MANNERS, John (1604-79), of Haddon Hall, Derbys.

The Manners family had settled in Northumberland by the early thirteenth century and provided several knights of the shire for that county over the next two hundred years.54Return of Members, i. 131, 355; HP Commons 1386-1421. They moved south late in the fifteenth century, having acquired by marriage the barony of Roos and an extensive estate in the north Midlands that included Belvoir Castle. John Manners’s grandfather was a younger son of Thomas Lord Roos, who had been created 1st earl of Rutland in 1525.55Stone, Family and Fortune, 165-6. He had acquired numerous properties in Derbyshire (among them Haddon Hall) by marriage and had sat for Nottinghamshire, where he also had estates, in 1559 and 1563.56Stone, Family and Fortune, 200; ‘John Manners’, HP Commons 1558-1603. Manners’s father, Sir George Manners, had represented Nottingham in 1589 and Derbyshire in 1593, while several other members of the family had been returned for county and borough seats in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire between 1559 and 1625.57HP Commons 1558-1603.

Manners was returned for Derbyshire to the second Caroline Parliament in 1626. By his own admission ‘the worse [sic] in the world at words’, he made no appreciable impact upon the House’s proceedings.58HMC Hatfield, xxiv, 287; HP Commons 1604-1629. Yet though regarded by some contemporaries as a ‘harmless, soft man’, Manners was in fact a shrewd landlord and entrepreneur.59‘Lincs. fams. temp. Charles II’, 117. Much of the income from his considerable estate in Derbyshire derived from his ruthless manipulation of the High Peak lead trade.60J.R. Dias, ‘Politics and administration in Notts. and Derbys. 1590-1640’ (Oxford Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1973), 82. Several of his manors were rich in lead ore, and rather than simply exact dues from the ‘free miners’ who traditionally claimed the right to work these deposits, he established his own lead mines and deliberately undercut the market. As a result of such confrontational tactics he became embroiled in a long-running, sometimes violent, dispute with the free miners and (by the late 1640s) their Leveller allies. Indeed, by the outbreak of civil war, Manners had ‘identified himself as the chief opponent of the right of free mining within the High Peak, uncompromising in his hostility to the ‘free liberty’ claimed by the miners and fully prepared to back his legal power with physical force’.61A. Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520-1770 (Cambridge, 1999), 121, 144, 147, 160, 247-8, 256, 277-86.

Manners effectively joined the ranks of the nobility in 1634, when, as part of a settlement on the succession of his cousin as 7th earl of Rutland, he was granted an income of £2,000 a year and the tenure of Belvoir Castle.62Strafforde Letters ed. W. Knowler (1739), i. 261; ‘Sir George Manners’, HP Commons 1604-1629. At the calling of the Short Parliament, he was urged to stand for Derbyshire by his gentry neighbour and ally against the free miners, John Gell of Hopton (father of John Gell*).63Add. 6682, f. 33; Derbys. RO, D258/10/9/69; Wood, Politics of Social Conflict, 23. ‘If the country please to make choice of me to be one of them’, Manners informed Gell, ‘I will serve them willingly and freely; if not, the election ought to be free and the people not laboured one ways [sic] nor other’.64Derbys. RO, D258/10/9/69; HMC 9th Rep. ii. 391. Manners’s wish to avoid a contest was frustrated, however, for at least two other men put themselves forward to represent the county – namely, Sir John Curzon* and Sir John Harpur. Manners and Curzon (Gell’s half-brother and business partner) opted to stand together, and on election day they defeated Harpur on a poll – Curzon taking the senior place.65Supra, ‘Derbyshire’; B. W., To the Faithfull and True-Hearted Covenanters (1644), 3 (E.257.6). But having probably put Gell and others to the trouble of labouring for votes on his behalf, Manners received no appointments and made no recorded contribution to debate. There is no evidence that he stood as a candidate in the elections to the Long Parliament, but had he done so it would have been wasted effort, for in March 1641 he succeeded his cousin as earl of Rutland.

Appointed lord lieutenant of Derbyshire in the 1642 Militia Ordinance, Rutland was slow to act upon his commission and was evidently considered biddable by the king’s party.66Northants. RO, FH133; HMC Hastings, ii. 85; Beats, ‘Derbys.’, 100. But reports that he went to York that summer, or of his imminent arrival there, appear to have been merely that – reports.67HMC Cowper, ii. 319; HMC Hastings, ii. 85; Beats, ‘Derbys.’, 102-3. In mid-August, he was among the peers in the Lords who affirmed their support for Parliament’s commander-in-chief, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.68LJ v. 282b, 283a; Some Speciall and Considerable Passages from London...and Other Places no. 1 (9-16 Aug. 1642), 4 (E.112.15). A month later, he raised a force of horse and seized a royalist garrison near Derby, capturing its commander, the king’s bedchamber man Endymion Porter*.69HMC Rutland, ii. 6. Yet why the earl, a firm episcopalian, sided with Parliament is something of a mystery.

One of the most active peers at Westminster during the early years of the civil war, Rutland was prominent among the peace-party peers in the Lords.70Harl. 164, f. 334; J.B. Crummett, ‘The Lay Peers in Parliament 1640-44’ (Manchester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1972), 299, 367, 403-4, 433, 434. Little can, or should, be read into his appointment in the spring of 1645 to the first Committee for the Army* (which he never seems to have attended), a body dominated by the Independents.71Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; J. Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy’, in Parliament at Work ed. C. Kyle, J. Peacey (2002), 123. Indeed, it is clear from his voting pattern in the Lords that he was closely aligned with the earl of Essex’s Presbyterian faction during the mid-1640s.72J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics 1645-9’ (Cambridge Univ. PhD thesis, 1986), 121-2, 290, 293. That he was contemplating abandoning his seat in the Lords by September 1648 does not suggest he viewed the army’s victories that summer as a portent for good – and indeed, he almost certainly opposed both Pride’s Purge and the regicide.73Derbys. RO, D258/30/14/3.

Although the Rump backed Rutland in his ‘deadly feud’ with the High Peak miners, in April 1649 the council of state ordered that Belvoir be slighted.74Add. 6682, ff. 30, 31; CJ vi. 175a; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 4 (8-15 May 1649), 30 (E.555.14); no. 11 (26 June-3 July 1649), sig. L2 (E.562.21); CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 66; Wood, Politics of Social Conflict, 280, 282, 284. All he received in recompense was a meagre £1,500.75CJ vi. 205a, 228b. Moreover, having demolished his principal country seat, the Rump authorities then tried to force him out of his main residence in town, Wallingford House, near Whitehall. Late in 1649, the Committee for Advance of Money* granted its chairman, Edward Howard*, Lord Howard of Escrick – who was one of the few peers prepared to sit in the Rump – the lease of Wallingford House, a grant that the compounding commissioners confirmed in mid-1650. Rutland fought back, however, and with the help of his wife’s ‘great servant’ Thomas Gell*, he not only managed to retain Wallingford House, but also helped to secure Howard of Escrick’s removal from the Rump and imprisonment on charges of peculation and bribery.76Supra ‘Edward, Lord Howard of Escrick’; ‘Thomas Gell’; Derbys. RO, D258/33/37/11, 15-18, 25-32; CCAM 530; CCC 179, 185, 187, 218-19, 229, 237, 239, 245, 254, 256, 278, 281; CJ vi. 448a-b, 591b; Ludlow, Mems. i. 258; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 482.

Rutland’s often confrontational and self-aggrandising proceedings against the High Peak miners during the 1650s and 1660s contrasts with his disengagement from national politics.77Add. 6677, ff. 49, 51; Wood, Politics of Social Conflict, 99, 285-6, 296-7, 301. He was declared absent and excused, sometimes sick, at almost every call of the House of Lords in the Cavalier Parliament between 1661 and his death. Nevertheless, in 1675 he was listed by the earl of Shaftesbury (Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*) among those in the Lords opposed to the non-resisting test advocated by the court.78Browning, Danby, iii. 124.

Rutland died on 29 September 1679 and was buried at Bottesford, Leicestershire, on 24 October.79CP. He made bequests in his will totalling a few hundred pounds and no reference to his landed estate.80PROB11/361, ff. 304v-305. His son John† represented Leicestershire in the Cavalier Parliament under the courtesy title of Lord Roos.81HP Commons 1660-1690.