Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland (1588–1612) and Countess Elizabeth (née Sidney), 1585-1612.

Next to the altar rail on the north side of the chancel is the tomb of Earl Roger and his Countess Elizabeth, in alabaster, the work of Nicholas, son of Gerard Johanssen. It cost £150 including carriage by sea from London to Boston. Earl Roger is in half armour and an ermine-trimmed mantle with a tippet and wears a coronet. A cushion supports his head and a peacock is at his feet. Elizabeth wears a close fitting cap, coronet, ruff and bodiced gown under her ermine trimmed mantle and tippet. A richly embroidered cushion supports her head.

Roger Manners had been one of Queen Elizabeth’s wards following the death of his father in 1588, and was placed under Sir William Cecil, together with Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. However his relationship with the Cecils was anything but close. Seemingly influenced by Essex, he came to regard Cecil’s hard-headed statecraft irredeemably vulgar, and they sought a more courtly way of conducting affairs of state. Roger Manners travelled widely on the continent between 1595-98, then in 1599 became a Colonel of the Infantry in the force Essex led to fight the rebellion of the Earl of Tyrone. The Queen forbade the earl from going, fearing Essex’s increasing power, but  in April he slipped out of England and in May was knighted by Essex before being summoned back for disobeying the Queen’s orders. Essex, realising that the campaign was a fiasco, concluded a private truce with Tyrone, to the Queen’s’ fury. He rode back overnight and famously burst into the Queen’s apartments in an attempt to explain his agreement. She was angry and probably frightened of the possibility of assassination and a coup. Essex was placed under house arrest, but on February 8^th 1601, with Roger Manners as his third of command, he led a group of nobles and gentlemen (some later involved in the Gunpowder Plot) to raise a rebellion. They expected to receive popular support, but none was forthcoming. Essex was found guilty of treason and beheaded. Rutland was imprisoned in the Tower and fined £30,000, a huge amount, but was fortunate not to have lost his life.

In 1599, he had married Elizabeth Sidney, daughter of Sir Phillip Sidney, the poet, military hero and role model for Elizabethan men of letters, who had died heroically fighting the Spanish in 1586. Sir Philip Sydney’s funeral was a major state event, gaining him the status of a Protestant martyr. Countess Elizabeth was also the grand-daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s master spy, and as the result of her mother’s re-marriage she was step-daughter of the ill-fated Earl of Essex. She was said to have been dismayed by her exile from court life following her husband’s punishment. Ben Jonson wrote the first of three poems to her in 1600, The Epistle to the Countess of Rutland, in which he tactfully withdrew a verse about the imminent birth of a son on hearing that the Earl was in fact impotent.

James VI of Scotland was proclaimed James I of England in 1603, and crossed into England on April 6th. Because of plague in London, he made a slow journey south, and on April 10th reached Belvoir Castle, where he stayed for two weeks.  He had been receiving an annuity of £4000 from Queen Elizabeth, under the settlement negotiated by the 3rd Earl, and this probably helped restoration of Earl Roger’s political fortunes. The Earl was appointed ambassador to Denmark, with orders to invest King Christian IV with the Order of the Garter and to convey gifts on the christening of his first son, an important role because of the close links between the Danish and Scottish thrones. Roger Manners evidently enjoyed his visit to the Danish court. The accountant John Brewer, who accompanied him, records what was almost a royal progress of the Earl’s party to Copenhagen and Elsinore, with lavish spending on food, entertainment, and munificent gifts to the poor. The fact that Hamlet was altered to improve the description of Elsinore in the 1605 edition, published shortly after the Rutland visit, has led some scholars to claim that Roger Manners actually was Shakespeare! Indeed, Ilya Gililov has argued that both Roger and Elizabeth Manners were the true authors of Shakespeare’s work. However this is very much a fringe opinion, rejected by mainstream of Shakespeare scholarship.

Countess Elizabeth gathered poets and admirers around her, including Ben Jonson, the playwright Francis Beaumont who worked for Shakespeare’s King’s Men, and Sir Thomas Overbury who was murdered in one of the most notorious of Jacobean conspiracies. She danced in the Masque of Hymenaei, a spectacular entertainment written by Jonson and designed by Inigo Jones, staged in Whitehall in 1606 to celebrate the marriage of her step-brother Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, to Frances Howard, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, a marriage designed by King James and Robert Cecil to reconcile the factions divided by the Essex rebellion.

The 5th Earl died childless on 26th June 1612 at Cambridge. At his funeral there were: 203 Retainers and Servants, 9 Clergy and 27 Cooks. Costs included £145 Herald’s fees, £5 Black draperies, £30 Doles for the poor, £20 Southwell Minster Choir, £20 Embalming fee, 16s. for 16 men ringing at the Funeral, 6 mourning gowns given to the people of Bottesford. Elizabeth died in August 1612, two months after Roger Manners’ death. A contemporary, John Chamberlain, reported a family rumour that she was poisoned by Sir Walter Raleigh, and her death was the subject of an extremely angry poem by Beaumont, An Elegy on the Death of the Virtuous Lady Elizabeth Countess of Rutland. According to Chamberlain, she had been planning to marry a member of the Howard faction with what was considered indecent haste. Ben Jonson said of her that she was as talented a poet as her father. However, none of her poems have been uncovered to date.