Dido Elizabeth Belle

Dido Elizabeth Belle was the daughter of an enslaved African woman and a Royal Navy officer, and was raised at Kenwood House by the Lord Chief Justice who decided the Somerset case. Her mother, Maria Belle, was taken from a captured Spanish ship in the Caribbean by Sir John Lindsay; Dido was born about 1761 and sent to England, where Lindsay's uncle, William Murray, Lord Mansfield, and his wife brought her up alongside another great-niece, Lady Elizabeth Murray. Her position in the household was genuinely unusual and genuinely ambiguous: she was not a servant, she managed the dairy and the poultry yard and helped Mansfield with his correspondence, she was paid an allowance smaller than her cousin's, and the American visitor Thomas Hutchinson recorded with distaste that she did not dine with guests but joined the company afterwards. The double portrait painted around 1778, long attributed to Zoffany and now to David Martin, shows the two young women together and Dido looking directly out of the canvas, which is not how black subjects were painted in English portraiture of the period; the picture is at Scone Palace. Mansfield's judgment in Somerset v Stewart in 1772 was given while she was living in his house, and the suggestion that her presence influenced it is popular and unprovable. His will left her five hundred pounds and an annuity, and confirmed her freedom explicitly, which suggests he thought the point needed settling. She married a Frenchman, John Davinier, in 1793 and had at least three sons. She died at forty-three and was buried in St George's Fields; the grave was lost when the burial ground was built over. Her descendants were traced in the twentieth century to South Africa. The 2013 film Belle invented most of its plot but brought the portrait to a wide audience.

• Lived: 1761 CE – 1804 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: other