Belle (25 page)

10
  Sancho, Letter LXVIII, to J— S— Esq., from Charles Street, 9 June 1780.

Chapter 13: A Visitor from Boston

  
1
 
Aurora and Universal Advertiser
, 22 February 1781.

  
2
  Inference from Hutchinson Diary, discussed below.

  
3
  The will was published in full, with its codicils, in several newspapers after Mansfield’s death, e.g.
Diary or Woodfall’s Register
, Saturday, 20 April 1793. The probate copy is in the National Archive at PROB 11/1230/206.

  
4
  J.C. Loudon,
The Suburban Garden and Villa Companion
(1838), quoted on exhibition panel at Kenwood.

  
5
  Quoted in Bryant,
Kenwood
, p.284.

  
6
  In 1776 Jane Austen’s friend Mrs Lybbe Powes took a tour of Wiltshire, visiting country houses in the area, such as Fonthill House and Longford Castle. See Mark Girouard,
Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History
(1993).

  
7
  Fanny Burney,
Journals and Letters
(3 vols, 1972–73), 2, p.346.

  
8
 
Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam
.

  
9
  Burney, 2, p.346.

10
  Scone Archive, NRAS776, Box 69, 30 March 1831.

11
  See Benjamin L. Carp,
Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America
(2010), and Benjamin Woods Labaree,
The Boston Tea Party
(1964, repr. 1979).

12
 
The Diaries and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson
, ed. Peter O. Hutchinson, 2 vols (1883–86), account of visit to Kenwood at 2, pp.274–7.

13
  Samuel Richardson,
Pamela or Virtue Rewarded
(1740), 1, p.36.

14
  James Oldham,
English Common Law in the Age of Mansfield
(2004), p.320.

15
  Sparks, p.91.

16
  Ibid., p.94.

17
  Ibid., p.99.

18
  Hutchinson, 2, p.275.

19
  Ibid., 2, p.277.

20
 
A Letter to Philo Africanus, upon Slavery
(1788), pp.39–40.

Chapter 14: The
Zong
Massacre

  
1
  See Prince Hoare,
Memoirs of Granville Sharp
(1820). See also the definitive James Walvin,
The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery
(2011), to which this chapter is much indebted.

  
2
  See Walvin, p.57.

  
3
  Putting a ship into the African trade was an expensive business, necessitating expenditure on the vessel and its fittings, the hire of a crew, the provision of foodstuffs for both crew and slaves, and the purchase of a cargo of trade goods to be exchanged for captives in Africa. By the late eighteenth century, the cost of putting a Liverpool ship to sea may have been as high as £12,000.

  
4
  Walvin, p.71.

  
5
  There was some confusion about the numbers killed: the legal hearing accepted 122 murdered, in addition to the ten who had jumped to their death. Walvin, p.98.

  
6
  Dolben’s Act of 1788 insisted that all slave ships should carry a surgeon. Some of them were promoted to captain slave ship surgeons.

Chapter 15:
Gregson v Gilbert

  
1
  The two other King’s Bench judges were Mr Justice Buller and Mr Justice Willes.

  
2
  Walvin, p.140.

  
3
  Ibid., p.153.

  
4
  See, for example, Jeremy Krikler, ‘The
Zong
and the Lord Chief Justice’,
History Workshop Journal
(2007), 64 (1), 29–47.

  
5
  Walvin, p.144.

  
6
  Ibid., p.145.

  
7
  Ibid., p.147.

  
8
  See A. Lewis, ‘Martin Dockray and the
Zong
: A Tribute in the Form of a Chronology’,
Journal of Legal History
(2007), 28 (3), 357–70; Robert Weisbord, ‘The Case of the Slave-Ship
Zong
, 1783’,
History Today
(August 1969), 19 (8), 561–7.

  
9
  Quoted in James Allan Park,
System of the Law of Marine Insurances
(1799 edn), p.154.

10
 
Documents relating to the Ship Zong
, 1783, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, REC/19, p.50.

11
  From Clarkson’s
History
: ‘In this year, certain underwriters desired to be heard against Gregson and others of Liverpool, in the case of the ship
Zong
, captain Collingwood, alleging that the captain and officers of the said vessel threw overboard one hundred and thirty-two slaves alive into the sea, in order to defraud them, by claiming the value of the said slaves, as if they had been lost in a natural way. In the course of the trial, which afterwards came on, it appeared, that the slaves on board the
Zong
were very sickly; that sixty of them had already died; and several were ill and likely to die, when the captain proposed to James Kelsall, the mate, and others, to throw several of them overboard, stating “that if they died a natural death, the loss would fall upon the owners of the ship, but that, if they were thrown into the sea, it would fall upon the underwriters”. He selected accordingly one hundred and thirty-two of the most sickly of the slaves. Fifty-four of these were immediately thrown overboard, and forty-two were made to be partakers of their fate on the succeeding day. In the course of three days afterwards the remaining twenty-six were brought up on deck to complete the number of victims. The first sixteen submitted to be thrown into the sea; but the rest with a noble resolution would not suffer the officers to touch them, but leaped after their companions and shared their fate.

‘The plea, which was set up in behalf of this atrocious and unparalleled act of wickedness, was, that the captain discovered, when he made the proposal, that he had only two hundred gallons of water on board, and that he had missed his port. It was proved, however, in answer to this, that no one had been put upon short allowance; and that, as if Providence had determined to afford an unequivocal proof of the guilt, a shower of rain fell and continued for three days immediately after the second lot of slaves had been destroyed, by means of which they might have filled many of their vessels with water, and thus have prevented all necessity for the destruction of the third.

‘Mr Sharp was present at this trial, and procured the attendance of a shorthand-writer to take down the facts, which should come out in the course of it. These he gave to the public afterwards. He communicated them also, with a copy of the trial, to the Lords of the Admiralty, as the guardians of justice upon the seas, and to the Duke of Portland, as principal minister of state. No notice however was taken by any of these, of the information which had been thus sent them.

‘But though nothing was done by the persons then in power, in consequence of the murder of so many innocent individuals, yet the publication of an account of it by Mr Sharp in the newspapers, made such an impression upon others, that new coadjutors rose up’ (1839 edn, p.81).

Chapter 16: Changes at Kenwood

  
1
 
Whitehall Evening Post
, April 1784.

  
2
  Explanation kindly provided by Guy Holborn, Librarian at Lincoln’s Inn, where the letter survives in Lincoln’s Inn Library Dampier MSS B.P.B. 437, where it was discovered by the legal scholar James Oldham.

  
3
  This account is borrowed from J.K. Laughton, revised by Clive Wilkinson, ‘Lindsay, Sir John (1737–1788), naval officer’,
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16710.

  
4
 
London Chronicle
, 7 June 1788.

Chapter 17: The Anti-Saccharites

  
1
  The quote comes from an 1826 abolitionist pamphlet,
What does your sugar cost?
, quoted in Charlotte Sussman, ‘Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792’,
Representations
48 (1994), p.57.

  
2
  ‘Women and the Politics of Sugar’, p.62.

  
3
  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Lecture on the Slave Trade’ (1795).

  
4
  See Elizabeth Eger (ed.),
Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830
(2001), p.146.

  
5
  Abbott, p.241.

  
6
  See Kate Davies, ‘A Moral Purpose: Femininity, Commerce and Abolition, 1788–92’, in Eger, p.140.

  
7
  Ibid., p.144.

  
8
  See Sussman.

  
9
  See John R. Oldfield,
Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade
(1998), p.178. See also http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1477504&partId=1.

10
  See William Hague,
William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner
(2008), p.141.

11
  Christopher Leslie Brown,
Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism
(2006), p.349.

12
 
The Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Rutland
(1894), p.268.

13
  Dorothy George,
Catalogue of Political and Personal Satire Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum
, no. 7075.

14
  ‘Life and Character of the Earl of Mansfield’, in
The New Annual Register
(1797), p.54.

15
 
The Inquirer
, 1 (1822), p.148.

Chapter 18: Mrs John Davinier

  
1
  Several modern sources give Davinier’s status as a ‘gentleman’s steward’. The steward was the highest-ranking male servant in a household, akin to the butler in Victorian and Edwardian times, but I have not traced the evidence for this claim. The key documents are the Allegation and Bond in the London Guildhall Library Manuscripts Section,
Bishop of London’s Marriage Allegations
, 3 November 1793: ‘John Davinier of the parish of St Martin in the Fields in the County of Middlesex, bachelor, above the age of twenty one years, intendeth to marry Dido Elizabeth Belle of the parish of St George Hanover Square in the same County, spinster, above the age of twenty one years … in the church of St George Hanover Square’ (GL Ms 10091/169). The bond adds that John Davinier’s occupation is ‘Servant’ (GL Ms 10091E/106). See http://www.history.ac.uk/gh/baentries.htm.

  
2
  Freedom of the City Admission Papers, London Metropolitan Archive, COL/CHD/FR/02/1079 –1086.

  
3
  Sarah Minney, ‘The Search for Dido’,
History Today
, vol. 55, no. 10 (October 2005).

  
4
  Advertisement in the
Morning Post
, 28 August 1800.

  
5
  See further ‘Pimlico’, in Edward Walford,
Old and New London
(1978), 5, pp.39–49, http://www.british-history .ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45221.

  
6
  See Isobel Watson,
Westminster and Pimlico Past
(2002), p.72.

  
7
  Quoted in Gerzina, p.45.

  
8
  Ibid., p.47.

  
9
  Ibid., p.49.

10
  Ibid., p.21.

11
  Ibid., p.72.

12
  National Archive, Kew, PROB 11/1324/97.

13
  Sun Life Fire Insurance Records, Guildhall Library Manuscripts Section, MS 11936/445/814109, 3 February 1808.