‘I’d walked passed Kenwood House [Lord Mansfield’s home in which Belle was raised] countless times when I was living in Highgate and studying at Rada, so I could imagine myself as her,’ says Gugu. The amazing thing about Dido Elizabeth Belle is not that she was mixed-race. Belle married John Davinier, played by Sam Reid in the film, in her 30s.
We are no longer accepting comments on this article. It may well have been that the family were keen to protect. He calculated that rather than let the slaves die on board and be rendered worthless, it would make more sense economically to kill them and claim the insurance money, arguing that the slaves were sacrificed for the others after the water supply had run out. But what’s most unusual is her direct gaze.”. In his will he wrote, “I assert to Dido her freedom.” Mansfield’s sister (played by Penelope Wilton in the film) also left her money as did Sir John Lindsay.
They moved to what is now Ebury Street in Belgravia and had three children, one of whom joined the East India Company. But it transpired that between the first and last group of slaves being thrown overboard, heavy rain had fallen, replenishing the water supplies. One of the women, now identified as Dido Elizabeth Belle, looks over with a cheeky, enigmatic smile, as if daring her viewer to figure her out.
He met Belle during his visit, who was about 18 at the time. “So why did the first Earl take her on?” asks William Murray. When the painting was later shown to Amma Asante she had a similar reaction.
Yet he did not flinch from coming to the judgment that the gossip-mongers said he would. A Jamaica planter, being asked what judgment his Lordship would give [answered] 'No doubt...he will be set free, for Lord Mansfield keeps a Black in his house which governs him and the whole family.’”.
There would have been a strong emphasis on Christian devotion, but they would also have learnt to draw, play a musical instrument and to dance. The double portrait has a long and distinguished tradition. We tend to think of mixed-race children as a modern phenomenon, but London has been a cultural melting pot since at least Roman times. “A few years ago there was a cause before his Lordship brought by a Black for recovery of his liberty. Gugu had previously won praise for her portrayal of Ophelia alongside Jude Law’s Hamlet and was working in Los Angeles on TV shows Touch and Undercovers at the time of the audition. The only thing we know for certain is that after her mother’s death, Captain Lindsay took a bold and unconventional step in arranging for his small daughter to be entrusted to Lord and Lady Mansfield and brought up in England, along with her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray. That was cleared to make way for the redevelopment of the Bayswater area in the Seventies. They were also bringing up Elizabeth Murray, the daughter of their nephew Lord Stormont, whose wife had died when Elizabeth was six. The Mansfields would have been keenly aware of the furore Dido’s presence in their home caused. “We were never looking out at the painter but up in awe at the white protagonist. 'The security that Belle had known with the Mansfields began to change', His discomfort is evident from every line he writes about the black girl’s presence: ‘She is neither handsome nor genteel.
They shared everything.
‘She has a natural elegance and understood the history,’ says Amma. 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. He calls her Dido, which I suppose is all the name she has. When an epidemic broke out on board, the captain made the decision to throw one third of the 442 slaves into the sea. The Kenwood portrait was moved to Scone Palace in Perth, Scotland, and the family assumed that the beautiful black girl was Elizabeth Murray’s maid. I knew this was something very different.” Esther Chadwick, a member of the History of Art department at Yale University, agrees. But other, rarely registered aspects of Jane Austen’s England are at the centre of the frame: the uncomfortable knowledge of where the fragrant leaves and sculpted sugar loaves at the ladies’ tea parties have come from; and, in Belle (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who was Ophelia opposite Jude Law’s Hamlet at the Donmar Warehouse in 2009), the evidence of what their men got up to when they were far away at sea or on the plantations. Critics have long been asking why is Dido pointing to her face? In Belle they’re less than delighted when Lindsay turns up with his dark-skinned child. “She is my blood,” he replies.
Dido Elizabeth Belle was born into slavery in 1761in the British West Indies to an enslaved African woman known as Maria Belle. In the end, the owners couldn’t prove necessity and dropped the claim amid a storm of negative publicity. We simply don’t know whether she was conceived by force, by consensual passion or as ‘duty’, which might have brought material benefits to her powerless mother on board the slave ship.
Over the years he added more codicils increasing her inheritance. The extraordinary thing about Dido Belle is that her father, a 24-year-old Navy officer called John Lindsay, took her home to England and asked his extended family to raise her.
Their story is recounted in the diaries of Thomas Hutchinson, a former governor of Massachusetts who attended a dinner party at Kenwood in August 1779. “She was in the top 5 per cent, perhaps the top 1 per cent, in terms of how she lived, her allowance, her dress, her education.” But Belle’s position was far from clear-cut. Lord Mansfield, left, was a barrister whose rulings changed the rights of slaves; Belle’s father, right, was naval officer Sir John Lindsay, Tom Wilkinson stars as Lord Mansfield and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dido Elizabeth Belle in the film. The artwork depicts two high-born women, both in lavish 18th-century dresses, and both gazing good-naturedly out from the painting. In the film, Belle experiences a political awakening during the trial and becomes involved in the fight against the ship’s owners. Belle and Elizabeth would have been taught elocution, French, some history and geography. It appalled English society. Dido Belle, the mixed-race daughter of an 18th-century British aristocrat, is the subject of a mysterious painting and a new film, Belle. In 1784 Lady Mansfield died and it was said that her husband never got over her loss. It seems he was worried about what would become of her after his death. For a long time, the double portrait at Scone Palace was labelled with only one name: “the Lady Elizabeth Murray”.
Philip and Fiona discover the fascinating family history behind a remarkable 18th century painting.
Wealthy, titled and powerful, he was equally known for his verbal brilliance and his fair-mindedness. She was Belle’s mother. “The British named the streets after men of importance and I believe Lindsay chose this lot deliberately,” says Stringfield. 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. His name by this time was irrevocably linked with the rights of slaves as a result of his judgment in the infamous Somerset case of 1772.
“You would not normally have men conveying property to an ex-slave.”.
Lord Hutchinson, who was an ex-Governor of Massachusetts, attended a dinner party at Kenwood in 1779.
But the spirit of the film is true to the astonishing story of Belle’s bond with Lord Mansfield. After coffee the ladies left the company to walk in the gardens, and – to Hutchinson’s horror – Lady Elizabeth walked arm in arm with Belle. Then a year later, her cousin Elizabeth left Kenwood to marry George Finch-Hatton. When Lord Mansfield died in 1793, Belle lost her friend and protector – but she had become a woman of some means.
Kenwood House in North London, where Belle lived with the Mansfields. According to Murray, they had known each other, at least by sight, for many years. Lindsay seems to have met Belle’s mother, a slave named Maria, on a captured ship in the West Indies. How she met her husband, a servant of French extraction called John Davinier, remains a mystery. But witnesses were shocked by Somerset’s violent capture and commentators horrified that a man’s freedom could be denied on English soil. But it appears to have ended in 1774, when Maria returned to Pensacola alone. Maria Belle probably accompanied him and this is when Dido most likely passed into the Mansfields’ care.
He was astonished when, after dinner, the 18- or 19-year-old Belle came into the drawing room to take coffee with the guests. Duration: 2 minutes Despite auditioning ‘every mixed-race actress possible’, on meeting 30-year-old Oxford-born Gugu, Amma knew she’d found her Belle. “I think it’s because of his own experience of being an outsider.” Mansfield grew up in Scotland, the fourth son of the Viscount of Stormont. But a new book and film reveal that Dido Elizabeth Belle was, in fact, the illegitimate daughter of a slave whose privileged upbringing helped change racial injustices for ever, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, left, and Sarah Gadon, who star as Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray in Belle. He was the son of Sir Alexander Lindsay, 3rd Baronet and his wife Amelia, daughter of David Murray, 5th Viscount S With no sons, it was Lord Mansfield’s nephew Lord Stormont who would inherit Kenwood, and it would have been unlikely that he would have wanted Belle there.
Other works about Dido include the plays "Let Justice Be Done" and "An African Cargo"; the musical "Fern Meets Dido"; and the novels "Family Likeness" and "Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle." At Kenwood, says Murray, “she was treated like the rest of the family – when it was just the family. One of these was the Zong insurance claim, which forms the centrepiece of the film. It was a noble but impoverished line and Mansfield was dispatched to London aged 12 to make his own way. ‘I’d just been to see an exhibition entitled The Black Character in Art, so when Damian Jones [Belle’s producer] sent me a postcard of this portrait depicting a black girl and white girl with equal prominence, I knew it was significant.’ Amma’s interest in Belle’s story grew and so began her journey to turn it into a film. “What’s remarkable is that Dido is painted at the same height as Elizabeth Murray, and Elizabeth Murray is shown reaching out to her. ‘We were busy – then came Boris’s statement’, The Trial of the Chicago 7, review: Aaron Sorkin supplies a barnstorming courtroom drama for the ages. Two years after their marriage Belle gave birth to twin boys, Charles and John, though it appears that John did not survive infancy. Lord Mansfield died in 1793, aged 87, and Belle married five months later. The black, illegitimate daughter of a nobleman occupied a peculiar, between-stairs rank; too well-born to belong to the serving classes but too different to be wholly welcome in high society. Pearl Harbour, the sequel: Hollywood, Japan, and the battle to make Tora!
Mansfield could have ruled that Somerset was a piece of property. 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. Stringfield found, among other things, a document, signed by Sir John Lindsay, deeding a lot in Pensacola, Florida, to Maria in 1772.