eighteenth century witnessed a flourishing of heroine-centred novels that explored female consciousness and identity. Questions of marriage and money, propriety and property, were constant themes. Some of the fictional heroines were low-born, lacking in wealth and status and connections; but all were white. It would take a little while longer for a pioneering novelist to depict a mixed-heritage girl, a ‘mulatto’: that is what Jane Austen did during the Regency years in her final, unfinished novel, Sanditon.
The white girl’s open book is a hint of her education and gentility. Few women in the eighteenth century went to school, but well-born girls were educated at home. A good library was an essential room in a gentleman’s country house: the book perhaps also serves to flatter the commissioner of the painting by implying that he has a particularly well-stocked collection.
The sitting girl holds her book in one hand, but our attention is drawn more to the other hand, the one that is stretched out: a white hand gripping the black arm of her companion. In the age of slavery-abolitionist fervour, the motto ‘Am I not a sister and a friend’ was often emblazoned on ladies’ pincushions and hair ornaments. Some modern spectators might feel that the black girl’s ‘ethnic’ costume, her basket of fruit and her sexually charged demeanour are degrading. But the hand gesture suggests affection and equality between the girls. For all the ambiguity of the image, the standing girl is ultimately represented as sister, cousin or friend, not as a servant, slave or inferior being. She is drawn into the picture as a cherished member of the family.
Portraits tell stories, and this one tells a story of love and sisterhood, unity between black and white, illegitimacy and gentility, vitality and virtue. A story, furthermore, that brings us to the very heart of a larger historical story: the abolition of the slave trade.
In the course of the last two and a bit centuries, this double portrait has moved between Kenwood House on the northern boundary of Hampstead Heath in London, where it was painted, and Scone Palace just outside Perth in Scotland. Kenwood House was, and Scone Palace is, the seat of the Earls of Mansfield. The portrait was commissioned some time in the late 1770s or early 1780s by William Murray, the first Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice and the most admired judge in eighteenth-century Britain. His name was by this time irrevocably linked with the question of slavery and abolition, as a result of his judgement in a famous case of 1772.
But these are not Lord Mansfield’s daughters. He and his wife Elizabeth (née Finch) were childless. The girl in the foreground of the picture is Lady Elizabeth Murray, his great-niece, who was brought up at Kenwood following the death of her own mother when she was a young child. For much of the twentieth century, the Mansfield descendants believed that the other girl was some kind of household servant. In an inventory of Kenwood taken in 1904, the portrait was described as ‘Lady Elizabeth Finch-Hatton with a Negress Attendant’, and attributed to the great society artist Johann Zoffany.1 There was a tradition of portraits of masters or mistresses with a servant or slave in the background. It was assumed that this was a variation on the theme, though with unusual prominence given to the servant. The family did not stop to consider the irony of Lord Mansfield, forever seen as a key figure in the abolition of slavery, commissioning a portrait that might seem to imply that he kept a slave himself. The painting remained little-known.
The old portrait plate at the bottom of the frame is still there today. It records the name of only the white girl – ‘The Lady Elizabeth Finch Hatton’. The black girl remains nameless, a blank.
It was only in the 1980s that she was identified. Her name was Dido Elizabeth Belle, and this book tells her story. She was a blood relative of the white girl in pink and the Mansfield family. The outline of Dido’s life has been pieced together, but details in the surviving archives are sparse. For a fuller picture of her life, we need to set her story in the wider context of slavery and abolition. The only way of glimpsing her life is through the lives of others.
2. Captain Sir John Lindsay, Dido’s father
On 1 June 1760, HMS Trent was docked in Portsmouth harbour. Captain John Lindsay, commanding officer, oversaw her substantial refitting.1 Over the course of the following weeks provisions were brought aboard, the ship’s pine was varnished and there were some short trips into the English Channel to test the new rigging. At the end of the month, the Trent moved out to Spithead. Lindsay had to deal with a few men for drunkenness and insubordination. Extra sails and small arms were taken on board. An unknown sail was spotted off Portland Bill, and the Trent gave chase. She proved herself fully seaworthy. Preparations were finalised for a long voyage. In August she set sail for Porto Santo, then Madeira, then Tenerife. By the end of the month she was at anchor off Senegal, on the west coast of Africa.
Then to Cape Verde, where Lindsay moored in Gorse Road while the crew dried the sails and aired the bread. Soon they would be off the Gambia, and then out into open water, heading across the Atlantic in squally weather. On 18 October they approached the Caribbean island of Montserrat, and a pilot from a Bristol-based privateer came on board. Five days later the Trent engaged with a schooner in French colours and boarded her, only to find the crew gone, but the ship laden with sugar and coffee. They sent the prize to St Kitts. Captain Lindsay and his crew had undergone their initiation on the Caribbean front in the worldwide war between the great colonial powers of Europe.
John Lindsay was born in the year 1737, in the bracing climate of the Easter Ross district of the Scottish Highlands. He was the younger son of a baronet, Sir Alexander Lindsay, who had made a very good marriage to Emilia, daughter of the fifth Viscount Stormont. Emilia was the sister of William Murray, who would later become the first Earl of Mansfield. The choices for the younger sons of the gentry were fairly limited: the Church, the armed forces or a life of idleness. Lindsay went into the navy, which carried more opportunity for adventure than his other options. It was a good decision. He quickly proved himself a fine sailor and a leader of men.
Before the age of twenty he was made a lieutenant and put in command of the fireship Pluto. This was a hazardous occupation: fireships were converted merchantmen, filled with flammable materials and explosives, intended to be sent into enemy lines with the purpose of setting the enemy’s wooden vessels on fire. Sister vessels of the Pluto included the aptly named Blast, Blaze, Etna and Vesuvius. The danger of accidental combustion was great enough in peacetime, but Lindsay got his first command in the midst of the Seven Years War, arguably the first global war, during which the European powers – most notably Britain and France – played out their rivalries in their colonial and trade empires. Lindsay’s first expedition aboard the Pluto was as part of a fleet sent to capture the French Atlantic naval port of Rochefort. The mission was not a success, but Lindsay’s contribution earned him a new posting just a few weeks later. Now he had command of the twenty-eight-gun frigate Trent, recently constructed out of pine, which was quicker to build with but less durable than the traditional English oak. He served on the Trent for the rest of the war, first in home waters and then from the West Indian station.
Reports of his exploits were soon reaching the Admiralty. In February 1759 the Trent joined the Vestal in giving chase to an enemy ship at the western end of the English Channel. This was a French frigate, La Bellone, en route to Martinique. They engaged in a four-hour battle at close quarters. La Bellone was duly captured, taken into service and renamed the Repulse.2 After various further exploits, the Trent was taken back into dock. A report was filed in the Admiralty: ‘The Portsmouth Officers inform us the Trent is touched with the worm but she does not make water and can be repaired and used for about 9 or 10 months
