What was to become of Dido now that Lord Mansfield was dead?

Overnight, she had become a woman of some means. Whether or not she was the ‘Elizabeth’ to whom her father John Lindsay had left a half share of £1,000, she now had the annuity of £100 a year for life in Lord Mansfield’s original will, the sum of £200 ‘to set out with’ in the first codicil, and the further £300 in the second. The consequence was clear: she had money of her own, so she could not expect to live at Kenwood with Lord Stormont and his family. Having been loved and cherished, living in splendour there all her life, she now had to face the harsh reality that she was to be turned out of her home. With Mansfield’s death she had lost her friend and protector.

Dido had turned thirty, and no doubt would have considered herself past marriageable age. Her cousin, now Lady Finch, had two children, and was happily settled in Kent. She apparently did not offer Dido a home. Dido would seem to have had little chance of meeting suitable men, yet within nine months of her uncle’s death she was married. Her husband was a servant of French extraction called John Davinie, Davinière or, most commonly in the surviving documentary records, Davinier.1

How she met him remains a mystery. The likeliest possibility is that it was through Lord Stormont, the new Earl of Mansfield. As a result of his time as ambassador in Paris, and his close connection with the French court, Stormont had a number of French servants working for him in London and at Scone. Some of them may even have been well-born refugees from the French Revolution, to whom he gave shelter and employment. There is a surviving accounts book of Stormont’s which lists numerous French servants, though none with the name Davinier. It seems highly probable that upon moving into Kenwood, Stormont took it upon himself to solve the problem of Dido by setting her up with one of his own men, or a French servant otherwise known to him.

Dido could never have made a match as brilliant as that of her cousin Elizabeth. Her status was uncertain. She was certainly more than a servant, and had noble blood in her veins, but as a ‘natural’ daughter, she could not expect the same privileges and opportunities as a child born in wedlock. Nevertheless, her inheritance set her well apart from the servant ranks. Financially, she was better off than many genteel women of her era. Dido also had her beauty, her ‘amiability and accomplishments’. She was educated. It was a good match for John Davinier.

On the marriage licence, it states that John Davinier was resident in St Martin-in-the-Fields, the parish of Lord Stormont’s townhouse. The entry in the marriage register for St George’s, Hanover Square, dated 5 December 1793, says that both bride and groom were of that parish. Dido signed with her full name, ‘Dido Elizabeth Belle’. The witnesses were Martha Davinie, who was presumably John’s mother or sister, and a man called John Coventry. The latter could conceivably have been the Honourable John Coventry, younger son of the Earl of Coventry, or perhaps it was a certain John Coventry, ‘citizen and joiner’, who held the freedom of the City of London.2

St George’s was one of the most fashionable churches in greater London. The couple were married there by licence. This was more expensive than being married by banns, and was sometimes perceived as a status symbol. Often the upper classes were married by licence, to avoid the banns being read out three successive times in church. This meant you could be married more quickly, and was also convenient if you were from a different parish.

The following year Dido changed her surname on her banking account from Belle to Davinier. A year later, she gave birth to twin boys, Charles and John, though it appears that John did not survive infancy. The name Charles was presumably chosen because of a Davinier family connection, while John would have been either for Dido’s husband or her father, Sir John Lindsay. Another son, William Thomas, was born in 1800.3 His first name was clearly chosen in homage to the memory of Lord Mansfield.

Land tax payments – the equivalent of modern property tax – reveal that John and Dido Davinier lived in Pimlico. An 1804 map of the area shows that it was largely fields at that time, though it was rapidly being built up. The ground was swampy, with creeks running from the Thames. It was essentially a middle-class area, not a fashionable one. The Daviniers lived on Ranelagh Street. This had long been an open roadway, with just a few houses on one side, but the north end had undergone development. A typical property was described as ‘A neat leasehold house, very pleasantly situated … containing two rooms on each floor, with convenient offices and a large garden.’4

One of Dido’s neighbours was the miniature painter and engraver Charles Wilkin. Others in the street were a mixture of trade and professional people. There was an architect called George Shakespeare, a dentist, a vicar’s daughter, a music seller (who went bankrupt), a herbalist called Mrs Ringenberig who, upon examination of morning urine, could provide surprising cures for female complaints (the offer of her services was a fixture in the classified ads of the London papers). Most were respectable types, but, as in any community, every now and then something untoward might lead to an unwelcome newspaper story. On one occasion a woman from Ranelagh Street was taken to court for having ‘put a live bastard child down the privy’.

Notable landmarks nearby were Locke’s Lunatic Asylum and two popular pleasure gardens. Ranelagh Gardens in Chelsea was the more famous, boasting a superb rotunda, a Chinese pavilion and beautifully laid-out formal gardens. Dido’s home was closer to the rather less salubrious ‘Jenny’s Whim’, which was a popular tavern and tea garden in Pimlico.5 The pleasure gardens were renowned as public spaces where different classes intermingled to walk, eat supper and attend musical concerts. They were also notorious as the haunts of prostitutes and the scenes of illicit assignations.

The district was only just becoming suburbia, and still had a rural feel. Much of the area was given over to market gardens. It was easily the largest area for vegetable produce on the north side of the river, so close to the densely populated streets of Westminster and the City of London.6 Pimlico was a far cry from the splendours of palatial Kenwood and its luxuries, but Dido was now her own mistress, and mother to two boys. She had her own home, from which she could not be turned away, or hidden out of sight when visitors came. When she looked at her children it is probable that she felt a sense of belonging and kinship that was denied her at Kenwood. In the sugar islands, such children would have been categorised as ‘quadroon’, meaning they had three white grandparents and one black. But in London, Dido’s children would have something she never had: their legitimacy, and a home where they were raised by their own parents.

What was it like living in London as a mixed-race couple in the early years of the nineteenth century? In the absence of direct evidence about Dido’s experience of married life, we must look to other marriages. One of the better-known is that of Francis Barber, the trusted manservant and friend of the childless Dr Samuel Johnson. Johnson educated Barber, and made him his heir. Johnson’s opposition to slavery was well known: he once made a toast to ‘the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies’.7

Johnson’s devotion to Barber is well documented, and many resented what they perceived as his sway over Johnson, just as people gossiped that Lord Mansfield was in thrall to Dido. Barber was born into slavery in Jamaica, but was raised and educated in England by his owner Colonel Richard Bathurst, who brought him from the West Indies. In his will, Bathurst confirmed Barber’s freedom, and left him a small legacy. Bathurst’s son helped to arrange a job for Barber as Johnson’s manservant, and he lived in Johnson’s household for thirty-four years. Their relationship was complex: Barber ran away several times, but always returned. Johnson had him taught to read and write so that he could act as his secretary, taking care of his correspondence and his manuscripts. Barber asked to read the popular novel Evelina, by Johnson’s friend Fanny Burney.

Barber, as Johnson noted with much amusement, was very popular with the female sex. One young woman, a haymaker, followed him to London from Lincolnshire ‘for love’.8 But he married a beautiful white woman called Elizabeth Ball, and the couple and their children lived in Johnson’s house in Bolt Court, near Fleet Street.

Barber was fiercely jealous of his wife, and was only reassured of her fidelity when she produced a daughter ‘of his own colour’.9 However, evidence suggests that the child was actually light-skinned, leading to much speculation and gossip: Hester Piozzi, Johnson’s great friend, noted cattily that Barber’s daughter was ‘remarkably fair’. It was rumoured that Elizabeth was a former prostitute, and that the children were not Barber’s. Barber’s jealousy of his pretty wife led Mrs Piozzi to refer to him and Elizabeth as Othello and Desdemona.

In fact, Frank and Elizabeth’s marriage was a happy one, and they produced three children. Their son Samuel became a Methodist preacher, and all three of them married whites, as did Dido’s children. Johnson expressed a desire that after his death the Barber family should live in his own home town of Lichfield, and their descendants still live there today.

Another mixed-race marriage was that of Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa), who married a local white woman called Susan Cullen in Soham, Cambridgeshire. They lived together happily and had two daughters. One of their children died, and the other, Joanna, married a Congregational minister. She inherited £950 on her father’s death, leaving her comfortably off. As the mixed-race daughter of a famous man, Joanna Vassa is the closest comparison to Dido that we have. Like Dido she married a white man and lived in London, although her first years were spent in Devon and Essex. She and her husband were seemingly devoted to one another, and were buried together.

The Barbers and the Vassas are examples of successful inter-racial marriages. One historian has noted that mixed-race marriages in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ‘tended not to be seen as problematic to the English because they primarily occurred among the lower working classes’.10 Most were between a black man and a white woman; unions between black women and white men were rare outside plantation life. The few examples tend to be found in the servant classes. Having money could actually be a disadvantage for a black woman in search of matrimony. A white footman named John Macdonald felt himself unworthy of a black woman called Sally Percival, not because of her race but because she was wealthy, having been left an inheritance by her former master.11 Sally, Joanna and Dido were unusual because their relative wealth gave them status.

So what was Dido’s status in Pimlico as Mrs John Davinier? It is unlikely that she became part of London’s black community or even had black friends, as did Francis Barber. Her elder son Charles was sent to Belgravia House School, a respectable white establishment. Having been given an education, he was in a position to apply for work that might lead to a position as a clerk. He duly applied to the East India Company in 1809, when he was fourteen, naming his parents as John and Elizabeth Davinier, and stating that he was born in 1795. Little is known of the life of the younger brother, who bore the Lord Chief Justice’s Christian name.

Lady Margery Murray, one of the Mansfield nieces who had joined Dido in caring for the Earl in his final years, died in 1799, a ‘spinster of Twickenham’. In her will, proved on 9 May of that year, she left the sum of £100 to ‘Dido Elizabeth Belle as a token of my regard’. This will was written before Dido married, and a codicil dated September 1796 added an important modification: ‘The sum of one hundred pounds left in my Will to Dido Elizabeth Belle, she being now married to Mr Davinier, I leave the said hundred pounds for her separate use and at her disposal.’12 Lady Margery evidently wanted the money to go to Dido herself, not to Davinier. This was the age before the nineteenth-century Married Woman’s Property Acts, so without such a stipulation the money would automatically have gone to Dido’s husband. Was Lady Margery worried that John Davinier might prove to be a gold-digger, more interested in Dido’s money than in loving and caring for her?

Dido did not live to see the abolition of the slave trade. She died in her early forties, in 1804, of unknown causes, and was buried that July in the St George’s, Hanover Square overspill burial ground on the Bayswater Road.

Four years later, John Davinier was living in spacious rooms above a baker’s on Mount Street, Grosvenor Square – still in the parish of St George’s, but at a more upmarket location than Ranelagh Street. The insurance policy for his property describes him as a ‘Gentleman’.13 When he married Dido he was a servant. Now that he was a widower, thanks to her money, he had risen to become a gentleman – someone who did not have to work for a living.

The following year, Davinier had a daughter, Lavinia, by a white woman called Jane Holland. Three years after that, in 1812, the couple had another child, a boy, although it was not until 1819 that Davinier married Jane. The last sighting we have of Dido’s husband suggests that he returned to his native France: in 1843 his daughter Lavinia was married in St George’s church, and a newspaper noted that her father, John Louis Davinier, was of ‘Ducey, Normandy’.14

Dido’s elder son Charles became an officer in the Indian army. Perhaps he was as brave and intrepid as his grandfather. He had a son, also christened Charles. But the Christian name that this boy used was the surname of Dido’s father. In 1901 he signed an Attestation upon joining the Canadian Scouts, part of the Imperial Irregular Corps, at Durban in South Africa.15 He mentioned his previous service in the Boer War, including participation as a gunner in the Relief of Ladysmith. And he gave his name as Lindsay d’Avinière. While ‘d’Avinière’ is probably a reversion to the correct spelling of his surname, which had been phonetically rendered in English as the identical-sounding ‘Davinier’, the choice of ‘Lindsay’ as his Christian name suggests the family’s pride in their noble and military heritage.

Dido’s grave was moved in the 1970s, due to the redevelopment of the Bayswater area, and the location of the reburial of her remains is unknown. There is no grave to mark her life or death, and for many years she was utterly forgotten. The Kenwood portrait was moved to Scone Palace in Perth, and the family assumed that the beautiful black girl in the background was Elizabeth Murray’s maid. But many visitors to Scone today are irresistibly drawn to Dido, and want to know her story. Who is she? What is she doing in the portrait?

It was only in the 1970s and ’80s that research was undertaken, notably by Gene Adams, a local historian from Camden who immersed herself in documents associated with Kenwood, uncovering Dido’s deep connection to the house and the family. Her presence in the household, and Lord Mansfield’s adoption of her as a cherished daughter, ensured that he viewed the atrocities of the odious slave trade through a personal lens, through the eyes of a much-loved young black woman.

Jonathan Strong, James Somerset, Dido Elizabeth Belle. These were individuals, black people living in Georgian London, who helped to change history, but have been largely neglected. Mansfield knew that the fate of thousands of black people rested in his hands: Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

The horrors of the slave trade have receded into the past, though they have not been entirely forgotten. Britain is still a nation of sugar consumers, but not at the expense of a barbaric practice that destroyed the lives of millions of Africans. The economy of the Caribbean sugar islands now chiefly depends on tourism. In Jamaica, guests can dine at the famous Sugar Mill restaurant. In Antigua, tourists can rent the Sugar Mill Villa. Ironically enough, Dido’s last descendant, her great-great-grandson Harold Davinier, was traced to South Africa, where he died in 1975, during the apartheid era. He was classified as a white.

The 2014 feature film Belle, directed by Amma Asante and starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, tells Dido’s story for the twenty-first century. Like all historical-biographical movies, it takes considerable artistic licence even with the few facts that we know about Dido. The Zong case, being more dramatic, is made the centrepiece of the courtroom drama, although the Somerset case was really the more significant for the abolitionist cause. And John Davinier becomes an idealistic clergyman’s son, with a little of the Granville Sharp about him, instead of a faceless French servant. But the spirit of the film is true to the astonishing story of Dido’s bond with Lord Mansfield.

Dido’s grave is lost, and she has no living descendants, but the painting once attributed to Zoffany remains as a testimony to her extraordinary legacy. Striding back from the orangery, perpetually in motion, gazing out boldly at the gazer, with her quizzical, dimpled smile, making no apology for her presence and her vitality. She lives on forever in this portrait, rising out of the darkness into the light.