Belle (9 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who, then, was the mysterious ‘Bell’, the purported father of Dido Elizabeth? The fact that he is listed without a forename suggests that he was absent from the baptism, and it is possible that this was a mere pseudonym, made up in order to avoid naming Sir John Lindsay as the father. Or there might really have been a man named Bell who had some involvement in Dido’s upbringing in her first five years – it is possible, though unlikely, that Maria really did marry a man named Bell after Captain Lindsay returned to sea.

Dido may have arrived in the Mansfield household in her infancy, or she may have remained with her mother or a nurse until she was five. It is not impossible that she was brought as an infant, with the intention that she should have a ‘below-stairs’ life, but that on the arrival of their other great-niece the Mansfields decided to baptise her and raise her status.

In official documents, she would always be called ‘Dido Elizabeth Belle’. The slave registers of the British Caribbean make it graphically clear that slaves had only one name – not their original African name, but a Christian name given to them by their owner. ‘Dido’ was a particular favourite for female slaves. It was an allusion to the beautiful Queen of Carthage who distracted Aeneas from his mission to found Rome, and who committed suicide when he deserted her – the slave-owners would have been thoroughly drilled in Virgil’s
Aeneid
at school. Perhaps Dido was a name that the cultivated Lindsay especially liked; or perhaps Maria had a particular friend called Dido. It could well be that ‘Elizabeth’ was added, as a proper British Christian name, when she was baptised. If so, it would have been a powerful sign of her adoption into the Mansfield family. Now there were three Elizabeths in the household: Lady Mansfield (born Elizabeth Finch), Miss Elizabeth Murray (daughter of David Murray, Lord Stormont), and Dido Elizabeth. Being illegitimate, she could not be called Dido Elizabeth Lindsay. Though her father’s surname is given as ‘Bell’ in the parish register, it was always subsequently spelled ‘Belle’. Since she grew up to be beautiful, it also seems fitting that she should be called Dido Elizabeth Belle.

The two girls were half-cousins by blood, and were now companions in a great household. The double portrait strongly implies that they became firm friends, despite the fact that they were physical opposites: Elizabeth with her flaxen hair, pale skin and blue eyes; Dido with her mischievous dimple, her cappuccino skin, huge liquid brown eyes, straight nose and exquisite bone structure.

Lord Mansfield, it would become clear to visitors, grew to dote on his two adopted daughters. He was always at his most relaxed at Kenwood. The eighteen-year-old Lady Louisa Stormont visited in 1776, the year in which she became the second wife of the heir to the Mansfield title and estate. We have no record of her impression of Dido, or of the teenage girl who was now her stepdaughter despite being only two or three years younger than herself, but she was captivated by Mansfield’s charm and charisma, writing in a letter: ‘You did not see enough of Lord Mansfield to know how diverting he is, he says with the gravest face the most comical things imaginable.’
¹²
This is not the image of the great judge that the public was accustomed to, but it chimes well with the opinion of his friends, such as James Boswell and the playwright Richard Cumberland, who remarked upon his ‘happy and en-gaging art … of putting the company present in good humour with themselves’.
¹³

There is every reason to suppose that, like her half-cousin Lady Elizabeth, Dido was brought up to be an educated and accomplished young woman. This befitted their status as Lord Mansfield’s wards. Like other well-to-do girls in the late eighteenth century, they would have learned elocution (by committing passages of poetry and eloquent prose to memory), French, some history and geography. There would have been a strong emphasis on Christian devotion, but they would also have learned to draw, to play a musical instrument and to dance. Horse-riding was considered beneficial to health, and no doubt they would have spent many hours walking in the grounds of Kenwood. Certainly in the case of Elizabeth, there would have been the expectation that she would make a good match when she reached marriageable age, so her accomplishments were a necessary part of her dowry.