single-mindedness, if not reckless impulsiveness. The prizes were mounting up: every captured ship meant a bounty for the crew, and especially for the captain.

His greatest triumph came at the siege of the castle of Morro, which stood guard over Havana Bay on the key strategic island of Cuba, held by the Spanish. Captain Goostrey of the Cambridge was shot dead in action on 1 July 1762, and Lindsay was sent to fill his place, where he ‘gave many strong proofs of his valour’.6 (#litres_trial_promo) A painting by the naval artist Richard Paton, now in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, shows the bombardment of the castle. It gives a vivid sense of the smoke of battle, the ease with which a wooden warship might burst into flames, and the nerves of steel demanded of the captains. The Cambridge is shown flying a red ensign in the mizzen shrouds, as a signal that her captain is dead. In the foreground is a little rowing boat in which Lindsay is being taken from the Trent to the Cambridge, where he will assume command.

At the end of July a breach was made with mines in the wall of the castle, and this enabled the British to take it by storm. The fall of Havana was now inevitable: it occurred on 11 August. In addition to stores and booty up to the value of £3 million, nine Spanish ships of the line were captured, and two on the stocks were burned. Possession would, however, be short-lived: under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the war the following year, Havana was returned to the Spanish.

After the taking of Havana, the Trent participated in the mopping-up operation. The sick and wounded were transported for treatment, newly arriving Spanish ships – including some slave transporters – were headed off. Then in July 1763 came the order to return home. The Trent reached Spithead on 12 August, and ten days later she was moored at Long Reach. Lindsay set about stripping the ship and getting his officers ashore. After a final cleaning, he paid off the men and closed his log on Friday, 9 September. The war was over; the Trent had performed her service. She was decommissioned and scrapped, and Captain Lindsay was knighted for his gallantry.

Despite the ending of the war, the colonies still needed to be patrolled, so before long Lindsay was back in the West Indies, in command of another ship. One senses that he couldn’t keep away. The heat and the excitement were a far cry from life in the chilly and dull Scottish Highlands. In 1768 he married a Scottish girl called Mary Milner, daughter of an MP. They had no children, although there is evidence that Lindsay sired one or possibly two illegitimate children in Scotland. His portrait was painted at around the time of his marriage by the leading Scottish society artist Allan Ramsay. He is seen in naval dress uniform, and looks not only handsome and distinguished, but somehow kind. He was soon off abroad again, this time to the East Indies.

One entry stands out in Captain Lindsay’s log of his earlier mission to the West Indies. Amidst the chases, the boardings and the prizes, the time at anchor and the set-piece drama of the siege, there is a poignant moment of rescue. It is Saturday, 7 February 1761, and the Trent is off Curaçao, one of the southernmost Caribbean islands: ‘saw a small boat to the East. Came up with her, found in her 2 English Negroes that Run away from Martinique. One of them dy’d immediately being Starv’d.’ The surviving negro, who went by the name of Peter King, was taken aboard and well looked after. Lindsay was clearly a man of compassion as well as purpose.

At some point in his West Indian naval adventures Lindsay met a slave woman, who was almost certainly called Maria. She would be Dido’s mother. The story told in England many years later, of which we have only a second-hand account, was that he captured a Spanish ship and took a fancy to one of the female slaves on board. We have seen from the logbook that the Trent did run down several Spanish ships. Perhaps the woman was a slave in service to a Spaniard on board that sloop heading to St Domingo with settlers, or the one coming from Port au Prince laden with sugar for Europe. We cannot, however, be certain that she was in fact on a Spanish ship, and not on one of the Dutch or French ones that Lindsay also captured. The muster rolls of the Trent include the names of many prisoners, who were held on board and victualled at two-thirds the allowance of the crew, before being transferred to other ships or put ashore. Among them were ‘Thomas a negro’, ‘James a negro’, ‘Marique’, ‘Domingeta’, ‘Sansauvie’, ‘Lanset’, ‘Greto’, ‘Adam’, and many more unnamed negroes. Tantalisingly, none of them is readily identifiable as the ‘Maria’ whom Lindsay kept as his mistress, although the prisoners from a Spanish sloop taken on 22 April 1761 did include one ‘Quainda Mairia’.

Then again, stories of this kind are often garbled in the detail, or embellished for dramatic effect in the retelling. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the woman was actually a prize taken on dry land. Could it have been in the aftermath of the capture of Havana? In February 1763 the Trent discharged many prisoners who had been captured in Havana onto a place called Belle Island. Perhaps Maria was retained from the group and Dido conceived at this time, the association inspiring the name Belle.

But this is speculation. All we know for sure is that the encounter between Captain Lindsay and Maria was the beginning of Dido’s story. There is evidence that Dido was about five years old late in the year 1766. This would suggest a date of birth before the siege of the castle of Morro and the surrender of Havana, and strongly suggests that Dido was conceived in the captain’s cabin aboard the Trent.

Maria appears to have remained on board the Trent until the summer of 1763, when the vessel returned to England and was decommissioned.7 (#litres_trial_promo) Lord Mansfield was later reported as saying that the negro woman was with child when the ship returned home, and that Dido was born in England, but a later Murray–Mansfield family tradition has it that she was born at sea. Unlikely as it may now seem, it was not uncommon for wives, mistresses and even babies to be present on Royal Navy warships in the eighteenth century.