Belle

by Paula Byrne

  The person who comes out of the Zong case most damnably is Solicitor General John Lee, who appeared at the hearing on behalf of the ship’s owners, and stated:

  What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods. Blacks are goods and property; it is madness to accuse these well-serving honourable men of murder. They acted out of necessity and in the most appropriate manner for the cause. The late Captain Collingwood acted in the interest of his ship to protect the safety of his crew. To question the judgement of an experienced well-travelled captain held in the highest regard is one of folly, especially when talking of slaves. The case is the same as if wood had been thrown overboard.10

  As for the real hero of the story, once again that was Granville Sharp. After the trial he wrote countless letters to highly placed individuals, contacted the press with a copy of his trial minutes, and tried to bring murder charges against Kelsall and his crew. He lobbied the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty.

  The immediate impact of the Zong massacre on public opinion may have been limited. But in the longer term, the breathtaking brutality of the murders, and the fact that drowned human beings could be reduced to an insurance claim brought home the urgency of abolishing the slave trade. It was because of Sharp’s efforts that the Zong massacre became an important topic in abolitionist literature: the massacre was discussed by Thomas Clarkson, Ottobah Cugoano, James Ramsay and John Newton – most of the great abolitionists. His attempts to instigate a prosecution for murder were to have important consequences, bringing together like-minded individuals who would play a leading role in the British anti-slavery movement, formally established in 1787.

  One of these men was Thomas Clarkson, who became perhaps the key founding member of the abolition movement. His definitive History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament used the Zong massacre to illustrate the atrocities of the trade. Strikingly, Clarkson’s account puts forward yet another, and most compelling, theory of the motivation behind the killings, and one that has not been sufficiently explored: that the whole tale of the water shortage was a fabrication, and that the Africans thrown overboard were ill and diseased, and therefore worth more dead than alive.11

  16

  Changes at Kenwood

  Dido Belle, amanuensis to the Lord Chief Justice

  Life at Kenwood was as idyllic as ever, but the security that Dido Belle had known with the Mansfields was about to change in the years after the Zong massacre. The first change came with the death of Lady Mansfield in 1784. Despite her reserves of energy, her health had been precarious since the stress of the Gordon Riots. Her husband was indefatigable in his efforts to nurse her. Newspapers reported that he ‘was most assiduous in the sick chamber, constantly administering what the phys-icians had ordered and sitting up several nights together’.1 The Mansfields had always had a strong and happy marriage, despite their childlessness.

  Lady Mansfield’s death was a blow to her family, and it was said that her husband never got over her loss. Just a year later, there was another huge change in the family’s circumstances when Elizabeth Murray left Kenwood on marrying her cousin, George Finch-Hatton. As Lord Stormont’s eldest daughter, it was Elizabeth’s duty to make a good marriage, and she did not fail. George Finch-Hatton’s father Edward was brother to Lady Mansfield. George was later MP for Rochester, and following their wedding in December 1785, he and his new bride moved to Eastwell Park in Kent, leaving behind Dido and the settled life of Kenwood.

  Perhaps Dido felt the loss of Elizabeth even more than she did that of Lady Mansfield. After all, they had been friends and companions since they were small children. They had shared everything. But now Elizabeth was to embrace the life she had been bred for, as the wife and mistress of Eastwell Park. She would bear five children to George Finch-Hatton, and their son George would become the tenth Earl of Winchilsea and fifth Earl of Nottingham.

  Furthermore, with Lady Mansfield departed to heaven and Miss Elizabeth to Kent, and with Lord Mansfield having reached eighty, Dido would have been acutely conscious that the time would soon come when Lord Stormont would inherit Kenwood. What would happen to her then? Viscount Stormont and his young second wife Louisa had a family of five children – Caroline, David, George, Charles and Henry. He was on the brink of succeeding to both the Mansfield and the Stormont lines of the Murray family, inheriting two titles and two fortunes. Kenwood would be his, and he would be unlikely to want Dido there.

  Now, more than ever, Dido would have been aware of her peculiar position in the family. It was inconceivable that she could hope to make a similar marriage to Elizabeth. Not merely because of her skin colour, but also because she was illegitimate. Although her father acknowledged paternity and provided for her, there was no question of her taking the Lindsay name. She was Miss Belle. In such circumstances, similar to those of the mixed-race Chevalier de Saint-George, she was prevented from making a society marriage, no matter how beautiful and accomplished she was.

  But Dido was not wholly alone with Lord Mansfield at Kenwood. Some time before Elizabeth’s marriage, two of Mansfield’s other nieces, Lady Anne and Lady Margery Murray, came to live at Kenwood. Spinsters in their middle years, it is possible that they came to help run the house. The account book kept by Lady Anne survives, dating from 1 Januuary 1785 to 2 April 1793. It gives an intriguing insight into the way Kenwood was run. All expenditure is accounted for: the farm, servants’ wages, charitable gifts, letters and turnpike fees, food, drink and fuel. It’s a reminder of the size of the community at Kenwood.

  Not surprisingly, Lord Mansfield and Dido grew even closer after his wife’s death and Elizabeth’s departure. The Kenwood account book includes references to ‘special presents by Ld M’s order’. Dido received a quarterly allowance of £5, augmented by birthday and Christmas presents. Her yearly allowance would thus have been £30 (for comparison, a kitchen maid was paid £8 per annum, the first coachman about £15).

  It is clear that Dido’s health was well attended to. She had two teeth extracted in 1789, at a cost of five shillings, and was given ass’s milk when she was ill, at the not insubstantial cost of £3.4s.2d. The account book also has a description of her bedding being washed and ‘reglazed’, at a cost of twelve shillings. This involved scouring and cleaning the bed and drapery and then pressing the fabric between hot rollers, to give it a silk-like sheen.

  After Elizabeth married, Mansfield added a codicil to his will, giving an extra £200 for Dido ‘to set out with’. It seems from this that he was worried about what would become of her after his death. A few days later he had second thoughts: £200 was not enough. He added a further codicil: ‘I think it right, considering how she has been bred, and how she has behaved, to make a better provision for Dido, I therefore give her Three Hundred Pounds More.’ As ever, his affection and solicitude for her shine through.

  Mansfield grew increasingly to rely on Dido, even using her as his amanuensis. In May 1786 she wrote out a letter to Justice Buller. It reveals that she had a clear, neat hand. The letter concerns a highly technical point in a marine insurance case, Lockyer v Offley – whether the clause in the policy which covered loss of a ship if seized by His Majesty’s Customs for barratry (a fraud committed by the master of a ship on the owners, in this case smuggling on his own account) was operative.2 At the end of the message is a playful comment: ‘This is wrote by Dido I hope you will be able to read it.’ Mansfield knows only too well that the letter is eminently legible – the remark springs from his pride in Dido. It also reveals that Justice Buller must have been clearly aware who Dido was.

  There was another death in the family in 1788. Sir John Lindsay’s marriage to Miss Milner did not keep him at home in Scotland. Between 1769 and 1772 he was commodore and commander-in-chief in the East Indies, with, as his biography puts it, ‘his broad pennant in the frigate Stag�
�. In June 1770 he had been appointed a Knight of the Bath, a considerable honour for a not very senior naval officer. He was subsequently recalled from the East Indies, apparently due to the hostility of the East India Company towards his investigation into its dealings with the Indian Nawabs. His career continued closer to home. He rose to become commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet. In 1784 he entertained the King and Queen on board his ship at Naples, but soon after that his health began to fail and he returned to Britain. He was promoted, honorifically, to the rank of Rear Admiral in September 1787, but died on 4 June 1788 at Marlborough, on his way back to London from Bath, where he had been staying on account of his poor health. He was just fifty-one. He was buried with full naval honours in Westminster Abbey,3 laid to rest in the Henry VII chapel beside the body of Lady Mansfield, who had cared for his natural daughter for so many years. We do not know whether at any time in his later years he ever went to Kenwood and met his grown-up mixed-race daughter. There would have been no reason for him to stay away: Lord Mansfield was fond of his nephew, as can be seen from his original will, in which he left £1,000 to him ‘in memory of the love and friendship I always bore him’.

  Lindsay never had legitimate children with his wife, Mary, but his will mentioned two natural children, Elizabeth and John, to each of whom he left £500: ‘I further give and bequeath unto my dearest wife Mary Lindsay, One Thousand Pounds in trust to be disposed by her for the benefit of John and Elizabeth my reputed son and daughter in such a manner as she thinks proper.’ It is not clear whether ‘Elizabeth’ refers to Dido, or to another illegitimate daughter. ‘John’ seems to have been an illegitimate son, conceived in Scotland. But the only child mentioned in his obituary in the London Chronicle was Dido. She was described as ‘a Mulatto who has been brought up in Lord Mansfield’s family almost from her infancy, and whose amiable disposition and accomplishments have earned her the highest respect from all his Lordship’s relations and visitants’.4 This is the first mention of Dido’s existence in the public prints, and it is wholly laudatory. One only wishes that some ‘visitant’ to Bloomsbury or Kenwood, other than the appalling Hutchinson, had left a record of their encounter with her ‘amiable disposition and accomplishments’.

  17

  The Anti-Saccharites

  ‘Anti-Saccharrites’, by James Gillray

  You no think, Massa, when you eat our sugar, you drink our blood?

  Abolitionist pamphlet of 18261

  As Dido Belle sipped her sweetened coffee in the company of Thomas Hutchinson, one wonders whether she spared a thought for the slaves who laboured to harvest and refine the sugar at such a huge cost to themselves. Towards the end of the eighteenth century there were many in England who were beginning to reassess the role of sugar in domestic life.

  In 1787 the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed, chaired by Granville Sharp. It was a coalition of various strands of anti-slavery factions, propelled by Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce as well as Sharp, but its roots were in the Quaker and Christian evangelical Churches, and many of these abolitionists were women. They felt compassion and sympathy for African women who were torn from their families and sexually exploited by planters and slavers. They were the homemakers who purchased and served sugar to their families. As one newspaper article said, ‘In the domestic department, they are the chief controllers [who] provide the articles for family consumption.’2 Women may have been prohibited from voting in Parliament, but they could boycott the British sugar bowl.

  One powerful abolitionist metaphor was of sugar tainted with blood. The Quaker William Fox wrote that ‘for every pound of West Indian sugar we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh’. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge joined in the furore: ‘A part of that Food among most of you is sweetened with the Blood of the Murdered … will the father of all men bless the food of Cannibals – the food which is polluted with the blood of his own innocent children?’3 Coleridge implored the women of England to consider their role: ‘The fine lady’s nerves are not shattered by the shrieks! She sips a beverage sweetened with human blood even while she is weeping over the sorrows of Werther or Clementina.’4

  William Allen urged women, sipping their tea at home, to consider their responsibilities as consumers. And it wasn’t just the upper classes: a white working-class abolitionist called Lydia Hardy wrote to Olaudah Equiano to tell him that in her village of Chesham more people drank tea without sugar than with it.5 So it was that women took the lead in the campaign to refuse to buy sugar or rum, another product of the plantations.

  Lady Margaret Middleton hosted dinner parties at which she spoke and spread awareness of the horrors of the slave trade. The novelist, playwright and evangelical writer Hannah More joined forces with her, and wrote anti-slavery pamphlets and poems. The official seal of the abolitionists was Wedgwood’s medallion bearing the figure of a manacled, kneeling slave and the slogan ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ Women abolitionists wore the medallion on chains around their necks, as bracelets or as hair ornaments.6 This was a visual symbol far more powerful than any pamphlet or newspaper article. Could Dido ever have slipped one around her neck?

  Abstention from sugar was an equally powerful, if less ostentatious, force. It was a denial of luxury, a self-sacrificing act of generosity which drew attention to the virtue of anti-consumption and anti-commodification.7 By the late 1790s the number of British abstainers from sugar seems to have risen towards half a million – and over half of them were women.8

  The abstention campaign, said to be supported by Queen Charlotte, provided satirists with ample ammunition. James Gillray’s ‘Anti-Saccharrites – or John Bull and his Family leaving off the use of Sugar’ (March 1792) depicts the royal princesses unhappily sipping unsweetened tea, urged on by their mother: ‘You can’t think how nice it is without sugar,’ and ‘then consider how much work you’ll save the poor Blackamoor by the leaving off the use of it’. Cruikshank followed with a print showing the Queen snipping off a tiny bit from the loaf with her sugar nippers and weighing it on scales, saying, ‘Now my dears, only an ickle bit. Do but tink of de Negro girl dat Captain Kimber treated so cruelly.’9

  It was Lady Middleton who persuaded the evangelical Christian MP William Wilberforce to take up the cause and lead Parliament towards the Abolition Act. The Middletons’ home, Barham Court in Teston, Kent, was the heart of the movement, and it was there that Wilberforce was introduced to such leading supporters as James Ramsay and Thomas Clarkson. Wilberforce adored the house, and his time spent there in the autumn of 1786 was pivotal to his conversion to the cause of abolition. By the early months of 1787 he had become convinced to take up the cause, writing in his journal: ‘God Almighty has sent before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.’10 Barham Court was used for planning the abolition campaign, with numerous meetings and strategy sessions attended by Wilberforce, Clarkson and others.

  Margaret Middleton’s impact was huge. In 1784 it was she who had persuaded James Ramsay to publish his account of the horrors of the slave trade, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies. This was the first time that the British public had read an anti-slavery work by a mainstream Anglican writer who had personally witnessed the suffering of the slaves on the West Indian plantations. Christian Ignatius Latrobe, a leading figure in the evangelical Moravian Church who spent many years at Barham Court, wrote to his daughter that the abolition of the slave trade was the work of one woman, Margaret Middleton.11 But the presence in another grand but more peaceful house – Kenwood – of another woman – Dido Elizabeth Belle – was also a hidden element in the story of abolition.

  Lord Mansfield would not live to see the end of the slave trade. By the time that the abolitionist forces were gathering at Barham, he was growing frail. In 1785 he wrote to the Duke of Rutland: ‘I go down hill with a gentle decay, and I thank God, without gout or stone.’1
2 On 1 November that year, the London Chronicle reported that the Lord Chief Justice ‘has been obliged to give up the pleasure of riding on horseback owing to a weakness in his wrists’ – it was rather remarkable that he had stayed on a horse so long, given that he was eighty.

  His popularity was waning. There were rumblings in the press that he was losing his judgement, and that retirement was overdue. Caricatures began to portray him as an old dodderer. One particular engraving even cast aspersions on his beloved dairy farm at Kenwood, which was presumably run by Dido alone now that Lady Mansfield had passed away. Entitled ‘The Noble Higglers’ and published in the Rambler’s Magazine on 1 February 1786, it shows four figures in a landscape, on a road leading from a country house. A judge, evidently Mansfield, carries a pair of milk pails on a yoke, while his companions bear pigs and poultry. It was published as an illustration to a letter about two peers, one of them Mansfield, who were in the habit of selling their dairy produce at Highgate. Surely, the letter suggests, they should be liable to the shop tax.13

  Finally, in 1788, Mansfield retired from his role as Lord Chief Justice. He remained at Kenwood, looked after by Dido and his other nieces, the Ladies Anne and Margery Murray, for the last few years of his life. When Fanny Burney visited Kenwood in June 1792 she was unable to see Lord Mansfield, as he was too infirm. She was told by the housekeeper that he had not been downstairs for four years, ‘yet she asserts he is by no means superannuated, and frequently sees his very intimate friends’. Burney says that the Miss Murrrays ‘were upstairs with Lord Mansfield, whom they never left’. Fanny Burney asked after the Miss Murrays and left her respects. They had often invited her to Kenwood, and she expressed her sorrow that she hadn’t taken up the offer before then. There is, however, no mention of Dido.