MANNERS, John (1676-1721)

John Manners, styled Lord Roos until 1703, was the eldest and only surviving son by the third marriage of John Manners, 9th earl of Rutland. Rutland was an enthusiastic supporter of William of Orange at the Revolution but evinced a strong distrust of the capital and never came to London to attend the House at anytime after the Convention. This may explain his failure to obtain a coveted dukedom in 1694. Instead he stayed in his Midlands fastness of Belvoir Castle, serving as lord lieutenant of Leicestershire from April 1689 and exerting a predominant electoral interest not only in that county but in the neighbouring regions of Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, as well as in the borough of Grantham, located near his seat and well within his sphere of influence.

He also maintained a strong influence over his son and heir and in 1692 arranged for his marriage, when the boy was just short of 16 years of age, with Katherine, the daughter of the Whig martyr William Russell^‡, Lord Russell. Katherine brought Lord Roos a portion of £15,000 (some reports had it as much as £25,000) and catapulted him into the higher echelons of the Whig aristocracy. Add. 70116, A. to Sir E. Harley, 16 Aug. 1692. He and his brother-in-law William Cavendish, styled marquess of Hartington (later 2nd duke of Devonshire), whose wife was Lady Roos’s sister, represented Derbyshire in the Parliament of January 1701. In the December election of that year Roos dismayed Hartington by standing for both Leicestershire and Derbyshire. He came bottom of the poll in Derbyshire but was elected for his father’s county of Leicestershire. HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 129-30, 348-9.

Roos, and particularly his wife, served as Rutland’s representatives and agents in the capital he despised so much. When the king approached Lady Roos to know why he never saw Rutland at Westminster, she replied that he had sent his two sons (Roos and his younger brother, Thomas Baptist Manners) to serve in his stead. Roos, his wife and his mother-in-law also pressed William III in the early months of 1702 to grant Rutland a dukedom, but although he promised, William III died before the patent could be sealed. Rutland and Roos found themselves out of step with the political complexion of the early days of Anne’s rule. Roos came bottom of the poll in the Leicestershire election in July 1702. Rutland then resigned from his offices as lord lieutenant and custos rotulorum of the county in protest over his son’s failure to be elected and the pressure placed on him to appoint Tory deputy lieutenants. Despite Rutland’s stance, Anne fulfilled the promises of her predecessor and awarded Rutland, now out of local office and still refusing to attend the House, with a dukedom on 29 Mar. 1703, whereupon Roos took on a new courtesy title, as marquess of Granby. Granby, always a reluctant candidate wary of the drudgery of canvassing and competition, settled for sitting for his father’s borough of Grantham in the Parliaments of 1705 and 1708. He was elected again in October 1710 but was unseated upon a petition claiming that many of his voters were disqualified on 11 Jan. 1711, just one day after he had succeeded to his father’s title.

Like his father, the new duke of Rutland was seen and categorized as a Whig who would have among his enemies Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham. HMC Rutland, ii. 191. Furthermore, like his father he was not an enthusiastic or committed member of the House. It was not until 5 Mar. 1711, almost two months after inheriting the title, that the 2nd duke came to the House where he, and his dukedom, were formally introduced as his father had never bothered to come to the House once during all the years he had been a duke. Rutland was introduced to his peers by his brothers-in-law, the 2nd duke of Devonshire (as Hartington had become) and Wriothesley Russell, 2nd duke of Bedford. These three peers exchanged proxies with each other throughout the latter months of the 1710-11 session. First Rutland registered his proxy with Bedford when he left the House for a period on 28 Mar. 1711, vacated when Rutland returned on 3 May; Devonshire in his turn registered his proxy with Rutland on 6 June, although Rutland only attended for a further two sittings before the session was prorogued. The family bond that kept these three peers close was broken at the end of October 1711 when Rutland’s wife Katherine, sister of Bedford and sister-in-law of Devonshire, died in childbed having already borne Rutland nine children, seven of them still surviving.

Despite this loss, he came to 40 per cent of the sittings of the following (1711-12) session, his highest attendance rate at any session in his career in the House and was there from its very first day on 7 Dec. 1711. He may have been among those Whigs who negotiated with Nottingham about attacking the ministry’s peace policy for he almost certainly voted to address the queen emphasizing that there could be ‘No Peace without Spain’. On 15 Dec. Charles Seymour, 6th duke of Somerset, registered his proxy with Rutland. Rutland voted on 20 Dec. against the right of the Scots peer James Hamilton, 4th duke of Hamilton, to sit in the House as the British duke of Brandon. Two days later he was one of 17 peers appointed to a committee assigned to draw up an address to the queen requesting her to instruct her negotiators at Utrecht to work ‘in the strictest union’ with the allies and to seek a guarantee of peace for all the allies. On 15 Feb. 1712 he was one of 19 assigned to draw up another address showing the indignation of the House against the French proposal that they would only recognize Anne as queen of Great Britain after the peace had been signed. He registered his proxy with Lewis Watson, 3rd Baron (later earl of) Rockingham, on 24 Mar. 1712, vacated by his return on 13 May. Two weeks later, on 28 May, he voted in favour of addressing the queen to remove her orders restraining the captain-general James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond from conducting an offensive war against France. He further entered his protest when this motion was rejected. PH, xxvi. 179. On 6 June he again protested, this time against the resolution not to amend the address of thanks to the queen concerning her recent speech with a clause insisting on a mutual guarantee clause with the other allies.

On the first day of 1713, Rutland celebrated his marriage to his second wife, Lucy, sister of Bennet Sherard, 3rd Baron Sherard [I] (later earl of Harborough), a fellow Whig magnate in the Midlands, who had shared the Leicestershire representation with Rutland in William III’s last Parliament. This further confirmed Rutland’s attachment to the Whigs, but nevertheless Oxford seems to have believed that he could still turn Rutland to his side, for he included him in a list of peers to be canvassed for votes before the session of spring 1713. Rutland attended less than a quarter of the sittings, and eventually Oxford had to assume that he would oppose the French commercial treaty if it ever came before the House. Rutland came to only four sittings in the first session of the 1713 Parliament, all in March 1714, and for much of that session his proxy was registered with members of the Whig Junto, first with Edward Russell, earl of Orford, from 25 Mar. 1714, then transferred to Charles Montagu, Baron (later earl of) Halifax, from 1 May. It may have been because of his proxy with Halifax that Nottingham forecast in May 1714 that Rutland would oppose the schism bill. Rutland was not present for any of the meetings of the brief session of August 1714 convened upon the death of the queen.

In the months following the queen’s death, the new king George I favoured Rutland for his adherence to his and the Whig cause. In late September 1714 it was reported that Rutland, with Charles Howard, 3rd earl of Carlisle, and John Somers, Baron Somers, had been offered places at court which they had refused. Verney ms mic. M636/55, W. Viccars to Fermanagh, 29 Sept. 1714. He did not turn down the garter when it was offered to him on 16 Oct., as part of a group of favoured peers which included Halifax, Charles Powlett, 2nd duke of Bolton, and Lionel Cranfield Sackville, 7th earl (later duke) of Dorset. Together these four Whigs were instituted into the order on 9 Dec. 1714. Shaw, Knights, i. 41. With the advent of the Hanoverians, in December 1714 Rutland replaced the Tory Basil Fielding, 4th earl of Denbigh, as lord lieutenant and custos rotulorum of Leicestershire. In this position he tried to further the Whig cause in the elections to George I’s new parliament by supporting the candidacy of Thomas Bird. He was opposed by one of the sitting members for the county, the country gentleman and Tory, Sir Thomas Cave^‡, who had initially received Rutland’s interest when he replaced him in the county seat upon his elevation to the upper House in 1711. Leics. RO, Braye (Cave) mss 2843, 2845, 2865, 2867. Cave complained to his father-in-law John Verney^‡, Viscount Fermanagh [I], in December 1714 that,

the duke of Rutland supports him [Bird], with money and interest and resolves to have Bird elected at any costs, and that they must and shall throw me out. ... We flatter ourselves with nothing but having taken a great deal of pains and fatigue if possible to conquer the vast Armado equipped with the great peers ... all against us. Verney ms mic. M636/55, M. Lovett to Fermanagh, 27 Nov. 1714, Sir T. Cave to Fermanagh, 6 Dec. 1714.

At the polling in February 1715 the sheriff, ‘a rank Whig’ as Cave characterized him, refused to certify the poll that would have returned Cave and his fellow Tory and sitting member Sir Geoffrey Palmer^‡, claiming that there had been a riot, though ‘there never was a more quiet election known’. The contest was held again two months later, at which time the Tory former lord keeper and recorder for Leicester, Nathan Wright^‡, came to observe the poll, declaring that he would ‘spend his blood and estate before this county shall be nosed by any duke in Christendom’. Cave and Palmer’s ‘stubbornness’ won through against the machinations of Rutland and his brother-in-law Harborough (as Bennet Sherard had become). Ibid. Sir T. Cave to Fermanagh, 23 Apr. 1715. Rutland’s influence was felt four years later when Cave died and one of the lord lieutenant’s many sons, Lord William Manners^‡, was returned to the county seat in December 1719, as ‘the gentlemen of the county in general, both Whig and Tory, agreed to make a compliment to my lord duke of choosing his son whenever a vacancy should happen’. HP Commons, 1715-54, i. 274-5.

Rutland himself maintained his same low rate of attendance on the House in the reign of George I, coming to only a fifth of the sittings from the first session of the new king’s Parliament in 1715-16 to the end of the session of 1719-20, just before he died at a premature age of 44. A more detailed account of his parliamentary career under George I will be found in the next phase of this work. Throughout 1715-17 even when he was not present in the House himself he was sure to register his proxy with a member of his growing extended family: his nephew John Leveson Gower, 2nd Baron (later Earl) Gower; Gower’s father-in-law, Evelyn Pierrepont, marquess (later duke) of Dorchester; or his own brother-in-law Harborough.

Although he continued to be considered a Whig lord under George I, he was not exempt from displeasing his king by his votes and actions on a number of occasions. He was in favour of the acquittal of Oxford throughout 1715-17, voted against the repeal of the Triennial Act in 1716 and, despite being warned by the king, insisted on visiting the court of the prince of Wales. Verney ms mic. M636/55, Sir T. Cave to Fermanagh, 18 June 1715; Bodl. Ballard 36, f. 176; BIHR, lv. 84; HMC Stuart, ii. 122. During the Whig schism he supported the faction centred around Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, as from July 1717 to April 1720 he consistently registered his proxy with him or with other peers sympathetic to him such as Devonshire and Orford. He had long been, both socially and politically, very close to these latter two Russell kinsmen and as far back as September 1712 had made them trustees for the provision of maintenance of his two younger sons and four daughters by his first wife, Lady Katherine Russell. Pols in Age of Anne, 328, 494n77. When he was felled with an attack of smallpox in early February 1721 he hurriedly wrote his will just two days before he died on 22 Feb. 1721 at his first wife’s residence, Southampton House. In his will he confirmed the arrangement made for the maintenance of his younger children and added more lands for their benefit. By his second wife, he had an additional eight children to provide for, and he tried to do this by entrusting her with £14,000 worth of South Sea Company stock to invest and distribute when these young children reached their majorities. He gave her an additional £3,000 worth of stock for herself as well as his coach and horses. He still had enough money to bequeath a little over £2,000 to individual family members, servants, and the hospital at Bottesford that his father had established. His executor was the heir to the bulk of his estate and his title, the eldest of his many surviving sons, John Manners*, styled marquess of Granby, but now 3rd duke of Rutland.