Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay was born in 1761, the natural daughter of Maria Belle, an enslaved African woman in the West Indies, and Captain Sir John Lindsay, a British Royal Navy officer. After Dido's mother's death in 1769, Captain Lindsay takes her from the West Indies slums and entrusts her to his uncle William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice, and his wife Elizabeth, who live at Kenwood House, an estate in Hampstead outside London.