Belle (8 page)

In his speech, described by Horace Walpole as ‘an incomparable oration’, Murray said: ‘My great ambition is to go through life with the character of an honest man. I am not afraid of calumny. I had rather be the object than the author of it.’
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Despite these stout words, the case made him aware of the power of whispers around Court, Parliament and Chambers. Murray was found innocent of any wrongdoing, but the rumours that he was a Jacobite continued to dog him – despite the fact that he had been involved in the prosecution of the leaders of the uprising of 1745. Fear of Jacobite associations was probably one of the reasons he never returned to Scotland. Coming from north of the border, and having been subject to smears and false allegations, had given him an understanding of the position of the outsider and the victim. This made him all the more determined to listen to both points of view, and not to prejudge a case.

Murray’s most recent biographer, Norman Poser, provides strong evidence that casts doubt on his supposed rejection of Jacobitism. As a young man, Murray wrote two letters offering his support and loyalty to the Old Pretender, whom he called ‘the King’. By doing so, Murray, usually so careful and cautious, had made himself extremely vulnerable. Those letters were a time bomb, and could have put an end to his career if they ever came to light. Poser attests to an important contradiction in Murray’s character: ‘his inclination to present a persona to the outside world that was not necessarily consistent with his real thoughts’.
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Nevertheless, his name officially cleared, in 1754 he was elevated to the position of Attorney General. He and Lady Betty had moved from Lincoln’s Inn Fields to Bloomsbury Square, but now he needed a residence worthy of his new status – somewhere close to Westminster, but sufficiently rural for him to relax and live the life of a country gentleman.

He found the perfect place, on the edge of Hampstead Heath: Kenwood House. It would be Murray’s country retreat, a glittering symbol of his success and how far he had come. Bloomsbury Square was convenient enough when Parliament and the law courts were sitting, but Kenwood would be his home. It was a gleaming white villa, sitting high on a hill in 112 acres of lush parklands surrounded by an ancient wood. Across the Heath one could glimpse the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. As a young man, Murray had walked with Pope on Hampstead Heath, and had seen and coveted Kenwood, little imagining that one day it would be his.
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In 1756 Murray reached the pinnacle of the legal profession, becoming Lord Chief Justice, which made him the head of the judiciary and President of the Courts of England and Wales. He was created Lord Mansfield, Baron of Mansfield.
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As befitted his newly elevated status, he commissioned the Scottish Adam brothers, the foremost architects of the day, to expand and remodel Kenwood. They added a third storey, and stuccoed the entire façade. An Ionic portico was added to the house’s entrance, to make it suitably classical. Entrance hall, staircase and ante-room were all created with supreme elegance. Robert Adam also remodelled the south front rooms, Lord Mansfield’s dressing room, the breakfast room, Lady Mansfield’s dressing room and the housekeeper’s room. In the 1770s he published an account of his work at Kenwood in a series of eight lavish engravings with accompanying texts. He wrote that Mansfield ‘gave full scope’ to his ideas, and that his brief was to preserve a similitude between the old and the new.
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Robert Adam added a neoclassical library, which would also serve as a receiving room, to balance the orangery that was already attached to one side of the house. It would come to be regarded as one of his most splendid interiors. In a letter to Mansfield the Duke of Newcastle said that he longed to see ‘your improvements and particularly your great room, which I hear is a very fine and agreeable one’. Kenwood’s walls were hung with beautiful and expensive paper, depicting Indian and Chinese figures, while huge mirrors and Venetian paintings lined the walls.
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It was a house built to impress.

Mansfield purchased neighbouring land, increasing the house’s already extensive grounds. He replaced the formal gardens with a more ‘landscaped’ look, in accordance with the latest fashionable taste. Some of the fishponds were merged to become Wood Pond and the grandly named Thousand Pound Pond, presumably to reflect its exorbitant cost. A mock stone bridge made of wood was also erected. The estate had its own farm and dairy, and an avenue that would be described by the poet Coleridge as ‘a grand Cathedral Aisle of giant Lime Trees’.
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Mansfield was a great tree-planter, especially favouring beech and oak. He was also fond of exotic plants, which he grew in the orangery. In 1785 he erected a new hothouse, sixty feet long, in which peaches and grapes were grown – prize specimens of those very fruits carried by Dido in the painting that was by then hanging in the big house.
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The gardener, Mr French, supplied Mansfield with a daily ‘nosegay of the finest oder and richest flowers which he took with him to the bench’.
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This presumably helped him overcome the stench of London, which was another reason for having a second, more rural, home. Despite Kenwood’s convenient proximity to Westminster Hall, it was a tranquil and restful haven. ‘The whole scene,’ wrote Robert Adam, ‘is amazingly gay, magnificent, beautiful and picturesque.’
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Lady Mansfield wrote to her nephew in May 1757: ‘Kenwood is now in great beauty. Your uncle is passionately fond of it. We go thither every Saturday and return on Mondays but I live in hopes we shall soon go hither to fix for the summer.’
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The one thing that the house lacked was children.

That was soon to change.

6

The Adopted Daughters

Lady Mansfield, Dido’s adoptive mother, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1776

To explain how it was that Dido came to grow up amid the beauties of Kenwood instead of on a slave plantation in the West Indies, we must return to the circumstances of her birth. What options were available to Captain Lindsay when he discovered that Maria was pregnant with his child?

Though colonial law stated that inter-racial liaisons were illegal, the many mixed-raced children were testament to its inefficacy. We know little of the relationship between Captain Lindsay and Dido’s mother, but his care and public recognition of their mixed-race baby daughter suggests that he felt at least some sort of emotional connection to his lover. So how unusual was it for a white master to protect his mixed-race child, to recognise that beneath the different skin colour was the same blood?

House or domestic slaves in plantation great houses were often lighter-skinned, or mixed-race, known as ‘mulattoes’. They were considered to be superior to field slaves, and were often given better treatment. They worked as housekeepers, cleaners, cooks, seamstresses, nursemaids, often as wet-nurses to white children. They could be given presents and treats, including cast-off clothes and jewellery. Often their lives were closely entwined with those of their white masters.

Wherever there are males and females living and working in close quarters, there will be sexual relations; particularly so when women are considered as part of a man’s property. Some female house slaves slept willingly with their masters; others refused, and were raped and flogged for doing so.

Thomas Thistlewood’s journals record instances of rape, including the gang rape of a female domestic slave. He also records Creole (mixed-race) women offering themselves in return for privileges and presents. There was sometimes the hope that a mulatto child would raise their status. A pregnancy could even be a step towards manumission, as planters often wanted to set their own children free. Some house slaves were the progeny of white sugar planters and overseers. It was often glaringly obvious that a light-skinned slave serving at dinner was waiting on his or her own half-siblings, such was their resemblance to their father. Some white mistresses turned a blind eye to their husband’s black children. Others beat the children as an outlet for their own frustration and rage. Some masters gave the impression of feeling a stronger attachment to their mulatto children than to their legitimate progeny.

Thomas Thistlewood and his slave ‘wife’ Phibbah had a son called ‘Mulatto John’, who was adored and spoilt by his parents. He was manumitted at the age of two, was educated and entered into an apprenticeship as a young man. Thistlewood’s nephew John was propositioned by a slave called Lettice, who wanted to have a ‘child for a master’.
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He agreed to meet her in the sugar distillery, where he was supervising the labour of the slaves. A Barbadian planter called Jacob Hinds left property to his offspring by three of his black slaves, saying in his will: ‘I would call them my children but that would not be legal as I never was married!’
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Lighter-skinned slave women sometimes rejected black men as sexual partners so that they could secure a white man who might raise their status. A Jamaican planter noted that ‘the
brown
females … seldom marry men of their own colour, but lay themselves out to captivate some white person, who takes them as mistresses, under the appellation of housekeepers.’ This was known as ‘nutmegging’.
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Mulatto women could exercise a degree of power and control over black slaves, whom they regarded as inferior. Mary Prince described in her
History
the ill-treatment she received at the hands of a mulatto slave who was put into a position of responsibility: ‘I thought it very hard for a coloured woman to have rule over me because I was a slave and she was free … the mulatto woman was rejoiced to have power to keep me down.’
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White masters in the sugar islands developed a bizarre system of classification to define the ‘new race’ they had created. A ‘mulatto’ was the offspring of a white and black pairing; a ‘sambo’ was the offspring of a mulatto and a black; and a ‘quadroon’ was the offspring of a mulatto and a white.
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In Jamaica, the birth register made a careful note of each category of mixed-heritage child.

If Captain Lindsay had left Maria in the West Indies, perhaps setting her up with a domestic position on one of the big plantations, Dido would not have looked anything out of the ordinary. She would have been just another of the many mulatto girls, assumed to be the offspring of a master and a slave. Clearly of great physical beauty, she could well have grown up to become the mistress of a plantation owner. Far from the prying eyes of the mother country, of English moral outrage, the sugar barons were making their own rules. In England, as we will see, it was quite a different matter to be a mixed-race child.

We simply don’t know whether Dido Belle was conceived by force, by mutual consensual passion, or as a ‘duty’ that might bring material benefits to her powerless mother. The only thing we can know for sure is that Captain Lindsay took a bold and unconventional step in arranging for his small daughter to be brought up in England, entrusted to a family member to be raised as a young lady. Not only that, but the man she was entrusted to was by this time one of the most powerful and famous in the land: Lindsay’s uncle, Lord Chief Justice the Earl of Mansfield, master of his domain at Kenwood.

According to the only report that survives, ‘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.’
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The lack of detail is tantalising. How accurate is this story? Was Maria pregnant on arrival in England, or was Dido actually born at sea or in the West Indies? Where did Lindsay lodge his pregnant black mistress when she first disembarked onto British soil – and their baby, if she was born by this time? How did he broach with Lord and Lady Mansfield the prospect of their taking a mulatto child into their household? How old was Dido when she was brought to Kenwood? What happened to Maria after that? How long did Lindsay keep her? What happened to her after he married? Did she die in childbirth? Or become a servant somewhere in England? Or return to the West Indies? And what would have been the reaction of innkeepers, lodging-house mistresses, servants, neighbours, people in the street, to the sight of the handsome naval captain making arrangements for his pregnant black slave? Or to a black woman with a young baby? Did a servant or junior officer work on his behalf? Was a midwife present to assist with the delivery of the child?