MANNERS, John (1604-79)

The Manners family had originally settled in Northumberland but acquired extensive estates in the north Midlands, centred around the manor and castle of Belvoir in Leicestershire. Their barony of Roos (or Ros), dated (as it was claimed) from a writ of summons to the Parliament of 1265 and descended through the marriage in 1469 of Sir Robert Manners^‡ to Eleanor Ros, daughter and heir general of Edmund Ros, 10th Baron Ros. The family obtained an earldom in 1525. John Manners was the grandson of the first earl’s second son, Sir John Manners^‡, who had acquired numerous properties in Derbyshire, including the medieval residence of Haddon Hall, through his marriage into the Vernon family. John Manners, already possessed of the Derbyshire estates from 1623, inherited the earldom of Rutland, and Belvoir Castle in March 1641 upon the death of the last of a string of three second cousins from the elder branch of the family, none of whom had left a male heir. Significantly, by law the family’s older title of Baron Roos did not pass to him since, as a barony by writ it descended to the heir general, Katherine, dowager duchess of Buckingham, mother of George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham. The descent of the barony would become a point of contention in later years.

The 8th earl of Rutland was described in the 1670s as ‘a harmless soft man’. Heraldry and Genealogy, ii. 117. Throughout his life he appears to have had little inclination for an active public life in Westminster, professing himself ‘the worse [sic] in the world at words’. HMC Hatfield, xxiv. 287; HHM, Estate Pprs. box V, no. 73. He was more of a force to be reckoned with in his own territory of the midlands, as he served in many local commissions and offices there and in 1628 had married Frances, the second daughter of the Northamptonshire magnate, Montagu of Boughton. Throughout his life he caused social conflict through his fierce opposition to the customary rights and privileges claimed by the ‘free miners’ working the lead mines on his land in Derbyshire. A. Wood, Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520-1770, pp. 121, 144, 147, 247-8, 256, 260, 277-86.

Rutland was one of the peers who remained in Westminster and attended the House after Charles I had set up his headquarters at Oxford, but he always remained a lukewarm and half-hearted parliamentarian, evading the commissions his peers loaded him with through claims of ill health and consistently voting throughout the 1640s with the Presbyterians in favour of a negotiated peace with the king and against the growing power of the army. J. Adamson, ‘Peerage in Politics, 1645-9’ (Univ. of Cambridge Ph.D thesis, 1986), App. B, D; LJ, vii. 276, viii. 309, 331-2, 355, ix. 56-7, 662, x. 383-4, 623-5, 641-2. His country seat of Belvoir had been seized and garrisoned in the king’s name at the beginning of the war, and in 1645 he claimed that he had lost more than £20,000 from the royalist occupation of his ‘whole estate’ in Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, and Yorkshire. HMC Rutland, ii. 1, 6-7; LJ, vii. 659. Rutland was restored to Belvoir in October 1647, but in April 1649 the council of state ordered it to be slighted, compensating him with a paltry £1,500. HMC Rutland, ii. 2-4, 6-7; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 66; CJ, vi. 205, 228. Rutland’s principal occupation for the next few years was the rebuilding of his grand castle, completed in 1668. He was aided in this by the income of the Belvoir and Haddon estates, which hovered at around £10,000 p.a. for much of the late 1650s; Sir Joseph Williamson^‡ calculated sometime in the 1670s that the earl was worth £8,000 p.a. L. Stone, Family and Fortune, 208; Heraldry and Genealogy, ii. 117.

Rutland first sat in the Convention on its third day, 27 Apr. 1660, and he came to a little over half of the meetings of the House until 13 Sept. 1660. In August he was named one of the eight peers to solicit a loan of £100,000 from the City of London. Apart from this appointment and another one made on his first day in the House he was never again placed on a select committee during the Convention, or indeed in any subsequent Parliament, and the first part of the Convention was the only time during which he showed a sustained attendance. He did not come to any of the winter meetings of the Convention and only came to the opening two days of the first session of the Cavalier Parliament, on 8 and 10 May 1661, before being formally excused from the House ‘in regard of his ill health’ and registering his proxy in favour of his son-in-law John Cecil, 4th earl of Exeter, on 1 July 1661. Strangely, the manuscript minutes of the Journal suggest that on 20 July 1661 Edward Herbert, 3rd Baron Herbert of Chirbury, registered his own proxy with Rutland, even though Herbert, up to that time a fairly constant attendant, would have been aware that Rutland had already been absent from the House for well over two months. PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/13, for 20 July 1661. Rutland did not return to the House until 16 Dec. 1661; Herbert vacated the proxy by his own presence on 23 Jan. 1662. It may have been Rutland’s lack of engagement, and also his ill health, which convinced the crown in the summer of 1661 to reject his petition to continue in office as chief justice in eyre north of Trent and instead to give it to the healthier, and far more steadfastly royalist, William Cavendish, marquess (later duke) of Newcastle. Perhaps it was in recompense that Rutland was granted the less onerous post of recorder for the borough of Grantham from 31 Jan. 1662. Lincs. Archs, GRANTHAM BOROUGH/5/1, f. 361.

From about this point, Rutland only ever attended the House when it was dealing with matters that affected his family, and especially the marital problems of his son John Manners, styled Lord Roos (and later duke of Rutland). In 1658 Roos had married Lady Anne Pierrepont, a daughter of another Midlands magnate Henry Pierrepont, marquess of Dorchester. HMC 5th Rep. 167, 184. Relations between the couple, and between Lady Roos and her imperious mother-in-law, had broken down shortly after the marriage, and mutual recriminations of adultery and of sexual incompetence were flung back and forth. Belvoir, Rutland mss vol. 18, f. 58; Add. 91 (bound vol. of pprs. on the divorce of Lord Roos ) passim. In September 1661 Lady Roos gave birth to a son whom Lord Roos refused to recognize as his own. To stop this boy from eventually inheriting the Manners estate, Rutland introduced into the House on 19 Apr. 1662—his first day in the House since 28 Jan.—a bill to declare this child illegitimate. Despite Rutland’s continued attendance on the House over the next two weeks, the bill was lost at the prorogation on 19 May. In the years following Lady Roos gave birth to a further two children who were definitely not Roos’s, and in 1666 Roos procured from the court of arches a formal separation, a divorce ‘from bed and board’, which he then used to support another parliamentary bill which would render all the children born to Lady Roos illegitimate. L. Stone, Road to Divorce, 309-11. This bill was introduced in the House on 22 Oct. 1666, but Rutland did not appear in the House until 14 Nov. when the bill was to be more fully debated. Rutland stopped attending after 19 Nov. but on 26 Nov. 1666 he entrusted his proxy to his wife’s cousin Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester, in order to take care of the family’s interests on his behalf.

During Rutland’s absence, Buckingham petitioned the House in December 1666 for the sole right to use the title of Lord Roos, as heir general of the title. Bodl. Carte 72, f. 114v. Rutland did not bother to appear and used the services of another Montagu, his wife’s brother (and the queen’s attorney-general) William Montagu^‡, to answer the complaint. Buckingham himself soon asked the king to make an amicable settlement as James I had done earlier in the century when he had resolved a similar dispute between two branches of the Manners family. In 1616 James I had tried to compose the dispute between the heir general of the Roos/Ros title, William Cecil, and the heir male, Francis Manners^†, 6th earl of Rutland. In accordance with the decision of the earl marshal’s court he granted Cecil the Ros title originally established by writ, but in compensation allowed Rutland to take the title of Lord Ros of Hamlake (i.e. Helmsley in Yorkshire). Rutland and his son followed the reasoning of the 6th earl in thinking that Buckingham’s claim failed because the title could not pass through the female line. There was some justification for their belief since there was great confusion throughout the seventeenth century concerning the heritability of baronies by writ. Richard Boyle, earl of Burlington, who was engaged in a similar dispute over the Clifford barony by writ, recorded that under his prompting Buckingham came to an agreement with the Manners family that he would be known as Lord Roos of Helmsley and Trebut (the older part of the title) while the heir to the Rutland earldom would be designated Lord Roos of Belvoir. Chatsworth, Cork mss misc. box 1, Burlington diary, 1 Feb. 1667. Although there does not appear to have been any formal statement of this compromise, the Manners family continued to call their male heirs Lord Roos until 1703, without any further opposition from Buckingham. In 1703 elevation to the dukedom supplied them with the courtesy title marquess of Granby. In any case, at Buckingham’s death in 1687 his title of Lord Roos fell into abeyance among the descendants of his two great-aunts, sisters of Francis, 6th earl of Rutland, and the Manners family had no competitors for the use of the title.

In February 1667 Rutland was appointed lord lieutenant of Leicestershire upon the death the previous month of the incumbent lieutenant Henry Hastings, Baron Loughborough, at a time when Loughborough’s chosen successor, his nephew Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntingdon, was still a minor. Far from this being a stop-gap measure, the Manners family was to remain in control of Leicestershire for the next few decades, much to the consternation of Huntingdon. Apart from these local affairs and the rebuilding of Belvoir Castle, Rutland was also concerned throughout the 1660s with the marriages of his many daughters, unions which connected him with some of the leading political and aristocratic families of the Restoration. His eldest daughter Frances (d.1669) had long been married to John Cecil, 4th earl of Exeter, and in 1665 another daughter, Margaret, married James Cecil, styled Viscount Cranborne (later 3rd earl of Salisbury). About the same time another, Grace, had been joined to Patrick Chaworth, 3rd Viscount Chaworth of Armagh [I]. The year 1669 saw many changes, as two more daughters, Elizabeth and Dorothy married, respectively, James Annesley, styled Lord Annesley (later 2nd earl of Anglesey) and the weak-minded Anthony Ashley Cooper, later 2nd earl of Shaftesbury. These marriages connected the Manners family to both branches of the powerful Cecils, as well as to the leading statesmen Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Baron Ashley (later earl of Shaftesbury).

In contrast to his sisters, the divorced and childless Lord Roos, the only surviving son in the family, was forced to rely again on Parliament to relieve him of his marital predicament, and on 5 Mar. 1670 a bill was introduced in the House that would allow him to marry again. Rutland was eager to support the progress of his son’s bill and before arriving in Westminster collected on 7 Mar. the proxies of Edward Watson, 2nd Baron Rockingham, and Charles Stanhope, Baron Stanhope of Harrington. He arrived in the House on 10 Mar., his first appearance since November 1666, only to find that the debate was postponed once again for another week. The bill was highly controversial. It faced the steady opposition of James Stuart, duke of York, the majority of the Catholic peers and all the bishops save two. It was favoured by many of those, particularly Rutland’s Montagu kinsmen, William Montagu^‡ and Edward Montagu, earl of Sandwich, and his recently acquired kinsmen by marriage Anglesey and Ashley, who saw it as a trial run to see if a similar bill could be brought in for the divorce and remarriage of the king. Belvoir, Rutland mss Add. 91, ff. 128-32; Harris, Sandwich, ii 318-33; Stone, Road to Divorce, 311-13; Verney ms mic. M636/23, Sir R. to E. Verney, 10 Mar. 1670; Add. 36916, f. 1731. Rutland was present on 19 Mar. for the second reading of the bill, when it and a petition of Lady Roos were committed. He came again for the last time that session five days later, on 12 Mar., when Charles Howard, 2nd earl of Berkshire, reported from the committee that they found the bill fit to pass with one amendment. The bill was read a third time and passed on 28 Mar., prompting a protest by 29 peers headed by York himself; the Commons returned the bill unamended on 2 Apr., on which day Rutland, confident of its success, registered his proxy with Anglesey and left Westminster. Roos quickly took advantage of the act and in 1673 married the sixteen-year-old Katherine Noel, daughter of Baptist Noel, 3rd Viscount Campden, by whom he had three children who survived him, including the long-desired legitimate son and heir.

Rutland never sat again in the House after this session and, as Williamson’s contemporary description of him as ‘a harmless soft man’ suggests, he was at this time largely seen as a politically innocuous and disengaged character. He was consistently excused during the sessions of the 1670s because of illness or because he had registered a proxy. Considering the wide array of peers in his kinship group, his choice of proxy recipient is surprising: from October 1673 to October 1678 he consistently entrusted his vote to Prince Rupert, who sat in the House as duke of Cumberland. Rupert held his proxy from 24 Oct. 1673 for the session of autumn 1673, from 27 Dec. 1673 in advance of the session of January-February 1674, from 26 Mar. 1675 for the spring 1675 session, from 6 Feb. 1677 for the long session of 1677-8 and from 14 Oct. 1678 for the final session of the Cavalier Parliament. The Letter from a Person of Quality, describing the session of spring 1675, states that Rutland was among those peers who ‘ought to be mentioned with honour, having taken care their votes [i.e. their proxies], should maintain their own interest and opinion’ in opposing the non-resisting test brought in by Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds). Cobbett, Parl. Hist. iv, p. lxv. Prince Rupert, however, did not make his opposition to Danby’s test known by signing any of the protests against the bill, and Danby even considered him, albeit belatedly, a supporter of the bill. Yet he was by this time increasingly moving in the ‘country’ political circles of Shaftesbury (as Ashley had become), and it may have been Shaftesbury who was somehow responsible for persuading Rutland to entrust his proxy with his political ally Rupert and for placing the glowing review of Rutland’s intent in the Letter. Shaftesbury considered Rutland ‘worthy’ in his political analysis of the peerage in spring 1677.

In April 1672 Rutland’s last unmarried daughter Anne unexpectedly eloped with the commoner Sir Scrope Howe^‡ (later Viscount Howe [I]) a union which Rutland initially refused to recognize. HP Commons, 1660-90, ii. 611-12; HMC Rutland, ii. 24. On 12 Mar. 1677 Howe petitioned the House desiring that Rutland waive his privilege so that Howe and his father could take the matter of Lady Anne Howe’s unpaid marriage portion before chancery. Rutland still refused, or was unable, to come down to the capital. On 21 Mar. a servant of his deposed before the House that he had seen Rutland read the petition and comment that he saw nothing unreasonable in it; on 30 Mar. William Howard, Viscount Stafford, formally conveyed Rutland’s willingness to submit the matter to the determination of the House. The House in turn appointed nine peers, including Rutland’s proxy holder Rupert, his spokesman Stafford and his relation Anglesey, to come to some composition. When they failed to reconcile the parties, they bounced the dispute back to the House, where on 23 May 1677 a long and complicated settlement concerning the marriage portion was reached and entered in extenso in the Journal.

That was not the end of the antagonism between Howe and his father-in-law for later in the same session, on 21 Feb. 1678, Howe complained to the House that he had tried to bring an action against a John Mason for felling trees on his property, only to find that Rutland claimed and protected Mason as a servant of his household. On 2 Mar. after the House heard testimony that Mason was well known in the area as a freelance day labourer and not a household servant, the House dismissed Rutland’s protection of Mason and allowed Howe to proceed at law against him.

By this time illness—on 20 Dec. 1678 servants of Rutland swore before the House that the earl was ‘so lame, that he is not able to go or stand’—or general lethargy led Rutland to abdicate all his responsibilities to his more active son Roos, now securely married and producing future heirs for the family. In 1677 Rutland resigned both the lord lieutenancy of Leicestershire and the recordership of Grantham, both of which entailed significant electoral patronage, to his son, even though the earl of Huntingdon, now of age, made a desperate plea to the duke of York to resume what he saw as his family’s rightful position in Leicestershire. HEHL, HA 6044 (misdated as 1684); Trans. Leics. Arch. and Hist. Soc. lxxi. 66-67. Roos even took over his father’s role in the House, so long neglected, before the old man died. Having been unseated from his Leicestershire seat in the Commons in the Exclusion Parliament because of electoral malpractice, Roos was in late April 1679 summoned to the Lords in his father’s lifetime as Baron Manners of Haddon (and not under the title of Baron Roos, perhaps to avoid any further complaints from Buckingham), and first sat there on 2 May 1679. He did not have long to wait until he inherited his father’s earldom and estate as well, for Rutland died on 29 Sept. 1679 at his Derbyshire estate of Nether Haddon, and was buried shortly afterwards in the Manners vault at Bottesford, Leicestershire.