This is a comment and discussion in a series on movies depicting relations between Black and White in America. I state my basic perspective on the situation here in The American Caste System. — —
Why am I thinking about a movie I saw half a year ago? Maybe because Belle is such an interesting and attractive character. It is easy to identify with her. And her story has me thinking about racial divisions and social justice in American society. I was active in the 1960s civil rights movement, believing that integration of Black and White Americans in school, at work and in public places would be followed by integration in our private lives, that we would come to know one another better, together create a more just society. And there has been progress. Discrimination against Black Americans has lessened, but we are hardly an integrated society. Segregation continues. Residential segregation is as total as ever. A rare integrated White-Black neighborhood can be found but usually all this means is that it is in transition, being gentrified to White or abandoned by Whites. Schooling is resegregating and even in integrated schools children self-segregate socially. Black and White people work side by side, go into the same shops and restaurants and banks and remain largely invisible to one another. Given the physical and psychological distance to be traversed, friendship across the color line is difficult to maintain. It is comforting to watch a movie based on real people who achieved real social progress.
I enjoyed the movie. (Reviews here and here) It is a costume drama set in late 18th century English aristocratic society, has very good acting, is beautifully filmed and Jane Austenesque in the quality of dialogue and depiction of families negotiating relationships and incomes, deciding who among the young will marry whom. The character Belle is a gentlewoman, intelligent, pretty, self-confident and, using an expression of the era, also a mulatto; her father was a Royal Navy officer and her mother an African slave, presumably in the Caribbean. The story begins with the father searching there for his lover, who has died, and finding instead their small daughter, Belle, whom he takes to his uncle, William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, to be raised alongside Elizabeth, the child of another of Mansfield’s nephews. 
The girls are the same age and grow up together in a loving household. They become friends, play together, dress the same, are both educated and taught the skills of a lady, such as needlepoint and music. In a number of scenes they have to be excused to sit for an artist who is painting the customary family portraits.
However, outside the estate grounds not all is equality and even at home Belle is not allowed to have dinner with the family when guests are at the table. We do not see Belle’s father again but know he loves her and dies leaving her a substantial inheritance that brings future security and, despite her being not fully socially acceptable, a respectable marriage proposal. The young man who proposed is in love with Belle but his mother treats her with contempt and his younger brother regularly insults her. Belle turns down the proposal. Lord Mansfield and his wife expect that after Elizabeth marries and leaves home, Belle will spend her life managing the Kentwood House and estate, taking over from the aging unmarried aunt, Lady Mary Murray, but that does not end the romantic interest for Belle.
We see the painting of the girls only at the end of the movie, followed by the actual portraits together of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Elizabeth Murry, the two women on whom the story is based. Consider the contrast in the late 18th century between a biracial girl in an English home and a biracial girl in an American home. Many English family fortunes were derived from the slave trade, such as that of Jane Austen’s family, and many thousands of Africans in England served in a servant, sometimes slave-like, status but slavery was not in English law; slavery was not an institution as it would come to be in the American colonies. I doubt that a situation like Belle’s was possible in the American colonies. Maybe in the north but I know of none.
Compare Belle’s story (and that of Dido, below) with the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Sally was Martha Jefferson’s half-sister whose mixed-race slave mother was Betty Hemings. While still a small child, Sally arrived in Monticello as part of the property that Martha inherited at her father’s death. Sally was, and continued to be throughout her life, a household slave. Her children, unrecognized as Jefferson’s children, lived as slaves. The four who survived were freed as they came of age and they left Monticello with no inheritance. They were seven-eighths European in ancestry and legally white. As adults, three entered the white community.
Interwoven with the story of Belle the movie deals with English law governing the slave trade and presents a court case based on two actual, historic cases. For history and background here.
It is widely agreed that because Lord Chief Justice Mansfield loved his part-African grand niece like his own child he made decisions against the slave trade, that she inspired him to write “… the state of slavery is .. so odious …”. Personal experience shapes our views on public policy. It was 1786 and in the movie Lord Mansfield had before him a case in the Court of King’s Bench he was to rule on, a case seriously affecting law regarding the slave trade. The crew of a slave ship, the Zong, had thrown slaves overboard to drown, claiming that reducing the cargo size was necessary for conserving the ship’s supply of potable water and ensuring that the remaining slaves survived. More likely, the ship owners were ridding themselves of individuals who were ill and could not be sold. Being good businessmen, the ship owners had taken out insurance on the lives of the slaves as cargo, and upon reaching port in Jamaica, put in a claim for their loss. The insurers refused to pay. The ship owners sued, arguing that human beings as cargo, and killing them, had been deemed legal in an earlier case.
In the movie, Belle hears John Davinier, an apprentice studying law with Lord Mansfield, and also an abolitionist, disagreeing with Mansfield about the Zong case. She informs herself about the case by reading the papers on her uncle’s desk when he is not around, and passes on critical information to Davinier, who incidentally, has fallen in love with her. She studies maps, sees where the Zong had sailed, etc., and discovers that the ship had no reason to be short of potable water, that the insurance claim is fraudulent. It is evidence for her great uncle, the Lord Chief Justice, the Earl of Mansfield, to rule against the owners of the slave ship and decide one of the important cases that will result in making the slave trade illegal.
The Zong massacre became famous as a symbol of the horrors of the Middle Passage. In 1840, some sixty years after the court case, 
J.M.W.Turner painted the slave ship and slavers throwing dead and dying Africans overboard. See the Turner painting enlarged here.
The great uncle depicted in the film, William Murray, first Earl of Mansfield and the Lord Chief Justice of Britain, is a major figure in legal history; his rulings are still cited in British and America court rulings. He is best known, however, for his judgment in the Somersett’s Case (1772). There he held that slavery had no basis in common law and had never been established by legislation in England, and therefore was not binding law. Nevertheless, slavery remained legal in most of the British Empire until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.
Misan Sagay wrote the screenplay for “Belle”, based on her research into the history of the young woman in a painting she saw while a university student at St. Andrews in Scotland. She walked into one of the bedrooms of the nearby Scone Palace and encountered “a stunning painting of a black girl, bright eyes looking out at me — at least that’s what I saw. The caption underneath said, “The Lady Elizabeth Murray.” That’s all. …To whoever wrote that caption, the very thing that had captivated me, this beautiful black woman, was invisible.” … and ten years later … “My friends the Murray Thrieplands live nearby at Fingask Castle and are friendly with the Mansfield family. Through them I met the present countess of Mansfield and gained access to the Scone Palace archives. ”
I highly recommend this essay by Misan Sagay on how and why she wrote the screenplay for Belle.
Sagay’s discovery of the painting led her to looking into the Mansfield family records for traces of Dido, and continuing the search, to the Murray family, finding there bits of information on Dido in household accounts from the period, in letters to and from family and visitors to Kenwood, and in various public records. I rely on an article by Gene Adams in the Camden History Review Vol.12 here. Here for another account of Dido’s history.
Dido was the natural daughter of Sir John Lindsay (1737—88), a captain in the Royal Navy and later Rear Admiral of the Red. (Illegitimacy was a shameful status. Hence the euphemism “natural.”) Lady Elizabeth Murray’s father was David, 7th Viscount Stormont, away as ambassador in Austria and in Paris; both he and Sir John Lindsay were nephews of Lord Mansfield. Lindsay, in his will, used Elizabeth as the name for his daughter but in her home she was Dido, after the famous African queen. Belle was her mother’s name. Cousins Dido and Elizabeth lived with their great uncle and aunt, Lord and Lady Mansfield, in Kenwood, a country home with a small working farm surrounded by fields of grass. Mansfield also owned a house in London on Bloomsbury Square where he and Lady Mansfield stayed when he was attending Parliament or the Law Chambers.
In the movie, a reason for accepting Belle in the home was to provide her cousin with a playmate; Elizabeth’s mother had died and her father did not want her in his new marriage. In life, Dido was Elizabeth’s playmate and personal attendant, all while benefiting from the privileged circumstance in Kenwood. It is not known if Dido as a child willingly parted from her mother.
One visitor to the Mansfield household wrote about Dido in his diary. He was Thomas Hutchison (1711 — 1780), Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, a conservative loyalist whom political opponents forced to leave Massachusetts for England. He was committed to an archaic ideology for perpetuating the privilege of his social class at a time when leaders like Adam Smith and Tom Paine were influenced by ideas from the Enlightenment.
The following are entries from Hutchison’s diary, 1779. Dido was about 18 years old at the time. The entries are worth quoting in full:
“Dined at Lord Mansfield’s in Caen Wood; only Lord Rob. Manners besides the family. My Lord, at 74 or 5, has all the vivacity of 50, He gave me a particular acct. of his releasing two Blacks from slavery, since his being Chief Justice … … ”
“Lady Mansfield must be about 80 . . . has the powers of her mind still firm, without marks of decay; her dress perfectly simple and becoming her age — is said to be benevolent and charitable to the poor. Lady Say, of the same age I saw at court with her head as high dressed as the young Duchesses etc. What a carricature she looked like! … How pleasing, because natural, Lady Mansfield’s appearance. A Black came in after dinner and sat with the ladies and after coffee, walked with the company in the gardens, one of the young ladies having her arm within the other. She had a very high cap and her wool was much frizzled in her neck, but not enough to answer the large curls now in fashion. She is neither handsome nor genteel — pert enough. I knew her history before, but My Lord mentioned it again.”
“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, and which was taken care of by Lord M., and has been educated by his family. He calls her Dido, which I suppose is all the name she has. He knows he has been reproached for showing fondness for her — I dare say not criminal.”
“A few years ago there was a cause before his Lordship bro’t by a Black for recovery of his liberty. A Jamaica planter being asked what judgement his Ldship would give? “No doubt” he answered “He will be set free, for Lord Mansfield keeps a Black in his house which governs him and the whole family.”
Hutchinson made quite clear in his diary that he did not agree with the position Mansfield adopted in the celebrated Somersett case (1772) involving an Englishman who had purchased the slave James Somerset in Boston and brought him to England. Somerset escaped and was recaptured. The Englishman imprisoned him on a ship and was prepared to sell him in Jamaica. Abolitionists brought the case to court and Mansfield determined that the imprisonment was unlawful. He wrote: “(Slavery) is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law (legislation). Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.”
Another entry:
“She is a sort of Superintendant over the dairy, poultry yard, etc, which we visited. And she was called upon by my Lord every minute for this thing and that, and shewed the greatest attention to everything he said.”
It should be noted that it was customary for the lady of the house to oversee various activities on the farm. Dido acted as legal secretary for her great uncle and it is reported that her handwriting was excellent.
Another recorded observation of Dido is in one of her father’s obituaries. She is described as “of amiable disposition and her accomplishments have gained her the highest respect from all his Lordship’s relations and visitants.”
When William Murray, Mansfield’s descendent and owner of the Scone Palace, was asked why the first Earl took on Dido he said, “I think it’s because of his own experience of being an outsider.” Mansfield grew up in Scotland, the fourth son of the Viscount of Stormont. It was a noble but impoverished line and Mansfield at 12 years old was dispatched to London to make his own way.
Lady Montague 1725
Gene Adams, historian, gives perspective on Dido’s position as a Black child in the Mansfield home: “Dido’s position was of course vastly superior to that of many young negro slaves or “body servants” who were regarded and treated as exotic playthings or status symbols by their aristocratic or rich owners. Sometimes these children were outrageously spoilt as infants and then, as awkward adolescents, were liable to instant dismissal or even cruel “repatriation” to the West Indies where most of them had never been. Owners tiring of their novelty would often advertise these children for sale in local papers and, if a local sale appeared unprofitable, they were sure to make at least some money by selling them to slave captains who would ship them to the West Indies.”
Dido’s mother was lifted from obscurity by Margo Stringfield, an archeologist at the University of West Florida. here Stringfield excavated the site of Maria Belle’s house. She found, among other items, a document signed by Sir John Lindsay in1772 that deeds a lot in Pensacola, Florida to Maria. The situation was unusual; normally men did not convey property to an ex-slave.
In 1764, when Dido was three, Lindsay was sent to Pensacola to test naval equipment. Maria Belle probably accompanied him, and most likely this was when Dido passed into the Mansfields’ care. Once in Florida, Lindsay took his pick of land that had been granted to the British Navy. Maria Belle’s former house is on the corner of Lindsay and Mansfield streets. Lindsay and Maria returned to London in subsequent years and their relationship continued well into Lindsay’s 1768 marriage to Mary Milner, an MP’s daughter but appears to have ended in 1774, when Maria returned to Pensacola alone.
In the deed for the house Lindsay guaranteed Maria her freedom, and artifacts from Stringfield’s excavation indicate that he provided well for her; she led a genteel life. China teapots and cups, “a beautiful decanter top” and pieces of delicate wine glass were found on the site. Springfield said that frontier life was relaxed, and Maria “probably had women friends in a similar situation to herself here.”
Lord Mansfield died in 1793, aged 87, and Dido married five months later. He left Dido an inheritance and an annuity of £100 for life. In his will written in 1783 he had confirmed Dido’s freedom. He wrote, “I assert to Dido her freedom” making doubly certain that once his personal protection was ended she should not be at the mercy of strangers or unscrupulous people. Mansfield’s sister also left her money, as did Sir John Lindsay. He had no children with his wife but mentions a second child, John, in his will.
Little is known about Dido’s life after Kenwood. She married John Davinier, a steward and the son of the local Reverend in Hampstead. According to William Murray, they had known each other, at least by sight, for many years. They moved to what is now Ebury Street in Belgravia and had three children, one of whom joined the East India Company. Belle died of natural causes, aged 41, and was buried somewhere in ground that is now built over.
Dido is currently known because of an unsigned painting, originally thought to have been painted in 1779 by the portraitist Johann Zoffany. Later the family concluded that the artist was David Martin, a young Scotsman.
I have a number of problems with the painting. The faces and details are well done but I first thought Elizabeth was seated and could not figure out what Dido was doing. In Gene Adams’ article the full painting is shown and it is obvious that both girls are standing. The setting is a grove of trees on a hill, with a river in the background, spanned by a bridge, and in the far distance the dome of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral that could once be seen from the house. Adams thinks this is a stage setting rather than an observed landscape. For him, the two girls are arm in arm, on a walk in the Kenwood gardens. But Elizabeth is holding Dido left arm with her fingers, not with her hand, and Dido seems livelier than Elizabeth. Are the two looking at the same thing? I cannot decide. Dido looks playful and Elizabeth pleasant, cool and maybe gently controlling. I cannot understand Dido’s hand gesture. I feel that the fingers are held in too relaxed a manner for her to be pointing at something.
The girls’ differing style of dress is striking. To Gene Adams, Dido’s turban trimmed with an ostrich feather and the exotic silver satin attire indicates a typical eighteenth century upper-class attitude to black slave children, representing the stereotype of what a young slave “should” wear rather than what she actually did wear. It occurred to me, though, that David Martin may have been alluding in the portrait to Dido of Carthage. After all, Dido was the name adopted by the family for the little girl. I know nothing of the ancient Dido other than she is a figure from Greek and Roman mythology and the mythological founder and reigning Queen of Carthage, a major city-state on the southern Mediterranean coast. Her story passed into European art through Virgil’s account in his Aeneid. In 1586, Christopher Marlowe, in “Dido, Queen of Carthage,” created a vivid, powerful, passionate Dido, far more alive than his Aeneas character (after all, he was writing for Queen Elizabeth), and for centuries operas and popular ballads were based on the play.
Perhaps Martin was trying in the painting to do a Zoffany-style “theatrical conversation piece”, a portrayal of family members or friends engaged in some activity together, set in a grand home or out in nature. The genre was popular in Britain in the 1700s. He presents Elizabeth, the English rose, and the exotic Dido strolling in the Kenwood garden. Perhaps Dido is carrying fruit they have gathered and Elizabeth is holding a book she, a gentlewoman, will read at leisure. Both girls are in costume and expensively so, dressed in silk with pearl necklaces and earrings and an ostrich feather for Dido. Her soft dress and turban are in satin and the turban is embroidered, I think, with gold thread. A gauzy silk, gold embroidered shawl has slipped off her shoulders and flutters in a breeze. Elizabeth’s dress suggests a regal air; it is proper and elegant, in the style of the old regime of the 1750s or ’60s rather than the late ’70s of the painting. She wears flowers in her hair.
We find information about Dido’s style of dress in a fascinating blog by a professor of art history. It begins with the turban. Turbans appeared occasionally in Europe throughout the 18th century but by the end of the century were the height of fashion. Visitors to the mysterious lands of Turkey and the Orient, such as Mary Wortley Montague, were bringing back different modes of dress to the courts of Paris and London and to the newly wealthy aristocracy (wealth from the slave trade). Montague had many accomplishments, of which discovering smallpox inoculation in Turkey and introducing it in England is the most noteworthy, but in her time she was known for far more conspicuous acts. She returned from Constantinople wearing a variation on the dress she had worn in the Sultan’s court. Soon Turkish dress was one of the most common costumes seen at the masquerade and it became a fashionable dress for leisure. However, turquerie was not suitable for outside the home; only an intellectual rebel like Mary Montague would dare to dress in public exactly as she pleased. In her portrait above, an African boy is standing behind her. I wonder why she had him painted with her. (I plan to read her Turkish Embassy Letters that she modeled on the letters of Madame de Sévigné.)
We cannot know why the family chose to present Dido to future generations in exotic dress but she was far from the only young woman so portrayed.
Liotard, Marie Adalaide of France 1753
Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789), an imaginative, quirky painter, lived in Istanbul (Constantinople to Europeans) for four years and painted the Europeans residing there and in Izmir, most of them dressed in Turkish attire.
George Willison, Scottish artist, Nancy Parsons in Turkish dress 1771
Painter unknown, girl’s identity unknown
Finally, for a fascinating visual account of the portraits a la turque. See
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Iris sans frontières 
Thoughts on the movie “Belle”
Posted in Caste in America, Comments on interesting movies on December 18, 2014| Leave a Comment »
This is a comment and discussion in a series on movies depicting relations between Black and White in America. I state my basic perspective on the situation here in The American Caste System. — —
I enjoyed the movie. (Reviews here and here) It is a costume drama set in late 18th century English aristocratic society, has very good acting, is beautifully filmed and Jane Austenesque in the quality of dialogue and depiction of families negotiating relationships and incomes, deciding who among the young will marry whom. The character Belle is a gentlewoman, intelligent, pretty, self-confident and, using an expression of the era, also a mulatto; her father was a Royal Navy officer and her mother an African slave, presumably in the Caribbean. The story begins with the father searching there for his lover, who has died, and finding instead their small daughter, Belle, whom he takes to his uncle, William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, to be raised alongside Elizabeth, the child of another of Mansfield’s nephews.
The girls are the same age and grow up together in a loving household. They become friends, play together, dress the same, are both educated and taught the skills of a lady, such as needlepoint and music. In a number of scenes they have to be excused to sit for an artist who is painting the customary family portraits.
However, outside the estate grounds not all is equality and even at home Belle is not allowed to have dinner with the family when guests are at the table. We do not see Belle’s father again but know he loves her and dies leaving her a substantial inheritance that brings future security and, despite her being not fully socially acceptable, a respectable marriage proposal. The young man who proposed is in love with Belle but his mother treats her with contempt and his younger brother regularly insults her. Belle turns down the proposal. Lord Mansfield and his wife expect that after Elizabeth marries and leaves home, Belle will spend her life managing the Kentwood House and estate, taking over from the aging unmarried aunt, Lady Mary Murray, but that does not end the romantic interest for Belle.
Compare Belle’s story (and that of Dido, below) with the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Sally was Martha Jefferson’s half-sister whose mixed-race slave mother was Betty Hemings. While still a small child, Sally arrived in Monticello as part of the property that Martha inherited at her father’s death. Sally was, and continued to be throughout her life, a household slave. Her children, unrecognized as Jefferson’s children, lived as slaves. The four who survived were freed as they came of age and they left Monticello with no inheritance. They were seven-eighths European in ancestry and legally white. As adults, three entered the white community.
Interwoven with the story of Belle the movie deals with English law governing the slave trade and presents a court case based on two actual, historic cases. For history and background here.
It is widely agreed that because Lord Chief Justice Mansfield loved his part-African grand niece like his own child he made decisions against the slave trade, that she inspired him to write “… the state of slavery is .. so odious …”. Personal experience shapes our views on public policy. It was 1786 and in the movie Lord Mansfield had before him a case in the Court of King’s Bench he was to rule on, a case seriously affecting law regarding the slave trade. The crew of a slave ship, the Zong, had thrown slaves overboard to drown, claiming that reducing the cargo size was necessary for conserving the ship’s supply of potable water and ensuring that the remaining slaves survived. More likely, the ship owners were ridding themselves of individuals who were ill and could not be sold. Being good businessmen, the ship owners had taken out insurance on the lives of the slaves as cargo, and upon reaching port in Jamaica, put in a claim for their loss. The insurers refused to pay. The ship owners sued, arguing that human beings as cargo, and killing them, had been deemed legal in an earlier case.
In the movie, Belle hears John Davinier, an apprentice studying law with Lord Mansfield, and also an abolitionist, disagreeing with Mansfield about the Zong case. She informs herself about the case by reading the papers on her uncle’s desk when he is not around, and passes on critical information to Davinier, who incidentally, has fallen in love with her. She studies maps, sees where the Zong had sailed, etc., and discovers that the ship had no reason to be short of potable water, that the insurance claim is fraudulent. It is evidence for her great uncle, the Lord Chief Justice, the Earl of Mansfield, to rule against the owners of the slave ship and decide one of the important cases that will result in making the slave trade illegal.
The Zong massacre became famous as a symbol of the horrors of the Middle Passage. In 1840, some sixty years after the court case,
J.M.W.Turner painted the slave ship and slavers throwing dead and dying Africans overboard. See the Turner painting enlarged here.
The great uncle depicted in the film, William Murray, first Earl of Mansfield and the Lord Chief Justice of Britain, is a major figure in legal history; his rulings are still cited in British and America court rulings. He is best known, however, for his judgment in the Somersett’s Case (1772). There he held that slavery had no basis in common law and had never been established by legislation in England, and therefore was not binding law. Nevertheless, slavery remained legal in most of the British Empire until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.
Misan Sagay wrote the screenplay for “Belle”, based on her research into the history of the young woman in a painting she saw while a university student at St. Andrews in Scotland. She walked into one of the bedrooms of the nearby Scone Palace and encountered “a stunning painting of a black girl, bright eyes looking out at me — at least that’s what I saw. The caption underneath said, “The Lady Elizabeth Murray.” That’s all. …To whoever wrote that caption, the very thing that had captivated me, this beautiful black woman, was invisible.” … and ten years later … “My friends the Murray Thrieplands live nearby at Fingask Castle and are friendly with the Mansfield family. Through them I met the present countess of Mansfield and gained access to the Scone Palace archives. ”
I highly recommend this essay by Misan Sagay on how and why she wrote the screenplay for Belle.
Sagay’s discovery of the painting led her to looking into the Mansfield family records for traces of Dido, and continuing the search, to the Murray family, finding there bits of information on Dido in household accounts from the period, in letters to and from family and visitors to Kenwood, and in various public records. I rely on an article by Gene Adams in the Camden History Review Vol.12 here. Here for another account of Dido’s history.
Dido was the natural daughter of Sir John Lindsay (1737—88), a captain in the Royal Navy and later Rear Admiral of the Red. (Illegitimacy was a shameful status. Hence the euphemism “natural.”) Lady Elizabeth Murray’s father was David, 7th Viscount Stormont, away as ambassador in Austria and in Paris; both he and Sir John Lindsay were nephews of Lord Mansfield. Lindsay, in his will, used Elizabeth as the name for his daughter but in her home she was Dido, after the famous African queen. Belle was her mother’s name. Cousins Dido and Elizabeth lived with their great uncle and aunt, Lord and Lady Mansfield, in Kenwood, a country home with a small working farm surrounded by fields of grass. Mansfield also owned a house in London on Bloomsbury Square where he and Lady Mansfield stayed when he was attending Parliament or the Law Chambers.
In the movie, a reason for accepting Belle in the home was to provide her cousin with a playmate; Elizabeth’s mother had died and her father did not want her in his new marriage. In life, Dido was Elizabeth’s playmate and personal attendant, all while benefiting from the privileged circumstance in Kenwood. It is not known if Dido as a child willingly parted from her mother.
One visitor to the Mansfield household wrote about Dido in his diary. He was Thomas Hutchison (1711 — 1780), Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, a conservative loyalist whom political opponents forced to leave Massachusetts for England. He was committed to an archaic ideology for perpetuating the privilege of his social class at a time when leaders like Adam Smith and Tom Paine were influenced by ideas from the Enlightenment.
The following are entries from Hutchison’s diary, 1779. Dido was about 18 years old at the time. The entries are worth quoting in full:
“Dined at Lord Mansfield’s in Caen Wood; only Lord Rob. Manners besides the family. My Lord, at 74 or 5, has all the vivacity of 50, He gave me a particular acct. of his releasing two Blacks from slavery, since his being Chief Justice … … ”
“Lady Mansfield must be about 80 . . . has the powers of her mind still firm, without marks of decay; her dress perfectly simple and becoming her age — is said to be benevolent and charitable to the poor. Lady Say, of the same age I saw at court with her head as high dressed as the young Duchesses etc. What a carricature she looked like! … How pleasing, because natural, Lady Mansfield’s appearance. A Black came in after dinner and sat with the ladies and after coffee, walked with the company in the gardens, one of the young ladies having her arm within the other. She had a very high cap and her wool was much frizzled in her neck, but not enough to answer the large curls now in fashion. She is neither handsome nor genteel — pert enough. I knew her history before, but My Lord mentioned it again.”
“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, and which was taken care of by Lord M., and has been educated by his family. He calls her Dido, which I suppose is all the name she has. He knows he has been reproached for showing fondness for her — I dare say not criminal.”
“A few years ago there was a cause before his Lordship bro’t by a Black for recovery of his liberty. A Jamaica planter being asked what judgement his Ldship would give? “No doubt” he answered “He will be set free, for Lord Mansfield keeps a Black in his house which governs him and the whole family.”
Hutchinson made quite clear in his diary that he did not agree with the position Mansfield adopted in the celebrated Somersett case (1772) involving an Englishman who had purchased the slave James Somerset in Boston and brought him to England. Somerset escaped and was recaptured. The Englishman imprisoned him on a ship and was prepared to sell him in Jamaica. Abolitionists brought the case to court and Mansfield determined that the imprisonment was unlawful. He wrote: “(Slavery) is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law (legislation). Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.”
Another entry:
“She is a sort of Superintendant over the dairy, poultry yard, etc, which we visited. And she was called upon by my Lord every minute for this thing and that, and shewed the greatest attention to everything he said.”
It should be noted that it was customary for the lady of the house to oversee various activities on the farm. Dido acted as legal secretary for her great uncle and it is reported that her handwriting was excellent.
Another recorded observation of Dido is in one of her father’s obituaries. She is described as “of amiable disposition and her accomplishments have gained her the highest respect from all his Lordship’s relations and visitants.”
When William Murray, Mansfield’s descendent and owner of the Scone Palace, was asked why the first Earl took on Dido he said, “I think it’s because of his own experience of being an outsider.” Mansfield grew up in Scotland, the fourth son of the Viscount of Stormont. It was a noble but impoverished line and Mansfield at 12 years old was dispatched to London to make his own way.
Lady Montague 1725
Gene Adams, historian, gives perspective on Dido’s position as a Black child in the Mansfield home: “Dido’s position was of course vastly superior to that of many young negro slaves or “body servants” who were regarded and treated as exotic playthings or status symbols by their aristocratic or rich owners. Sometimes these children were outrageously spoilt as infants and then, as awkward adolescents, were liable to instant dismissal or even cruel “repatriation” to the West Indies where most of them had never been. Owners tiring of their novelty would often advertise these children for sale in local papers and, if a local sale appeared unprofitable, they were sure to make at least some money by selling them to slave captains who would ship them to the West Indies.”
Dido’s mother was lifted from obscurity by Margo Stringfield, an archeologist at the University of West Florida. here Stringfield excavated the site of Maria Belle’s house. She found, among other items, a document signed by Sir John Lindsay in1772 that deeds a lot in Pensacola, Florida to Maria. The situation was unusual; normally men did not convey property to an ex-slave.
In 1764, when Dido was three, Lindsay was sent to Pensacola to test naval equipment. Maria Belle probably accompanied him, and most likely this was when Dido passed into the Mansfields’ care. Once in Florida, Lindsay took his pick of land that had been granted to the British Navy. Maria Belle’s former house is on the corner of Lindsay and Mansfield streets. Lindsay and Maria returned to London in subsequent years and their relationship continued well into Lindsay’s 1768 marriage to Mary Milner, an MP’s daughter but appears to have ended in 1774, when Maria returned to Pensacola alone.
In the deed for the house Lindsay guaranteed Maria her freedom, and artifacts from Stringfield’s excavation indicate that he provided well for her; she led a genteel life. China teapots and cups, “a beautiful decanter top” and pieces of delicate wine glass were found on the site. Springfield said that frontier life was relaxed, and Maria “probably had women friends in a similar situation to herself here.”
Lord Mansfield died in 1793, aged 87, and Dido married five months later. He left Dido an inheritance and an annuity of £100 for life. In his will written in 1783 he had confirmed Dido’s freedom. He wrote, “I assert to Dido her freedom” making doubly certain that once his personal protection was ended she should not be at the mercy of strangers or unscrupulous people. Mansfield’s sister also left her money, as did Sir John Lindsay. He had no children with his wife but mentions a second child, John, in his will.
Little is known about Dido’s life after Kenwood. She married John Davinier, a steward and the son of the local Reverend in Hampstead. According to William Murray, they had known each other, at least by sight, for many years. They moved to what is now Ebury Street in Belgravia and had three children, one of whom joined the East India Company. Belle died of natural causes, aged 41, and was buried somewhere in ground that is now built over.
Dido is currently known because of an unsigned painting, originally thought to have been painted in 1779 by the portraitist Johann Zoffany. Later the family concluded that the artist was David Martin, a young Scotsman.
I have a number of problems with the painting. The faces and details are well done but I first thought Elizabeth was seated and could not figure out what Dido was doing. In Gene Adams’ article the full painting is shown and it is obvious that both girls are standing. The setting is a grove of trees on a hill, with a river in the background, spanned by a bridge, and in the far distance the dome of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral that could once be seen from the house. Adams thinks this is a stage setting rather than an observed landscape. For him, the two girls are arm in arm, on a walk in the Kenwood gardens. But Elizabeth is holding Dido left arm with her fingers, not with her hand, and Dido seems livelier than Elizabeth. Are the two looking at the same thing? I cannot decide. Dido looks playful and Elizabeth pleasant, cool and maybe gently controlling. I cannot understand Dido’s hand gesture. I feel that the fingers are held in too relaxed a manner for her to be pointing at something.
The girls’ differing style of dress is striking. To Gene Adams, Dido’s turban trimmed with an ostrich feather and the exotic silver satin attire indicates a typical eighteenth century upper-class attitude to black slave children, representing the stereotype of what a young slave “should” wear rather than what she actually did wear. It occurred to me, though, that David Martin may have been alluding in the portrait to Dido of Carthage. After all, Dido was the name adopted by the family for the little girl. I know nothing of the ancient Dido other than she is a figure from Greek and Roman mythology and the mythological founder and reigning Queen of Carthage, a major city-state on the southern Mediterranean coast. Her story passed into European art through Virgil’s account in his Aeneid. In 1586, Christopher Marlowe, in “Dido, Queen of Carthage,” created a vivid, powerful, passionate Dido, far more alive than his Aeneas character (after all, he was writing for Queen Elizabeth), and for centuries operas and popular ballads were based on the play.
We find information about Dido’s style of dress in a fascinating blog by a professor of art history. It begins with the turban. Turbans appeared occasionally in Europe throughout the 18th century but by the end of the century were the height of fashion. Visitors to the mysterious lands of Turkey and the Orient, such as Mary Wortley Montague, were bringing back different modes of dress to the courts of Paris and London and to the newly wealthy aristocracy (wealth from the slave trade). Montague had many accomplishments, of which discovering smallpox inoculation in Turkey and introducing it in England is the most noteworthy, but in her time she was known for far more conspicuous acts. She returned from Constantinople wearing a variation on the dress she had worn in the Sultan’s court. Soon Turkish dress was one of the most common costumes seen at the masquerade and it became a fashionable dress for leisure. However, turquerie was not suitable for outside the home; only an intellectual rebel like Mary Montague would dare to dress in public exactly as she pleased. In her portrait above, an African boy is standing behind her. I wonder why she had him painted with her. (I plan to read her Turkish Embassy Letters that she modeled on the letters of Madame de Sévigné.)
We cannot know why the family chose to present Dido to future generations in exotic dress but she was far from the only young woman so portrayed.
Liotard, Marie Adalaide of France 1753
Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789), an imaginative, quirky painter, lived in Istanbul (Constantinople to Europeans) for four years and painted the Europeans residing there and in Izmir, most of them dressed in Turkish attire.
George Willison, Scottish artist, Nancy Parsons in Turkish dress 1771
Painter unknown, girl’s identity unknown
Finally, for a fascinating visual account of the portraits a la turque. See
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