Belle (22 page)

Jane Austen met the Finch-Hattons on many occasions when she was staying with her brother at Godmersham. Although she found Elizabeth quiet and dull, to have known and been on friendly terms with Lord Mansfield’s adopted daughter was of great interest to her. A young girl is brought to a large country house to be brought up with wealthy relations. Her status is somewhat ambiguous: is she a servant, or is she a fine lady? How should she be raised? Is the story of Dido Belle a shadow flickering in the background of the tale of Fanny Price, who rises from being the most lowly member of the household to the best-loved? It is hard to believe that it is no more than a coincidence that the Austen novel most connected to the slave trade is called
Mansfield Park
.

In this novel, Mansfield Park, the great English country house, has been overtaken by interlopers from the city. But the real corruption lies at the door of the flawed custodians, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, and Lady Bertram’s sister Mrs Norris, who lives nearby. Mansfield Park is not an old English house, like Pemberley in
Pride and Prejudice
. It is of comparatively recent construction, and is built on the fruits of the slave trade. Sir Thomas Bertram is an MP, the head of a respected family, and a planter.

The shadow story of
Mansfield Park
is slavery, to which the Austen family were fiercely opposed, despite their own connections with plantations. Opinions on the slave trade in Jane Austen’s day were part of everyday conversation, as she suggests in
Emma
, where the subject is treated in a brutally casual way by the odious Mrs Elton: ‘Oh my dear, human flesh! You quite shock me; if you mean a fling at the slave trade, I assure you Mr Suckling was always rather a friend to the abolition.’ Mr Suckling has a seat near Bristol, and Mrs Elton (born Augusta Hawkins) is the daughter of a slave merchant: ‘Miss Hawkins was the youngest daughter of a Bristol – merchant, of course, he must be called.’ The dash of hesitation tells us that he is a slave trader. This is further hinted at by the fact that the Elizabethan mariner John Hawkins is often regarded as the father of the English slave trade.

It is in
Mansfield Park
that Austen shows her support for the abolition of slavery and her disapproval of sugar planters. Sir Thomas is having problems with ‘poor returns’ from his plantations in Antigua. Jane Austen was an obsessive realist, who always did her research. Though she does not state the reason for Sir Thomas’s diminishing returns, she would certainly have had some in her mind. Was it because, under the influence of the anti-saccharites, the British people had reduced their consumption of sugar and rum? Or because the American war of 1812 greatly disrupted the sugar trade? Or because Antigua, one of the oldest colonies, was suffering from soil exhaustion?
Mansfield Park
was published several years after the abolition of the slave trade, so perhaps Sir Thomas was suffering from a shortage of labour. And slave unrest was a huge problem in Antigua.

Three of Jane Austen’s very favourite writers were Thomas Clarkson, the greatest of the abolitionists; William Cowper, the fervently evangelical poet whose verses became the war cry of the anti-slavery movement; and Dr Samuel Johnson, who was unshakable in his opposition to the evils of the plantations. The root of Clarkson’s passion for abolition was his devout Christianity. He also argued that the slave trade was highly destructive and dangerous to the Royal Navy – in time of war there should be no distraction from the defence of the realm. Christianity and the navy were two things dear to Jane Austen’s heart.

Austen was personally connected to the sugar plantations through family and friends. Her father’s relations, and her cousins, the Hampsons and the Walters, had plantations in Jamaica; on her mother’s side, the Leigh-Perrots had plantations in Barbados. Her brother James’s first wife was the daughter of the Governor of Grenada. The Austens were great friends of the Nibbs family, who owned a 294-acre plantation in Antigua, of which Jane’s father was a trustee.

Another family connection was with the notorious William Beckford of Fonthill.
³
His father, ‘the uncrowned king of Jamaica’, was the richest of all plantation owners. Known as ‘England’s wealthiest son’, Beckford inherited £1 million at the age of ten (the modern equivalent would be over £100 million). He lost this huge fortune, because he was both a lavish spender (especially on his vast Gothic mansion, Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire) and an absentee proprietor: he blamed his various agents and managers for cheating him in his absence. Agents were notorious for their dissipated lives: they drank, sexually exploited their female slaves, squandered money and mired the plantations in debt. The man Beckford principally blamed for his ruin was James Wildman, whom he called an ‘infernal rascal’. Wildman managed Beckford’s plantations in Jamaica, and purchased the ‘Quebec’ plantation from him. Beckford became convinced that he had swindled him of his fortune.

Wildman fell in love with a woman called Fanny Knight, who was Jane Austen’s favourite niece. Fanny entreated him to read her aunt’s novels (one wonders what he made of
Mansfield Park
), and Jane wrote, teasingly, that she would like Fanny to live on his estate, Chilham Castle in Kent. Fanny would have become a plantation mistress, but in the end she refused Wildman. He was eventually forced to sell Chilham Castle because of his falling income after the emancipation of the slaves.

William Beckford was a prime example of the absentee planter. One of the main themes of
Mansfield Park
is absenteeism, which represented a considerable problem in plantation management for both planter and slave. Sir Thomas Bertram is an absentee sugar baron, who is forced to return to his suffering plantations, taking his unruly elder son with him. We are not told whether he is being cheated by his agent, but his visit is a necessity – most sensible absentees visited their estates once a year to prevent feckless agents from running them into the ground.
⁴
It was a known fact that slaves suffered badly and had increased mortality rates on absentee estates.
⁵

In
Mansfield Park
, the absenteeism of Sir Thomas causes damage not only in Antigua, but on his estate in England. In his absence the house falls under the rule of the vicious bully Mrs Norris, Austen’s most unremitting portrait of corrupted power. It is her unregulated power in the great house that causes the real damage to its inhabitants. It is one of the ironies of the novel that Sir Thomas goes out to his sugar plantations to sort out their problems, only for his own house to be thrown into moral chaos and subversion by his absence.

Sir Thomas comes to see the error of his ways. Like Shakespeare’s Prospero, he acknowledges that Mrs Norris is his Caliban: ‘His opinion of her had been sinking from the day of his return from Antigua … he had felt her as an hourly evil, which was so much the worse, as there seemed to be no chance of its ceasing but with life; she seemed a part of himself, that must be borne forever.’
⁶

If the name of Mansfield was synonymous with the cause of abolition, then that of Norris was its opposite. Any reader familiar with Thomas Clarkson’s great
History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade
would have known of the infamous slave captain Robert Norris, who was a key figure in Clarkson’s account. When Clarkson met him in Liverpool, Norris was initially charming and helpful, and claimed that he deplored the slave trade; but in fact he was a hypocrite, and when it came to a parliamentary inquiry, instead of testifying in support of the abolitionists he argued against them, brazenly claiming that the slave trade had positive effects. He argued that slaves had excellent, well-ventilated living quarters, ate delicious food, danced and sang, made necklaces out of African beads, and were given luxuries such as tobacco and brandy.
⁷
His captain’s logbook told a different story, of a slave insurrection that Norris quelled with two deaths and twenty-four lashes each for the women who led it. The slaves then planned a mass suicide, ‘by drowning or self-incineration’. Norris shot the ringleader. ‘Norris seemed to have no ordinary sense of his own degradation,’ wrote Clarkson, ‘for he never afterwards held up his head, or looked the abolitionists in the face.’
⁸
His name thus became a byword for pro-slavery sympathies. It hardly seems a coincidence that the villainous Mrs Norris shares his name.

Austen knew the connection between slave-operated plantations and English high society. She provides a critique of the English landed gentry and their wealth generated by slaves. To make clear the connection between the great house and Sir Thomas’s ill-gotten gains in Antigua, the heroine, Fanny Price, describes Mansfield’s grounds as ‘plantations’ – a not-so-subtle reminder of where the money for the estate came from. And it is Fanny alone, Austen’s most timid, shy heroine, who is brave enough to ask the intimidating Sir Thomas about the slave trade:

‘Did not you hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?’

‘I did – and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.’

‘And I longed to do it – but there was such a dead silence.’
⁹

Fanny – a reader, a thinker, a true observer of the world – is no coward or weakling. She speaks truth to power, and asks of England the question that no one else in the novel dares to raise: ‘We have no slaves at home – then why abroad?’ Sir Thomas later acknowledges that it is his adopted daughter who is the true daughter of Mansfield Park.

In Jane Austen’s unfinished last novel,
Sanditon
, there is a ‘half-Mulatto’ character called Miss Lambe, a wealthy heiress of seventeen who has been brought from the West Indies to complete her education in England. ‘Chilly’ and ‘tender’ in the cold English weather, she ‘had a maid of her own, was to have the best room in the lodgings, and was always of the first consequence’.
¹⁰
Just as it might be said that Dido was always of the first consequence to Lord Mansfield. Jane Austen died in the midst of writing
Sanditon
, so we will never know what would have happened to Miss Lambe.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Arabella Pike, my fabulous commissioning editor at William Collins, and Damian Jones, producer of the motion picture
Belle
, for suggesting that I write this book. Also to Terry Karten and Jillian Verillo in New York and everybody on the team who saw the book through production so smoothly – Stephen Guise, Joseph Zigmond and especially my wonderful copy-editor Robert Lacey. Helen Ellis is the best of publicists.

Grateful thanks to the Earl of Mansfield, to Viscount Stormont, to William Murray (Master of Stormont), Sarah Adams (archivist) and Elspeth Bruce (administrator) for access to the Mansfield and Stormont Papers at Scone Palace; also to Caroline Brown in Special Collections, University of Dundee Library. Thanks also to the ever-helpful staff in the Public Record Office at Kew and the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich; also to Jenny Foot, from the curatorial team at Kenwood. Guy Holborn, Librarian at Lincoln’s Inn, kindly provided the image of Dido’s letter and explanatory information about it. Professor David Armitage, Chair of the History Department at Harvard University, provided me with some valuable references.

As always, I was superbly looked after by Andrew Wylie, Sarah Chalfant and James Pullen at the Wylie Agency.

Thanks to Oxford High School and Mrs Anne Brazel, for giving me the opportunity to try out material. The girls were fantastic, especially Phoebe Cole and Hildie Leyser. Thanks, Ellie Bate, for not being too embarrassed by my presence.

On a more personal level, I want to express heartfelt thanks to my friends here at Oxford, in particular Laura Ashe, Kate Cooper, Steven Methven, Jo Quinn and Kate Tunstall. It’s been an interesting year, and I’m not sure how I would have survived without your unstinting support, loyalty and friendship. Thanks also to Corinna Hilton.

Thank you Father Matthew Catterick for ‘foot-stepping’ Pimlico with me. Tom and Harry Bate, thank you for being so cheerful and low-maintenance. Grateful thanks to the delightful, hard-working and beautifully quiet Ewa Checinska.

As always I want to reserve very special thanks for Jonathan Bate. You’re simply brilliant. I couldn’t do this without you.

Paula Byrne

February 2014

Notes

Chapter 1: The Girl in the Picture

  
1
  Mansfield and Stormont Private Family Archive at Scone Palace, NRAS776/volume 763, quoted by kind permission of Lord Stormont.

Chapter 2: The Captain

  
1
  Unless otherwise indicated, all information in the opening pages of this chapter is derived from Lindsay’s hitherto unexamined captain’s log, National Archives, ADM 51/3994: Captain’s Log, HMS
Trent
, 1 June 1760 to 9 September 1763, cross-checked with National Archives, ADM 52/1481: Master’s Log (18 January 1760 to 9 September 1763, the master being the chief navigation officer). Also the
Trent
’s Muster Rolls: ADM 36/6867–9.

  
2
  See Isaac Schomberg,
Naval Chronology, or an Historical Summary of Naval and Maritime Events
(5 vols, 1802), 1, p.324.

  
3
  Report by John Cleveland, Admiralty Papers, now in the John Caird Library, National Maritime Museum (ADM 354/165/28).