Life at Kenwood was as idyllic as ever, but the security that Dido Belle had known with the Mansfields was about to change in the years after the Zong massacre. The first change came with the death of Lady Mansfield in 1784. Despite her reserves of energy, her health had been precarious since the stress of the Gordon Riots. Her husband was indefatigable in his efforts to nurse her. Newspapers reported that he ‘was most assiduous in the sick chamber, constantly administering what the physicians had ordered and sitting up several nights together’.1 The Mansfields had always had a strong and happy marriage, despite their childlessness.

Lady Mansfield’s death was a blow to her family, and it was said that her husband never got over her loss. Just a year later, there was another huge change in the family’s circumstances when Elizabeth Murray left Kenwood on marrying her cousin, George Finch-Hatton. As Lord Stormont’s eldest daughter, it was Elizabeth’s duty to make a good marriage, and she did not fail. George Finch-Hatton’s father Edward was sister to Lady Mansfield. George was later MP for Rochester, and following their wedding in December 1785, he and his new bride moved to Eastwell Park in Kent, leaving behind Dido and the settled life of Kenwood.

Perhaps Dido felt the loss of Elizabeth even more than she did that of Lady Mansfield. After all, they had been friends and companions since they were small children. They had shared everything. But now Elizabeth was to embrace the life she had been bred for, as the wife and mistress of Eastwell Park. She would bear five children to George Finch-Hatton, and their son George would become the tenth Earl of Winchilsea and fifth Earl of Nottingham.

Furthermore, with Lady Mansfield departed to heaven and Miss Elizabeth to Kent, and with Lord Mansfield having reached eighty, Dido would have been acutely conscious that the time would soon come when Lord Stormont would inherit Kenwood. What would happen to her then? Viscount Stormont and his young second wife Louisa had a family of five children – Caroline, David, George, Charles and Henry. He was on the brink of succeeding to both the Mansfield and the Stormont lines of the Murray family, inheriting two titles and two fortunes. Kenwood would be his, and he would be unlikely to want Dido there.

Now, more than ever, Dido would have been aware of her peculiar position in the family. It was inconceivable that she could hope to make a similar marriage to Elizabeth. Not merely because of her skin colour, but also because she was illegitimate. Although her father acknowledged paternity and provided for her, there was no question of her taking the Lindsay name. She was Miss Belle. In such circumstances, similar to those of the mixed-race Chevalier de Saint-George, she was prevented from making a society marriage, no matter how beautiful and accomplished she was.

But Dido was not wholly alone with Lord Mansfield at Kenwood. Some time before Elizabeth’s marriage, two of Mansfield’s other nieces, Lady Anne and Lady Margery Murray, came to live at Kenwood. Spinsters in their middle years, it is possible that they came to help run the house. The account book kept by Lady Anne survives, dating from 1 Januuary 1785 to 2 April 1793. It gives an intriguing insight into the way Kenwood was run. All expenditure is accounted for: the farm, servants’ wages, charitable gifts, letters and turnpike fees, food, drink and fuel. It’s a reminder of the size of the community at Kenwood.

Not surprisingly, Lord Mansfield and Dido grew even closer after his wife’s death and Elizabeth’s departure. The Kenwood account book includes references to ‘special presents by Ld M’s order’. Dido received a quarterly allowance of £5, augmented by birthday and Christmas presents. Her yearly allowance would thus have been £30 (for comparison, a kitchen maid was paid £8 per annum, the first coachman about £15).

It is clear that Dido’s health was well attended to. She had two teeth extracted in 1789, at a cost of five shillings, and was given ass’s milk when she was ill, at the not insubstantial cost of £3.4s.2d. The account book also has a description of her bedding being washed and ‘reglazed’, at a cost of twelve shillings. This involved scouring and cleaning the bed and drapery and then pressing the fabric between hot rollers, to give it a silk-like sheen.

After Elizabeth married, Mansfield added a codicil to his will, giving an extra £200 for Dido ‘to set out with’. It seems from this that he was worried about what would become of her after his death. A few days later he had second thoughts: £200 was not enough. He added a further codicil: ‘I think it right, considering how she has been bred, and how she has behaved, to make a better provision for Dido, I therefore give her Three Hundred Pounds More.’ As ever, his affection and solicitude for her shine through.

Mansfield grew increasingly to rely on Dido, even using her as his amanuensis. In May 1786 she wrote out a letter to Justice Buller. It reveals that she had a clear, neat hand. The letter concerns a highly technical point in a marine insurance case, Lockyer v Offley – whether the clause in the policy which covered loss of a ship if seized by His Majesty’s Customs for barratry (a fraud committed by the master of a ship on the owners, in this case smuggling on his own account) was operative.2 At the end of the message is a playful comment: ‘This is wrote by Dido I hope you will be able to read it.’ Mansfield knows only too well that the letter is eminently legible – the remark springs from his pride in Dido. It also reveals that Justice Buller must have been clearly aware who Dido was.

There was another death in the family in 1788. Sir John Lindsay’s marriage to Miss Milner did not keep him at home in Scotland. Between 1769 and 1772 he was commodore and commander-in-chief in the East Indies, with, as his biography puts it, ‘his broad pennant in the frigate Stag’. In June 1770 he had been appointed a Knight of the Bath, a considerable honour for a not very senior naval officer. He was subsequently recalled from the East Indies, apparently due to the hostility of the East India Company towards his investigation into its dealings with the Indian Nawabs. His career continued closer to home. He rose to become commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet. In 1784 he entertained the King and Queen on board his ship at Naples, but soon after that his health began to fail and he returned to Britain. He was promoted, honorifically, to the rank of Rear Admiral in September 1787, but died on 4 June 1788 at Marlborough, on his way back to London from Bath, where he had been staying on account of his poor health. He was just fifty-one. He was buried with full naval honours in Westminster Abbey,3 laid to rest in the Henry VII chapel beside the body of Lady Mansfield, who had cared for his natural daughter for so many years. We do not know whether at any time in his later years he ever went to Kenwood and met his grown-up mixed-race daughter. There would have been no reason for him to stay away: Lord Mansfield was fond of his nephew, as can be seen from his original will, in which he left £1,000 to him ‘in memory of the love and friendship I always bore him’.

Lindsay never had legitimate children with his wife, Mary, but his will mentioned two natural children, Elizabeth and John, to each of whom he left £500: ‘I further give and bequeath unto my dearest wife Mary Lindsay, One Thousand Pounds in trust to be disposed by her for the benefit of John and Elizabeth my reputed son and daughter in such a manner as she thinks proper.’ It is not clear whether ‘Elizabeth’ refers to Dido, or to another illegitimate daughter. ‘John’ seems to have been an illegitimate son, conceived in Scotland. But the only child mentioned in his obituary in the London Chronicle was Dido. She was described as ‘a Mulatto who has been brought up in Lord Mansfield’s family almost from her infancy, and whose amiable disposition and accomplishments have earned her the highest respect from all his Lordship’s relations and visitants’.4 This is the first mention of Dido’s existence in the public prints, and it is wholly laudatory. One only wishes that some ‘visitant’ to Bloomsbury or Kenwood, other than the appalling Hutchinson, had left a record of their encounter with her ‘amiable disposition and accomplishments’.