George Manners, 7th Earl of Rutland (1632 –1641)

Next to the priest’s door, the neoclassical marble effigy of Earl George, standing erect in fanciful Roman dress.  This tomb and that of the 8th Earl, both erected in 1686, were by Grinling Gibbons to designs by Gabriel Cibber. The Belvoir Accounts include a receipt dated 12th July, 1686, from Gibbons to the 9th Earl for £100 paid for two tombs. It seems that Earl George did not get his memorial until 45 years after his death.

The youngest son of the 4th Earl, George served in Ireland with his brothers Roger and Francis, and was knighted by the Earl of Essex. Like his brothers he joined the Essex Rebellion of 1601, but also like Francis was excused his fine after the intervention of Sir Robert Cecil. After the accession of James I he became MP for Grantham then in 1614 MP for Lincolnshire in the Addled Parliament, which tried but failed to limit James’s extravagance. He served in the Parliament of 1621 and again in 1624 when he represented Stamford in the Happy Parliament, so called because it was James’s last Parliament and was determined not to disagree with the king. Sir George Manners was re-elected in 1625 to the Useless Parliament, Charles I’s first Parliament, which tried to limit the king’s powers to raise customs duties in a way that no other monarch had previously experienced (Charles continued to raise customs revenue, and dismissed parliament when it tried to impeach Buckingham following his failure to lift the siege of La Rochelle). George Manners entered the peerage as the 7^th Earl of Rutland in 1632 on the death of his brother Francis, and served in the Lords until his death in 1641, eighteen months before the start of the English Civil War.  The Earl’s wife, Countess Frances, daughter of Sir Edward Cary and sister of Viscount Falkland, the Royalist poet, died in 1641. They had no children and she was denied a place in this monument, which seems harsh and difficult to justify by modern standards. At any rate, his titles passed to his second cousin, John Manners.