Belle

by Paula Byrne

  Robert Adam added a neoclassical library, which would also serve as a receiving room, to balance the orangery that was already attached to one side of the house. It would come to be regarded as one of his most splendid interiors. In a letter to Mansfield the Duke of Newcastle said that he longed to see ‘your improvements and particularly your great room, which I hear is a very fine and agreeable one’. Kenwood’s walls were hung with beautiful and expensive paper, depicting Indian and Chinese figures, while huge mirrors and Venetian paintings lined the walls.24 It was a house built to impress.

  Mansfield purchased neighbouring land, increasing the house’s already extensive grounds. He replaced the formal gardens with a more ‘landscaped’ look, in accordance with the latest fashionable taste. Some of the fishponds were merged to become Wood Pond and the grandly named Thousand Pound Pond, presumably to reflect its exorbitant cost. A mock stone bridge made of wood was also erected. The estate had its own farm and dairy, and an avenue that would be described by the poet Coleridge as ‘a grand Cathedral Aisle of giant Lime Trees’.25

  Mansfield was a great tree-planter, especially favouring beech and oak. He was also fond of exotic plants, which he grew in the orangery. In 1785 he erected a new hothouse, sixty feet long, in which peaches and grapes were grown – prize specimens of those very fruits carried by Dido in the painting that was by then hanging in the big house.26 The gardener, Mr French, supplied Mansfield with a daily ‘nosegay of the finest oder and richest flowers which he took with him to the bench’.27 This presumably helped him overcome the stench of London, which was another reason for having a second, more rural, home. Despite Kenwood’s convenient proximity to Westminster Hall, it was a tranquil and restful haven. ‘The whole scene,’ wrote Robert Adam, ‘is amazingly gay, magnificent, beautiful and picturesque.’28

  Lady Mansfield wrote to her nephew in May 1757: ‘Kenwood is now in great beauty. Your uncle is passionately fond of it. We go thither every Saturday and return on Mondays but I live in hopes we shall soon go hither to fix for the summer.’29 The one thing that the house lacked was children.

  That was soon to change.

  6

  The Adopted Daughters

  Lady Mansfield, Dido’s adoptive mother, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1776

  To explain how it was that Dido came to grow up amid the beauties of Kenwood instead of on a slave plantation in the West Indies, we must return to the circumstances of her birth. What options were available to Captain Lindsay when he discovered that Maria was pregnant with his child?

  Though colonial law stated that inter-racial liaisons were illegal, the many mixed-raced children were testament to its inefficacy. We know little of the relationship between Captain Lindsay and Dido’s mother, but his care and public recognition of their mixed-race baby daughter suggests that he felt at least some sort of emotional connection to his lover. So how unusual was it for a white master to protect his mixed-race child, to recognise that beneath the different skin colour was the same blood?

  House or domestic slaves in plantation great houses were often lighter-skinned, or mixed-race, known as ‘mulattoes’. They were considered to be superior to field slaves, and were often given better treatment. They worked as housekeepers, cleaners, cooks, seamstresses, nursemaids, often as wet-nurses to white children. They could be given presents and treats, including cast-off clothes and jewellery. Often their lives were closely entwined with those of their white masters.

  Wherever there are males and females living and working in close quarters, there will be sexual relations; particularly so when women are considered as part of a man’s property. Some female house slaves slept willingly with their masters; others refused, and were raped and flogged for doing so.

  Thomas Thistlewood’s journals record instances of rape, including the gang rape of a female domestic slave. He also records Creole (mixed-race) women offering themselves in return for privileges and presents. There was sometimes the hope that a mulatto child would raise their status. A pregnancy could even be a step towards manumission, as planters often wanted to set their own children free. Some house slaves were the progeny of white sugar planters and overseers. It was often glaringly obvious that a light-skinned slave serving at dinner was waiting on his or her own half-siblings, such was their resemblance to their father. Some white mistresses turned a blind eye to their husband’s black children. Others beat the children as an outlet for their own frustration and rage. Some masters gave the impression of feeling a stronger attachment to their mulatto children than to their legitimate progeny.

  Thomas Thistlewood and his slave ‘wife’ Phibbah had a son called ‘Mulatto John’, who was adored and spoilt by his parents. He was manumitted at the age of two, was educated and entered into an apprenticeship as a young man. Thistlewood’s nephew John was propositioned by a slave called Lettice, who wanted to have a ‘child for a master’.1 He agreed to meet her in the sugar distillery, where he was supervising the labour of the slaves. A Barbadian planter called Jacob Hinds left property to his offspring by three of his black slaves, saying in his will: ‘I would call them my children but that would not be legal as I never was married!’2

  Lighter-skinned slave women sometimes rejected black men as sexual partners so that they could secure a white man who might raise their status. A Jamaican planter noted that ‘the brown females … seldom marry men of their own colour, but lay themselves out to captivate some white person, who takes them as mistresses, under the appellation of housekeepers.’ This was known as ‘nutmegging’.3

  Mulatto women could exercise a degree of power and control over black slaves, whom they regarded as inferior. Mary Prince described in her History the ill-treatment she received at the hands of a mulatto slave who was put into a position of responsibility: ‘I thought it very hard for a coloured woman to have rule over me because I was a slave and she was free … the mulatto woman was rejoiced to have power to keep me down.’4

  White masters in the sugar islands developed a bizarre system of classification to define the ‘new race’ they had created. A ‘mulatto’ was the offspring of a white and black pairing; a ‘sambo’ was the offspring of a mulatto and a black; and a ‘quadroon’ was the offspring of a mulatto and a white.5 In Jamaica, the birth register made a careful note of each category of mixed-heritage child.

  If Captain Lindsay had left Maria in the West Indies, perhaps setting her up with a domestic position on one of the big plantations, Dido would not have looked anything out of the ordinary. She would have been just another of the many mulatto girls, assumed to be the offspring of a master and a slave. Clearly of great physical beauty, she could well have grown up to become the mistress of a plantation owner. Far from the prying eyes of the mother country, of English moral outrage, the sugar barons were making their own rules. In England, as we will see, it was quite a different matter to be a mixed-race child.

  We simply don’t know whether Dido Belle was conceived by force, by mutual consensual passion, or as a ‘duty’ that might bring material benefits to her powerless mother. The only thing we can know for sure is that Captain Lindsay took a bold and unconventional step in arranging for his small daughter to be brought up in England, entrusted to a family member to be raised as a young lady. Not only that, but the man she was entrusted to was by this time one of the most powerful and famous in the land: Lindsay’s uncle, Lord Chief Justice the Earl of Mansfield, master of his domain at Kenwood.

  According to the only report that survives, ‘Sir John Lindsay, having taken her mother prisoner in a Spanish vessel, brought her to England, where she was delivered of this girl, of which she was then with child.’6 The lack of detail is tantalising. How accurate is this story? Was Maria pregnant on arrival in England, or was Dido actually born at sea or in the West Indies? Where did Lindsay lodge his pregnant black mistress when she first disembarked onto British soil – and their baby, if she was born by this time? How did he broach with Lord and Lady Mansfield the prospect of their taking a mulat
to child into their household? How old was Dido when she was brought to Kenwood? What happened to Maria after that? How long did Lindsay keep her? What happened to her after he married? Did she die in childbirth? Or become a servant somewhere in England? Or return to the West Indies? And what would have been the reaction of innkeepers, lodging-house mistresses, servants, neighbours, people in the street, to the sight of the handsome naval captain making arrangements for his pregnant black slave? Or to a black woman with a young baby? Did a servant or junior officer work on his behalf? Was a midwife present to assist with the delivery of the child?

  We do not have answers to any of these questions, though we can get a glimpse of popular attitudes, and perhaps even fantasies, by looking to the London stage, the place where the moral and social questions of the day were played out before a vociferous, hungry public. One of the most famous and successful dramas in late-eighteenth-century England was Samuel Arnold and George Colman’s comic opera Inkle and Yarico (1787). Inkle is an English slave trader who is shipwrecked in America and rescued by a beautiful black slave, Yarico. She is as dark and as elegant as a ‘Wedgwood teapot’. They fall in love, but as soon as he arrives in Barbados, Inkle betrays Yarico and tries to sell her into slavery. It is Inkle who is presented as the barbarian, and condemned for his callous inhumanity. In the end, though, he is reunited with Yarico, who forgives his treachery and fickleness. ‘It’s amazing how constant a young man is in a ship!’ remarks one character, who knows all too well that sailors cast aside their black mistresses when they touch land.

  Captain Lindsay may or may not have abandoned Maria, but he didn’t abandon his daughter.

  The only blemish on the happy marriage of Lord and Lady Mansfield was their inability to have children. Given that Elizabeth Finch was thirty-four – at the time, this would have been considered well past the ideal marriageable age – when she married William Murray, their childlessness could not have been entirely a surprise. We do not know whether Elizabeth ever miscarried, or whether there was simply a failure to conceive.

  The great sculptor John Michael Rysbrack made a bust of Lady Mansfield in 1745. The cold marble gives an air of severity to her demeanour, which is at odds with the lively sense of humour and the great warmth of heart revealed in her surviving letters. But one cannot help feeling that Rysbrack has captured a certain sadness in her. When she sat for Rysbrack she had been married for seven years, and she was still childless. By the time Lord Mansfield’s nephew Captain Lindsay had his daughter, Lady Mansfield was in her mid-fifties. She was, perhaps, looking for a surrogate grandchild to stand in for the child she never had. In the event, she and her husband received two girls – though we do not know which of them arrived first.

  In eighteenth-century England the question of inheritance was all-consuming among those with titles and land to their name. Lord Mansfield was not the kind of man to contrive to get rid of his wife and find a younger woman to give him an heir. Once it was apparent that he would never have a child of his own, he settled his estate on his nephew David Murray, who upon the death of Mansfield’s eldest brother in 1748 became Viscount Stormont and Lord Scone. David, born in 1727, was extremely close to Lord and Lady Mansfield, and they treated him as a son. Like his uncle he attended Westminster and Oxford, after which he travelled abroad. A few letters survive from Lady Mansfield to her nephew, and they suggest a warm and close relationship. When her husband was made a peer in 1756 she wrote to her nephew, with a nice mixture of pleasure and humility: ‘Though I’m now at the fagg end of the Peerage, and by being so, have lost the Pas [manuscript unclear] of many, No one can rejoice more than I do that your Uncle Amidst all the confusions etc is now gott safely into Port or rather If you please into the Haven where I have long Earnestly wish’d him to be.’7

  David was generous, and liked spending money. In 1757 his aunt wrote to him teasingly, chiding him for his profligacy: ‘Money certainly burns in your Pocket to lay it so out as you have lately done in purchasing Dresden China for me were you within reach of hearing (which by the way I am very very sorry you are not) you would not fail having a good scold, but as that unfortunately is not now the case I return you many thanks for that which you must allow me to call an Unnecessary token of remembrance, and which I never shall or can want to put me in mind of l’aimable Mi Lord.’8

  Lord Stormont’s brilliant career can be credited to the influence of his uncle. He recognised that, with his Scottish background and the Jacobite associations of the family, he was unlikely, as he put it, to ‘make my way at home’.9 Accordingly, he prepared himself for a career in diplomacy, assiduously writing a manuscript history of the development of the European state system since the treaty that in 1648 had brought the Thirty Years War to an end. He was duly rewarded, thanks to Mansfield’s influence, with the position of Envoy-Extraordinary to Saxony-Poland, where he was based in Dresden and subsequently in Warsaw. He was then appointed Ambassador to the Habsburg capital of Vienna, a position he held from 1763 to 1772.

  In Warsaw in 1759 Lord Stormont married a beautiful young widow, Henrietta Frederica de Berargaard, daughter of a senior Saxon diplomat, Graf Heinrich von Bünau. This was a very unusual match, undoubtedly the result of a grand romantic passion rather than a piece of political or financial manoeuvring. The following year Lady Stormont gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth (the favoured Murray family female name). Four years later they had another daughter, named Henrietta after her mother, who died in infancy. In 1766 Lady Stormont herself died, aged just twenty-nine, leaving her devoted husband bereft – indeed, he seems to have suffered some sort of nervous breakdown. Still standing in the chapel at Scone Palace today is a neoclassical monument erected in memory of Henrietta. Its Latin inscription describes her virtues, and unabashedly proclaims Lord Stormont’s misery at her death.

  Elizabeth inherited her mother’s fair complexion and beauty, and she must have been a constant reminder to David of the loss of his beloved. She was just six years old at the time of her mother’s death, and it was impossible for her father to care for her while engaged in high diplomatic affairs in Vienna. The half-German girl was accordingly brought to Kenwood to be cared for by her great-uncle and great-aunt.

  Lord Stormont, benefiting once more from Mansfield’s powerful influence, went on to win the plum job in the diplomatic service, that of Ambassador to France. He held this position from 1772 until 1778, becoming a confidant of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. He also remarried. No doubt feeling the absence of a son and heir, his choice fell on the teenage daughter of a fellow Scottish diplomat. The Honourable Louisa Cathcart was thirty years his junior, and she duly provided him with five children, including four boys. When Lord Stormont returned to Britain from France in 1778 he became an active member of the House of Lords, and Lord Justice General for Scotland. The family made their homes in London and at Scone Palace in Perth. Elizabeth did not join her father and her half-siblings, but remained at Kenwood, in the company of Dido.

  It is possible that Dido was brought into the Mansfields’ home as a companion for Lady Elizabeth Murray. Or perhaps she was the first little girl to fill the place of the much-longed-for child in the Lord Chief Justice’s household. The two girls were near-contemporaries, but Elizabeth’s mother only died when she was six. That would place her arrival at the Mansfields’ home some time in 1766, when Dido would have been four or five. Lindsay’s obituary in the London Chronicle just over twenty years later says that Dido was raised by the Mansfields ‘almost from her infancy’.10 It is hard to know how literally to take that ‘almost’. There is, furthermore, the intriguing evidence of a baptismal record.

  St George’s, Bloomsbury, was the last of the exquisitely proportioned London churches to have been designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, the former assistant of Sir Christopher Wren and master of Georgian neoclassical architecture. Consecrated in 1730, it stands between Little Russell Street and Hart Street, a stone’s throw from Bloomsbury Square. This was Lord and Lady Mansfield’s pari
sh church when they were at their house in town. In the church’s baptismal register for November 1766, signed by the rector, Charles Tarrant, Doctor of Divinity, there is a curious entry. All the other entries on the page record the parents as a married couple and the child’s date of birth as being close to that of the baptism. But between Bridgett, daughter of James and Ann Hills, and James, son of James and Lucy Sutton, we find ‘20[th] Dido Elizabeth D[aughte]r of Bell and Maria his Wife Aged 5 y[ears]’.11 It stretches the bounds of credibility to suppose that this could refer to any child other than Dido. ‘Dido’ was a highly unusual name in England, and she was known in later life as ‘Dido Elizabeth Belle’. Bloomsbury was the Mansfields’ parish. And the record gives us reason enough to believe that Dido’s mother was called Maria.

  It was customary in eighteenth-century England to baptise a baby as soon as possible after birth, for fear that the child would go to Limbo rather than to Heaven in the all-too-common event of an early death. The logical conclusion to be drawn from the fact of Dido’s baptism into the Church of England at the age of five must be that no one bothered to baptise her when she was born, because she was illegitimate and the daughter of a slave. Dido Elizabeth must have been baptised a Christian at the behest of Lord and Lady Mansfield. So what would have been the occasion of the event? The baptismal date in the autumn of 1766, eight months after the death of the first Lady Stormont, strongly suggests that this was at the time when little Elizabeth Murray was brought to the Mansfield household by the distraught Lord Stormont. This was surely the moment when it was agreed that the two little girls would be brought up together.