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| FILM POSTER FOR BELLE (2014) |
Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay was born 1761 as the natural daughter of Maria Belle, an enslaved African woman and 24-year-old Sir John Lindsay, a British career naval officer and captain of the British warship HMS Trent, based in the British West Indies, who was already much-feted by the newspapers back home for his exploits. Lindsay is thought to have found Maria Belle held as a slave on a Spanish ship which his forces captured in the Caribbean. He took her as his lover and she later gave birth to his daughter.
Margo Stringfield, an archaeologist at the University of West Florida, has been digging at the site of the house of Dido’s mother, Maria Belle. Stringfield found, among other things, a document, signed by Sir John Lindsay, deeding a lot in Pensacola, Florida, to Maria in 1772. “It was such an unusual situation -you would not normally have men conveying property to an ex-slave.”
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| LORD MANSFIELD & SIR JOHN LINDSAY |
In 1764, when Dido was three, Lindsay was sent to Pensacola to test naval equipment. Maria Belle accompanied him. Once in Florida, Lindsay took his pick of land that had been granted to the British Navy. “The British named the streets after men of importance and I believe Lindsay chose this lot deliberately,” says Stringfield. 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 it appears to have ended in 1774, when Maria returned to Pensacola alone.In the deed for the house, Lindsay guaranteed Maria her freedom, and he set her up well. Stringfield has found china tea pots and cups, “a beautiful decanter top” and pieces of delicate wine glass. “It was certainly a genteel life.”
Lindsay returned to London after the war in 1765 and bought his young daughter, who was baptised as Dido Elizabeth Belle in 1766 at St. George's, Bloomsbury. In London in the 18th Century there were around 10,000 black people already in the city, and there were more of mixed parentage by the time Belle was living there.
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| KENWOOD HOUSE, HAMPSTEAD |
Lindsay took Dido Belle to Kenwood House in Hampstead which was set in beautiful landscaped gardens with a view of St Paul’s Cathedral six miles away. Kenwood House was the home of Lindsay’s Uncle, William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, and his wife Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Mansfield. The Murray family raised Belle as a free, educated woman along with their great-niece and Dido's cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray, whose mother had died when Elizabeth was six. The Mansfield’s took Belle in to be Lady Elizabeth's playmate and, later in life, her personal attendant and companion, .
Belle lived at Kenwood House for 31 years and "was treated like the rest of the family when she was in company with only the family." As the black, illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, Belle was too well-born to belong with commoners but too different to be welcomed whole-heartedly in high society. When the Mansfield’s were entertaining, Belle didn't eat with the guests but she was always treated as "a loved but poor relation" by the family.
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| FROM THE FILM BELLE |
Being given expensive medical treatments and luxurious bedroom furnishings, were further evidence of her special position at Kenwood She had a four-poster bed draped in chintz, mahogany furniture in her rooms and costly remedies were purchased when she was ill. She received an allowance that was twice the annual salary of the first coachman. She, just like Elizabeth, had private lessons from a governess and was taught how to play the piano. “Dido was very, very privileged,” says William Murray, a descendant of the Earl . “She was in the top 5 per cent, perhaps the top 1 per cent, in terms of how she lived."
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| PAINTING OF DIDO AND ELIZABETH |
The family commissioned a painting of Dido and Elizabeth. Completed in 1779, it was formerly attributed to Johann Zoffany though is currently thought to have been painted in the Zoffany style by David Martin. It is unique in British art of the 18th century in depicting a black woman and a white woman as near equals. It shows Dido alongside and slightly behind her cousin Elizabeth, carrying exotic fruit and wearing a turban with a large ostrich feather. Dido is portrayed with great vivacity, while her cousin appears more sedate and formal; both women wear gowns reflecting their high social status. They are standing together on the grounds of Kenwood and her cousin's hand lies gently upon Dido's arm, suggesting affection and the possibility that they are walking the grounds together. Their positioning in the painting may hint to differences in their race: Elizabeth stands holding a book while Dido holds a plate of fruit, as if on her way to serve others. However, Dido's gown and accessories demonstrate an expensive, fashion-forward style contrasting with Elizabeth's more traditional dress.
Esther Chadwick, a member of the History of Art department at Yale University said “What’s remarkable is that Dido is painted at the same height as Elizabeth Murray, and Elizabeth Murray is shown reaching out to her. But what’s most unusual is her direct gaze.”
The painting is owned by the present Earl of Mansfield and housed at Scone Palace in Perth, Scotland. In 2007, it was exhibited in Kenwood House, together with more information about Belle, during an exhibition marking the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act 1807. For a long time, the double portrait at Scone Palace was labelled with only one name: “The Lady Elizabeth Murray”. As William Murray explains, “It was only when my grandmother was taking some tourists around Scone in the early Nineties that one of them who had heard of Dido questioned who was in this portrait.” The family then started digging for more information on Belle.
Lord Mansfield had a close paternal relationship with Belle. She often assisted him in his work by taking dictation of his letters and later acted as his personal secretary. This sort of work was normally done by a male clerk. Belle he had beautiful handwriting as a result of her good education.
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| FROM THE FILM BELLE |
“So why did the first Earl take her on?” asks William Murray. “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 was dispatched to London aged 12 to make his own way.”
One of Mansfield's friends, American Thomas Hutchinson, a former governor of Massachusetts who as a Loyalist had moved to London, recalled in his personal diary that Belle "….was called upon by my Lord every minute for this thing and that, and showed the greatest attention to everything he said".
He also talks about his first impressions of her at Lord Mansfield's house, saying:
"A Black girl 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. I knew her history before, but my Lord mentioned it again. Sir Lindsay, having taken her mother prisoner in a Spanish vessel, brought her to England, where she 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 shewing a fondness for her – I dare say not criminal.”
A reference to Belle also appears briefly in volume II of James Beattie's Elements of Moral Science. Beattie refers to her intelligence, saying;
"But I happened, a few days after, to see his theory overturned, and my conjecture established by a negro girl about ten years old, who had been six years in England, and not only spoke with the articulation and accent of a native, but repeated some pieces of poetry, with a degree of elegance, which would have been admired in any English child of her years."
Following this is a footnote which states, "She was in Lord Mansfield's family ; and at his desire, and in his presence, repeated those pieces of poetry to me. She was called Dido, and I believe is still alive." This is and the quotations from Thomas Hutchinson are some of the few direct references to Dido found in primary source material.
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| FROM THE FILM BELLE |
As Belle grew older, she took on the responsibility of managing the dairy and poultry yards at Kenwood. This was a typical occupation for ladies of the gentry. Belle was given an annual allowance of £30 10s, which was several times the wages of a domestic servant. By contrast, Lady Elizabeth received around £100, but she was a beneficiary in her own right through her mother's family. Belle, quite apart from her race, was illegitimate, in a time and place when great social stigma usually accompanied such status.
Lady Mansfield died tragically early in 1784 and her husband never got over her loss. Mansfield’s retreat from public life began then. After his retirement, he withdrew to the first floor apartments at Kenwood. According to the novelist, Fanny Burney, writing in her diary at this time,
“Poor Lord Mansfield has not been downstairs, the housekeeper told us, for the last four years…”
Then a year later, Elizabeth left Kenwood to marry George Finch-Hatton. Elizabeth and Belle had been friends and companions since they were small children.They shared everything, but now Elizabeth was to embrace the life she had been bred for, as a wife and mistress of Eastwell Park in Kent. She would bear five children and their son George would become the tenth Earl of Winchilsea and fifth Earl of Nottingham.
With no sons, it was Lord Mansfield’s nephew Lord Stormont who would inherit Kenwood, and it would have been unlikely that he would have wanted Belle there. Now more than ever she 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.
Not surprisingly, Lord Mansfield and Belle grew even closer after his wife’s death. After Elizabeth’s marriage, Mansfield added a codicil to his will, giving an extra £200 for Belle ‘to set out with’. It seems he was worried about what would become of her after his death. Over the years he added more codicils increasing her inheritance.
The original will of 1782 also specifically requests that his wife’s friend the Dowager Duchess of Portland should bequeath Belle a portrait of himself by Van Loo, ‘to hang in her room, to put her in mind of one she knew from her infancy, and always honoured with uninterrupted confidence and friendship’.
The phrasing here is astonishing: for a lord to have stated in his will that he honoured a young black woman would have been remarkable enough, but for Mansfield to say that Belle honoured him with her confidence and friendship gives an intimation of the deep affection and respect in which he held her. Equally importantly in this document of 1782 he made a striking statement, ‘I confirm to Dido Elizabeth Belle her freedom,’ revealing his absolute determination that there should be no possibility of her somehow being sold back into slavery after his death.
Belle's father had died in 1788 without legitimate heirs, bequeathing £1000 to be shared by his "reputed children", John and Elizabeth Lindsay. Historian Gene Adams believed this suggested that Lindsay referred to his daughter as Elizabeth, and she may have been named Dido by his uncle and aunt after they took charge of the girl.. A contemporary obituary of Sir John Lindsay, who had eventually been promoted to admiral, acknowledged that he was the father of Dido Belle, and described her:
"[H]e has died, we believe, without any legitimate issue but has left one natural daughter, a Mulatta who has been brought up in Lord Mansfield's family almost from her infancy and whose amiable disposition and accomplishments have gained her the highest respect from all his Lordship's relations and visitants."
When Lord Mansfield died in 1793, Belle lost her friend and protector – but she had become a woman of some means. Belle was in her 30s and no doubt considered herself past marriageable age at this point but this was to change very shortly.
In his will written in 1783, Lord Mansfield bequeathed her with £500 as an outright sum and a £100 annuity, which she received after his death in 1793. In 1799 Belle also inherited £100 from Lady Margery Murray, one of two female relatives who had come to live with and help care for the Murrays in their later years.
William Murray left his niece Elizabeth Murray £10,000. Her father was in line to inherit his father's title and more money.
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| FROM THE FILM BELLE |
Five months after her great-uncle's death in March 1793, Belle married John Davinier, a Frenchman who worked as a gentleman's steward. They wed on 5 December 1793 at St George's, Hanover Square. They were both then residents of the parish. He was the son of the local Reverend in Hampstead, and they had known each other, at least by sight, for many years. They moved to what is now Ebury Street in Belgravia. The Daviniers had at least three sons: twins Charles and John, both baptised at St George's on 8 May 1795; and William Thomas, baptised there on 26 January 1802. The young family must have lived a comfortable life, thanks to the legacies Belle had and Davinier’s earnings as a trusted servant.
Belle died of natural causes in 1805 at the age of 43, and was interred in July of that year at St George's Fields, Westminster, a burial-ground close to what is now Bayswater Road. In the 1970s, the site was redeveloped and her grave was moved.
Her husband later remarried and had two more children with his second wife.
Belle's son Charles Davinier served with the Madras Army - one of the territorial armies of the East India Company , preceding the British Indian Army. In 1810, he was listed as a lieutenant in the 15th Native Infantry In August 1836, he married at Kensington Church, Hannah Nash, youngest daughter of J. Nash, Esquire, of Kensington. At this time, he held the rank of captain in the 30th Native Infantry. In August 1837, Captain Charles Davinier was relieved from his former duty and was "to have charge of Infantry recruits" in the headquarters at Fort St. George. He retired from service in 1847, still being with the 30th Native Infantry. After his retirement he lived with his wife, children and servants at Lansdowne Villas in Notting Hill, where he died on 24th January 1873.
Belle's last known descendant, her great-great-grandson Harold Davinier, died childless in South Africa in 1975.
Belle’s great-uncle, Lord Mansfield, in his capacity as Lord Chief Justice, ruled in two very significant slavery cases.
The first was that of James Somerset. A slave who had been brought to England, Somerset escaped, was caught and then forced onto a ship bound for the West Indies. Somerset’s “owner” argued he could do with him as he pleased. But witnesses were shocked by Somerset’s violent capture and commentators horrified that a man’s freedom could be denied on English soil. Mansfield set him free, judging that colony slave laws were not binding in England.
The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory: it's so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England.
Mansfield's ruling that slavery did not exist in common law and had never been introduced by positive law was taken by abolitionists to mean that slavery was abolished in England.
His ruling was narrow and reserved judgment on this point, saying only that the slave's owner had no right to remove Somerset from England against his will. Mansfield later said his decision was intended only to apply to the slave at issue in the case. At the time, it was suggested that Mansfield's personal experience with raising Dido Belle influenced his decision. Thomas Hutchinson later recalled a comment by a slave-owner:
"A few years ago there was a cause before his Lordship brought by a Black for recovery of his liberty. A Jamaica planter, being asked what judgment his Lordship would give [answered] 'No doubt... he will be set free, for Lord Mansfield keeps a Black in his house which governs him and the whole family.'"
The second case he ruled on was The Zong massacre. In 1781, a slave ship bound for Jamaica threw 132 slaves overboard. The ship’s owners claimed the vessel had run out of water and the crew had to sacrifice some slaves to save the 300 others on board. Now, they wanted their insurers to pay up for the lost “cargo”. The insurance company rejected the claim and it found its way to Lord Mansfield.
“It is a very shocking case,” he wrote. It appalled English society. The legal argument hinged on whether the slaves had been killed out of necessity or whether, as was suspected, they had become diseased during the journey - and therefore worthless - and had been murdered for the insurance pay out. In the end, the owners couldn’t prove necessity and dropped the claim amid a storm of negative publicity.
Dido Belle’s story has been told in plays, films and books:
Dido Belle (2006), a film by Jason Young, was written as a short period drama titled Kenwood House. It was workshopped at Battersea Arts Centre on 21 June 2006 as part of the Battersea Writers' Group script development programme.
Shirley J. Thompson's operatic trilogy, Spirit Songs – including Spirit of the Middle Passage about Dido Elizabeth Belle, with Abigail Kelly in the role – was performed with the Philharmonia Orchestra at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, in March 2007 as part of the 200-year commemoration of the act abolishing the international slave trade.
Let Justice Be Done, a 2008 play by Mixed Blessings Theatre Group, explores the influence that Belle might have had on her great-uncle's Somersett Ruling of 1772.
An African Cargo by Margaret Busby, a play staged by Nitro Black Theatre Co-operative at Greenwich Theatre, 2007, in commemoration of the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, deals with a landmark 1783 trial presided over by Lord Mansfield at the Guildhall, resulting from the Zong massacre. The character of Dido Belle expresses to the audience feelings of horror and injustice for the murder of the slaves on the ship.
Family Likeness, a 2013 novel by Caitlin Davies, was inspired in part by the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle. Zadie Smith mentions the story of Belle in her 2016 novel Swing Time when the narrator goes to Kenwood House and overhears a tour guide talking about her.
Belle (2013), a major feature film directed by Amma Asante, explores Dido's life as the multiracial natural daughter of an aristocrat in 18th-century England; she became an heiress but occupied an ambiguous social position. The film is based on the 1779 painting of Dido and her cousin Elizabeth, formerly thought to be by Zoffany. The film stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dido and Tom Wilkinson as her guardian Lord Mansfield.
Author Paula Byrne was commissioned to write Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle (2014) as a tie-in to the 2013 film Belle. It was published as an audiobook when the movie opened in the United States.
The film Belle, directed by Amma Asante and starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, tells Dido Elizabeth Belle’s story for the 21st century. Like all historical-biographical films, it takes considerable artistic licence even with the few facts that we know about her. The Zong case, being more dramatic, is made the centrepiece of the courtroom drama, although the Somerset ruling was more significant for the abolitionists’ cause. John Davinier becomes an idealistic clergyman’s son instead of a French servant and much of their romance is invented but the spirit of the film is true to the astonishing story of Belle’s bond with Lord Mansfield.
Belle’s grave may be lost and she may have no living descendants, but the painting remains a testament to her extraordinary legacy. She lives on for ever in this portrait, striding back from the orangery, perpetually in motion, gazing out boldly with her quizzical, dimpled smile, making no apology for her presence and her vitality.
Just as the portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray sparked Paula Byrne’s interest, it was also the starting point for Belle director Amma Asante. ‘I’d just been to see an exhibition entitled The Black Character in Art, so when Damian Jones [Belle’s producer] sent me a postcard of this portrait depicting a black girl and white girl with equal prominence, I knew it was significant.’ Amma’s interest in Belle’s story grew and so began her journey to turn it into a film.
Amma had to make some changes to the known facts about Belle’s life: ‘We wanted to show the development of Dido’s relationship with her father figure, Lord Mansfield and her romantic affairs, alongside the documenting of this momentous time in history.’
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| FROM THE FILM BELLE |
Set against the background of the Zong slave massacre, Amma made Belle older than she would have been at the time as she felt it was key that she had a political conscience and an understanding of the social upheavals. The landmark verdict against slavery that concludes Belle was in fact delivered by Lord Mansfield at the Somerset case, but it is no less significant for this. ‘We don’t know whether Dido had an influence on Lord Mansfield’s verdict, or whether he was that courageous already,’ says Amma.
Despite auditioning ‘every mixed-race actress possible’, on meeting 30-year-old Oxford-born Gugu, Amma knew she’d found her Belle. Gugu had previously won praise for her portrayal of Ophelia alongside Jude Law’s Hamlet and was working in Los Angeles on TV shows Touch and Undercovers at the time of the audition. ‘She has a natural elegance and understood the history,’ says Amma.
‘I’d walked passed Kenwood House [Lord Mansfield’s home in which Belle was raised] countless times when I was living in Highgate and studying at Rada, so I could imagine myself as her,’ says Gugu.
Belle is a coming-of-age story. During the film, Dido discovers her position as a member of the aristocracy, as a daughter and as a black woman,’ says Amma.
OFFICIAL TRAILER FOR THE FILM BELLE (2014)
DOCUMENTARY ON THE LIFE OF DIDO BELLE
BUY YOUR COPY OF BELLE BY PAULA BYRNE HERE
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