Tea at Trianon: Dido Elizabeth Belle

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Dido Elizabeth Belle

There is a new film about the abolition of slavery in England. From The Root:

Her name was Dido Elizabeth Belle. Her mother was an enslaved African, and her father was an officer in the British Royal Navy. (The true nature of and the circumstances surrounding their relationship are unclear.) Belle was spared a life in slavery. She was taken from her mother to live in the home of her aristocratic great-uncle, where, even as an illegitimate child, she was afforded the privileged life that came with her father’s bloodline. But because she was also biracial/black, she was denied full societal and familial acceptance. As the character sums it up in the movie, “How may I be too high in rank to dine with the servants but too low to dine with my family?”

The filmmakers take some liberties with parts of her story. Belle’s love affair with a white man, John Davinier, is given the dramatic Hollywood treatment and plays prominently in the movie, but the real-life Belle did marry Davinier. Her family circumstances are also historically accurate, including that her great-uncle, the man who raised her, was the first earl of Mansfield. He served as lord chief justice of England in the late 18th century and presided over two of the most significant legal cases during the transatlantic slave trade that eventually led to the abolition of slavery in Britain. And one of the cases, Gregson v. Gilbert, serves as the backdrop for the movie.

The Zong Massacre was at the heart of Gregson vs. Gilbert. The Zong slave ship was headed from West Africa to Jamaica in 1781 when the captain and crew threw 133 slaves overboard to their deaths, a practice not uncommon during the slave trade. The owners of the Zong later said that because of illness and a shortage of fresh water, it was necessary to dump “cargo” to save those remaining on the ship. English law at the time allowed the ship’s owners to file an insurance claim if they threw slaves overboard to save the ship, but not if the slaves died of natural causes.

The Zong’s owners filed a claim, but the insurers refused to pay after it came to light that the ship probably wasn’t short on water. In court, Lord Mansfield ruled in favor of the insurers, but he stopped short of saying murder had been committed. Still, the Zong case brought to light the horrors of the slave trade for the British public and spurred the movement to end it.

Mansfield also presided over the earlier landmark Somerset case, in which the legality of slavery in Britain was questioned. But that case is not a part of the Belle movie plot. James Somerset was a slave brought from Boston to England, where he escaped. He then challenged his master for his freedom on the basis of English common law. In his decision, Mansfield made his view on slavery pretty clear:

The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, which preserves it’s force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself, from whence it was created, is erased from memory: It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.

(Read more.)