Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle. Paula Byrne
of his typical diary entries. (This is not our Dido – the name was commonly given to female slaves.) Thistlewood’s journal shows how institutional violence characterised sugar plantations, how slavery brutalised everyone.16 But there was another side to him, which was developed when he fell in love with Phibbah and became the father of a mixed-race boy. His relationship with Phibbah sheds light on the highly complicated matter of inter-racial pairings.
Thistlewood’s sugar plantation was in the south-east of the island. He would probably have known Sir Thomas Hampson, who also owned a plantation in Jamaica. Hampson was Jane Austen’s cousin twice-removed,17 and the shadow story of her novel Mansfield Park, in which Sir Thomas Bertram owns a sugar plantation in Antigua, is the slave trade. Many people in Georgian England were connected in some fashion with West Indian plantations.
Indeed, the character of the West Indian planter became a staple in British fiction and drama during the period. One of the most popular comedies on the eighteenth-century stage was Richard Cumberland’s The West-Indian (1771). Its hero, Belcour, is a wealthy young scapegrace fresh from his sugar estates in Jamaica, ‘with rum and sugar enough belonging to him to make all the water in the Thames into punch’. His entourage includes four black slaves, two green monkeys, a pair of grey parrots, a sow and pigs, and a mangrove dog.
The fine ladies and gentlemen of England piled into the Theatre Royal Drury Lane to see the exploits of this kind-hearted fictional sugar baron. They would have laughed at his bewildered account of arriving from Jamaica at a bustling English port crammed with sugar casks and porter butts. Belcour is depicted as a harmless libertine, who chases English girls until he is as thin ‘as a sugar cane’ – the mild stage image of such a man was a far cry from the reality of Thomas Thistlewood, with his rapes, his floggings and his sadistic punishments.
Georgian high society was a world away from the sugar islands, where all that mattered was efficient production on the plantations, whatever the human cost. As one wit remarked, ‘Were beef steaks and apple pies ready dressed to grow on trees, they would be cut down for cane plants.’18 But in the words of the eminent food historian Elizabeth Abbott, ‘So many tears were shed for sugar that by rights it ought to have lost its sweetness.’19
Sugar was indubitably the main engine driving the European slave trade. England was not the first country to trade in human flesh, but due to its maritime power it became the dominant transatlantic transporter of enslaved Africans. It has been estimated that British ships transported between three and four million Africans to the Americas. The Caribbean islands became the hub of the British Empire, the most valuable of all its colonies. By the end of the eighteenth century, £4 million-worth of imported sugar came into Britain each year from its West Indian plantations.20 Britain was growing rich on the white stuff. Its impact was epic and irreversible.
5. Elevations of the north and south fronts of Kenwood House, and the interior of Lord Mansfield’s Library, by Robert and James Adam
William Murray was born on 2 March 1705, at Scone Abbey in Perthshire, Scotland. He was the fourth son of the fifth Viscount of Stormont and his wife Margaret, and one of fourteen children. Though he was born to Scottish nobility, it was an impoverished line, and he was forced to make his way in the world by his intelligence and hard work. He attended Perth Grammar School, where he mixed with boys from different social backgrounds and was taught Latin, English grammar and essay-writing skills. He later said that this gave him a great advantage at university, as those students educated in England had been taught Greek and Latin, but not how to write properly in English. When he was eight his parents moved away, and left him and his younger brother Charles in the care of his headmaster.1
In 1715, when William was in his tenth year, the recently formed political union between Scotland and England was shaken by the first ‘Jacobite’ rising, otherwise known as the ‘Fifteen’. This was an attempt, led from Scotland, to overthrow the newly installed Hanoverian King George I and restore the Stuart monarchical line that had come to an ignominious end with the deposition of King James II in 1688. Perceived to be returning the country to Catholicism, James was deposed and exiled when a group of powerful Protestant aristocrats invited William of Orange to come to England with an army. The Dutch invasion came to be known by Parliament as the ‘Glorious Revolution’; among its consequences were a strengthening of Protestantism, Whig supremacy and a limitation of royal powers. The Jacobites took their name from the Latinised form of ‘James’, and their ambition was to bring back ‘the king over the water’, James II’s eldest son, James Francis Edward Stuart, who became known as ‘the Old Pretender’. His son, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ or ‘the Young Pretender’, would lead another, more substantial, Jacobite rising thirty years later, in 1745. Both would end in military defeat. Scottish nationalistic resentment over the union and English suspicion of Jacobite tendencies were unavoidable contexts for the lives of families such as the Murrays, which had to make a choice between Scotland and England, Edinburgh and London.
On 15 March 1718, young William Murray set off for London on horseback to take up a place at Westminster School, where he hoped to win a scholarship. He was just thirteen. He stopped at Gretna Green for an overnight stay, then continued south despite problems with his horse, which fell lame in the first leg of the journey, meaning he had to walk part of the way. The distance from Perth to London by road is over four hundred miles. To have completed this trip was a mark of Murray’s tenacity and determination, and a testament to his great energy, which would be remarked upon throughout his life.
He never saw Scotland again.2 It was apropos Murray, by then Lord Mansfield, that Dr Johnson remarked to James Boswell, ‘Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.’3 Not a single letter survives from Murray to his parents, and it seems unlikely that he kept in contact with any of his siblings.4 For some of his critics, he was distancing himself from unsavoury Jacobite connections. His father openly supported James Stuart, as did several of his siblings, including his brother James, who was secretary of the Old Pretender’s court in exile in France.
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