He knows he has been reproached for showing fondness for her

Thomas Hutchinson

Kenwood was now Dido’s permanent home. Lady Mansfield was considered ‘one of the most domestic females in the Kingdom’. Newspapers reported the pleasure she took in her gardens and her farm, and that she always rose at six o’clock to spend time in the purpose-built dairy before breakfast.1 Dido would nearly always be there with her.2

In the immediate aftermath of the Gordon Riots, and Lord Mansfield’s brush with death, Lady Mansfield’s health became precarious. She suffered a long and serious illness in the winter of 1781–82. With intimations of mortality, Mansfield made out his own will, dated 17 April 1782. He made sure that Dido was well provided for, specifying that she should come into an annuity ‘after the decease of my dear Wife’. The clear intention was that Dido would remain as a companion for whichever of the Mansfields outlived the other, and then be rewarded with enough money to keep herself comfortably for the rest of her days. Over the years he added codicils to the will, increasing her inheritance. The original will of 1782 also specifically requests that his wife’s intimate friend the Dowager Duchess of Portland should bequeath Dido his portrait 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’.3 The phrasing here is astonishing: for a Lord to have stated in his will that he honoured a young black woman with his ‘uninterrupted confidence and friendship’ would have been remarkable enough, but for Mansfield to say that Dido 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 and sobering statement: ‘I confirm to Dido Elizabeth Belle her freedom.’ This of course was an acknowledgement of the fact that as the daughter of a slave, she was herself technically a slave. But it was also an admission that his famous judgement in Somerset’s case a decade earlier might not necessarily be universally applicable. The statement shows that he was still troubled not only about the force and interpretation of the judgement, but also about the possible tension between his pronouncements on the bench and his affections at home.

Mansfield threw himself into more improvements for the house. He may have lost his library in Bloomsbury, but his Adam library or ‘Great Room’ at Kenwood was one of the best in the land. The house was now considered to be the ‘finest country residence in the suburbs of London’.4 Perched on the edge of Hampstead Heath, Kenwood was a very visible house, and it drew many admirers to view its Adam architecture and landscaped gardens. Mansfield’s fame as Lord Chief Justice also attracted sightseers hoping for a glimpse of the great man. Jeremy Bentham, who kept a picture of Mansfield ‘as a great treasure’, once wrote that ‘at the head of the Gods of my idolaltry had sitten the Lord Chief Justice’, and recalled that he ‘frequently went to Caen Wood, as a lover to the shrine of his mistress, in the hope that chance might throw him in his way’.5 Perhaps some visitors also hoped for a peek at Kenwood’s most intriguing inhabitant, Dido Belle.

Having lost so many of his paintings in the riots, Mansfield set about commissioning more to hang at Kenwood. An artist called Richard Corbould provided him with classical landscapes, one including a temple and another a lark. Corbould also drew some sketches of the house and grounds. One of them shows gardeners at work in the foreground, the landscaped lake with a small boat moored at its edge, and the house in the background, with its elegant orangery to one side and the library to the other. An engraving of it, executed by the prolific James Heath, was published in May 1793 by Harrison and Co. of Paternoster Row in London, and appeared in various magazines. Right in the middle of the print, three people are standing on the lawn, two men and a woman. The man to the left bears a ceremonial sword. These are clearly ‘above stairs’ figures, contrasting with the labouring gardeners in the foreground. The woman in the centre appears to be wearing a white turban and white Indian-style pantaloons, seemingly with a gauze-like dress above them. Her face is represented by black shading, in contrast to the white of her dress and head-dress. Examining the figure under a magnifying glass, one is led irresistibly to the conclusion that this could well be a representation of Dido.

The habit of visiting other people’s houses had become well established by this time. Then as now, people visited stately homes when they were on holiday, as may be seen from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, when Mr Darcy’s housekeeper proudly shows Elizabeth Bennet and her uncle and aunt around his home, Pemberley.6 In 1792 the novelist Fanny Burney visited Kenwood to see the house and pictures. She was shown around by the knowledgeable housekeeper, and was especially interested in the pictures, especially a self-portrait by Pope, which for a time was feared to have been burned in the Gordon Riots.7

From the entrance hall, visitors would proceed to the ante-chamber, where – tired, perhaps, from the climb up the hill – they could glimpse the magnificent view across the park and lake towards the London skyline, and even ships passing up and down the River Thames.8 They would then go through to the magnificent Adam library, or ‘Great Room’, which had been built as a receiving room for company. A central marble fireplace was flanked by symmetrical curved recesses, with elegant sofas for visitors. Handsomely carved bookshelves lined the room, above which was an elaborate frieze of lions and deer. One of the best features was a superb ceiling, with stucco work by Joseph Rose. The ceiling panels were painted in softly tinted pinks and greens by the Venetian painter Antonio Zucchi, who also executed the ceiling paintings. Fanny Burney spent ‘a good deal of time in the library’, where she admired ‘first editions of almost all of Queen Anne’s classics, and lists of subscribers to Pope’s Iliad’.9

An inventory of Kenwood that was taken in 1831 reveals the full vastness of the house and its treasures. There were over eighty rooms, including a music room, a schoolroom, a nursery, the Japan room, the clock room, the Long Gallery, as well as numerous bedrooms – the white room, the red room, the blue room, the pink room, the Chintz room, the French bedroom. The house was stuffed with antiques, Turkish rugs, mahogany furniture, oil paintings, Sèvres china.10

The Kenwood inventory also reminds us of the vast machinery of service that was needed to run a large household. There was a kitchen, scullery, pantry, larder, brewhouse, bakehouse, still room, steward’s room; there were maids’ rooms, footmen’s rooms, under-butler’s room, servants’ hall, valet’s room, second coachman’s room, head groom’s room, kitchen maids’ bedrooms, housekeeper’s room, servants’ side room, young ladies’ maids’ rooms. Kenwood was a community of people living and working together, and Dido, who seems to have moved with ease between upstairs and downstairs, a very special figure at its centre.

As magnificent as the interiors were, Kenwood’s greatest beauty lay in its location and grounds. It was in the early 1780s that Lord Mansfield commissioned the portrait of his two wards: the girls he loved in the grounds of Kenwood House, the place he loved. It is a glorious testament to his paternal affection and to the friendship between the girls and the life they had formed at Kenwood.

Lord and Lady Mansfield were good and generous hosts, and received numerous visitors over the years. Some time before the Gordon Riots, Thomas Hutchinson, an American loyalist living in exile in London, had dined with them at Kenwood. He had been Governor of Massachusetts, and was Acting Governor in Boston in 1773 when a group of colonists, protesting against British taxation, boarded three East India Company ships and dumped their entire cargo of tea into Boston harbour – the famous event later known as the Boston Tea Party.11 Hutchinson, who had unsuccessfully insisted that the duty be paid and the tea landed, was one of the most reviled men in America as a result of his loyalty to the Crown, considered a traitor by many American colonists. He would never return to Boston, and died in London in 1780.

Hutchinson kept an extremely full diary. We therefore have a unique record of a dinner party at Kenwood. It took place in August 1779. The Mansfields had invited another guest, Lord Manners. Hutchinson was impressed and charmed by Lord and Lady Mansfield. Lord Mansfield ‘at 74 or 5 has all the vivacity of 50’.12 Of Lady Mansfield he wrote that, although elderly, she ‘has the powers of her mind still firm’. He noted with approval her dignified and elegant appearance, and her simplicity of dress, unlike that of another aristocrat, Lady Say and Sele (‘of the same age I saw at court with her head as high dressed as the young Duchesses etc. what a caricature she looked like!’). In comparison, he noted how ‘pleasing because natural’ was Lady Mansfield’s appearance.

Hutchinson was a frightful snob, obsessed with personal appearances and the latest fashions in hair and dress. He was astonished when, after dinner, the eighteen- or nineteen-year-old Dido came into the drawing room to take coffee with the guests. He noticed every move that she made, from the moment she walked in, sat down with the ladies and took up her cup and saucer. After coffee, the ladies left the company to walk in the gardens. To Hutchinson’s evident horror, one of the young ladies, almost certainly Lady Elizabeth, walked arm in arm with Dido. His discomfort is evident from every line he writes about the black girl’s presence.

One of the most striking things about this journal entry is Hutchinson’s disclosure that he already knew of Dido’s place in the household, and of her story: ‘I knew her history before, but My Lord mentioned it again.’ It is clear from this remark that her presence in the Mansfield family was an open secret. Yet she seems to have been kept out of the newspapers, other than one brief but flattering reference after her father, Sir John Lindsay, died in 1788.

Dido was not invited to dinner with the company, though this does not prove that she was normally excluded from family meals. It may well have been that the family were keen to protect her from stares and questions – or worse, the contempt of people who might look down on her for her colour and illegitimacy. The fact that Hutchinson knew the gossip about her ‘history’ shows that she was an object of fascination in London society. Nevertheless, the fact that she joined the company for coffee suggests that Lord and Lady Mansfield were not ashamed of her, and wanted to show visitors that she was part of the family. No mere servant would ever have been seen drinking coffee anywhere near their masters.

It is clear from Hutchinson’s tone that he took an instant dislike to Dido: ‘A Black came in after dinner … 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. She is neither handsome nor genteel – pert enough.’ The fact is, Dido was handsome and genteel, and that left the American visitor thoroughly discomposed. ‘Pert’ is a most suggestive word: Hutchinson means ‘impertinent’ or cheeky, acting and especially speaking in a way unbecoming to her lowly station (‘Pamela, don’t be pert to his Honour,’ says Mrs Jervis to the uppity servant girl in Samuel Richardson’s hugely influential novel13).

Apart from the obvious and crude racial slurs, Hutchinson’s comments are extremely interesting. His reflections are not just on Dido’s physical appearance (we know from the double portrait of her and Elizabeth that she was extremely beautiful), but on her vivid and strong personality. This was the age of politeness, when young ladies were expected to be meek and timid, and to observe propriety. To sit quietly and wait to be spoken to. The picture that emerges of this unique young woman is of someone who is simply not prepared to be intimidated (‘pert’), who is confident enough to wear the latest fashions (her ‘very high cap’), who is lively and bubbly (‘not genteel’), and who is comfortable in the drawing room sipping a cup of coffee (sweetened with sugar) and on equal terms with her adoptive family (walking arm in arm with her aristocratic cousin). Her energy fizzes from the page, despite Hutchinson’s intention to damn her.

When he toured the gardens after dinner with Lord Mansfield and Dido, Hutchinson noticed the particular closeness between them. Mansfield proudly recounted her responsibilities: ‘She is a sort of Superintendant over the dairy, poultry-yard etc which we visited.’ As they walked and talked, Hutchinson noted that ‘she was called upon by my Lord every minute for this thing and that, and shewed the greatest attention to everything he said’. It was obvious that they doted upon one another. Mansfield was proud of Dido and was clearly showing her off, tacitly letting Hutchinson know how much she was valued.

While they were having coffee, Mansfield had been keen to explain the circumstances of Dido’s birth. He emphasised that she was the daughter of a distinguished man, Sir John Lindsay, that she had been educated, that she had been taken into his care as a small child. Hutchinson sneered, ‘[he] calls her Dido, which is I suppose all the name she has’. That, of course, was a slur on her birth: she was a slave, so she must have had only one name, and further, as a ‘natural’ daughter she had no right to her father’s name. Hutchinson was evidently surprised by Lord Mansfield’s candour in revealing that Dido’s mother was ‘taken prisoner’ by his nephew and brought to England while she was ‘with child’.

Hutchinson goes even further, intimating a more sinister relationship: ‘He knows that he has been reproached for showing fondness for her – I dare say not criminal.’ His phrase ‘I dare not say criminal’ alludes to the legal idiom ‘criminal conversation’, which is to say adultery. Hutchinson is deviously suggesting what he purports to deny: he cannot bear to imagine an innocent, loving, familial relationship between Mansfield and Dido, so he fantasises that it all comes down to sex – a vile thought, given that Mansfield was seventy-four at the time, and Dido a teenager. The slur also feeds into a bigoted view of the sexual voracity of black women: she is ‘pert’, she hangs on every word that Mansfield says, she controls him. It shows Hutchinson in a deeply unpleasant light, but it also reflects the common eighteenth-century predilection for objectifying African women as sexual creatures.

Hutchinson’s insinuation that Dido has somehow, by her arts, bewitched the family into submission chimes with the gossip circulating in London society, to the effect that the highly respected Lord Chief Justice showed favouritism in court to the black cause because of his relationship with Dido.

In the very month of Hutchinson’s visit to Kenwood, Lord Mansfield presided over a case involving a free black sailor called Amissa. A Liverpool slave captain had hired Amissa and paid him part of his wages in advance. But when the ship reached Jamaica, the captain sold him and told his relatives that he had died. Three years later, Amissa was found to be alive, and was brought to London, where he was redeemed (set free). Amissa was awarded the large sum of £300 in damages, with Mansfield telling the jury that such cases should be determined by ‘good policy and humanity’.14

‘He gave me a particular account of his releasing two Blacks from slavery, since his being Chief Justice,’ wrote Hutchinson. In the course of the evening at Kenwood, Lord Mansfield discussed two cases with him, that of James Somerset and that of ‘the Two Princes of Calabar’, which had some similarities to the Amissa case. Their story was extraordinary. The two African princes were called Little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin Robin John, and they were related to the ruler of Old Town in Old Calabar (in present-day Nigeria), Grandy King George. In 1767 they were captured during an ambush and sold into slavery. Having survived a massacre in Old Calabar they were sold in Dominica to a French doctor. After several months they escaped with the help of a ship’s captain, but he double-crossed them and sold them to a merchant in Virginia. Five years later they came across two countrymen from Old Calabar, who had sailed to America on a Bristol ship called the Greyhound. The men recognised the princes, and the ship’s captain, Terence O’Neil, agreed to help them, so they escaped yet again and boarded his ship. But once they arrived in Bristol, O’Neil betrayed them, and tried to sell them. Little Ephraim wrote of his ‘great surprise and horror … when they came to put on the Irons we then with tears and trembling began to pray to God to helpe us in this Deplorable condition’.15

This is where Lord Mansfield entered the story. It was just fifteen months after the Somerset case. Although the princes were imprisoned by O’Neil, they managed to write to Thomas Jones, a Bristol slaver they knew from Old Calabar. Initially he failed to respond, and the princes reconciled themselves to their fate. Then, at the last minute, as one of them recorded, ‘The Lord as good as stayed the wind which prevented our sail then I write agin to Mr Jones which moved him to pity.’16 Jones applied for a writ of Habeas Corpus, arguing that the princes were being held prisoner ‘in order to be conveyed out of this Kingdom to Virginia against their consent and in order to be made slaves’.17 This all sounds very like the Somerset case. Mansfield agreed to the writ, and the men were set free. However, they were captured yet again, and thrown into the lock-up house (temporary jail), and then a house of correction. In the meantime, Captain O’Neil had them arrested for ‘a pretended Debt for their said passage to England’.

Little Ephraim wrote to Lord Mansfield, who ‘sent to fetch us to London where we was examined then Discharged’. The princes argued that they had never been slaves: ‘we were free people … we had not done anything to forfeit our liberty’. Mansfield was troubled because, unlike Somerset, and indeed Thomas Lewis and Jonathan Strong, the Robin Johns had never lived in England: ‘the whole transaction was beyond sea’, and thus more legally complex. After a delay of some days the parties settled, a compromise being reached in which the alleged Virginia owner was reimbursed for the princes ‘as purchase money or value of the two said Africans’, and they were allowed to go free. In a very surprising turn of events, the man who originally captured the Robin Johns was forced to pay £120 to the Virginia owner. The details of the arrangement were formally accepted by the court, Lord Mansfield presiding.

That he had a special interest in the case is suggested by the diary of Thomas Hutchinson, who said that it had given ‘particular pleasure’ to Mansfield, who was ‘much pleased at their relief’.18 This revelation is striking, as this is the only surviving evidence of Lord Mansfield expressing his private thoughts on the slave trade. He is not the judge here; he is not at Westminster, where all eyes are upon him. Here we see Lord Mansfield’s evident pride in his ‘releasing two Blacks from slavery’. And that pride is expressed on an evening when he drinks coffee with Dido and walks with her in the grounds of Kenwood.

Striking, too, is the fact that the Robin Johns appealed to Mansfield in the first place. This suggests the wide-reaching repercussions of the Somerset case, despite the fact that Mansfield always emphasised that it did not abolish slavery as such in England. Rather, it prevented masters from forcibly removing slaves against their wishes. Hutchinson wanted to discuss this sensitive issue, which had had such repercussions in England and America: ‘I wished to have entered into a free colloquium and to have discovered … the nice distinction [Mansfield] must have had in his mind, but I imagined such an altercation would be rather disliked and forbore.’19

One of Mansfield’s enduring concerns about the possible effects of the Somerset case was the economic implications both for the owners who had lost their ‘property’ and would seek compensation, and for the freed slaves who would be rendered homeless and destitute, with the result that they would seek parish relief. In the courtroom he had asked the question, ‘How would the law stand with the respect to their settlement; their wages?’

Charlotte Howe was a slave brought to England by her owner in 1781. Following his death, she was baptised and considered herself to be free. She applied to two parishes for poor relief, but neither would grant it, as the poor law only applied to hired servants. This case exposed Mansfield’s very real concern about who would take responsibility for destitute former slaves. He ruled that the ‘case was very plain … the statute says there must be a hiring, and here there was no hiring at all. She does not therefore come within the description.’

Furthermore, in a pamphlet published in 1786, it was reported that Mansfield used the Charlotte Howe Case to clarify his Somerset ruling:

Lord Mansfield very particularly took occasion to declare, that the public were generally mistaken in the determination of the court of the King’s Bench, in the case of Somersett the negro, which had often been quoted, for nothing more was then determined, than that there was no right in the master forcibly to take the slave and carry him abroad … nor was it held … that on setting foot in this country he instantly became emancipated.20

The dinner at Kenwood with Thomas Hutchinson is of supreme importance, as it shows how Mansfield was torn between the ethical questions of black emancipation and his concerns about its financial implications. Once again, he was agonising over the old question of the rights of liberty versus the rights of property.

But could a human being ever really be reduced to the status of nothing more than an item of property?