John Manners, 9th Duke of Rutland

Captain John Henry Montagu Manners, 9th Duke of Rutland (21 August 1886 – 22 April 1940), styled as Marquess of Granby from 1906 to 1925, was an English peer and medieval art expert.

Early life and education Rutland was the younger son of Henry Manners, 8th Duke of Rutland and his wife Violet. His mother was the daughter of Colonel the Hon. Charles Lindsay, third son of the 25th Earl of Crawford. His elder brother, Robert, Lord Haddon, died in 1894 at the age of 9. His sister Diana Manners was a leading light of the "Corrupt Coterie". Rutland was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. He joined the Diplomatic Service as an Honorary Attaché and was posted to the British Embassy in Rome in 1909. He resigned in July 1914 but withdrew his resignation on the outbreak of World War I and was promoted to lieutenant. He was seconded as an aide-de-camp in March 1916 to General Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley and reached the rank of captain by the end of the war.

He was sent to the Western Front in February 1915,

John was however not without guilt. Author Catherine Bailey, who wrote the book The Secret Rooms about the Duke, stated that Rutland "to begin with, did all he could to fight with the men of the 4th Leicesters. But it was his mother's meddling and constant undermining that finally got him returned home". There is evidence however that after John met his future wife, he became complicit in his mother's conspiracy to have him removed from frontline duties and thus he spent the rest of his life ashamed and his final years locked away trying to destroy any documents that might reveal his disgraceful conduct during the war."

He died of pneumonia at Belvoir Castle in 1940, eight days after being taken ill.

A friend, John Gilliat, wrote to The Times – "When one reads the obituary notice of the late Duke of Rutland, the bare facts of his career seem to fall so far short of giving the reader the true picture of the man as his intimate friends knew him. To those friends his passing has left a blank impossible to refill, and this applies equally to his staff at Belvoir and Haddon. Here was a man in every sense of the word belonging to a school that to the country's loss represented a type of the Grand Seigneur, living his life for his own people's welfare and enriching all those with whom he came in contact by his erudite knowledge not only of manuscripts and early English furniture, heraldry, early tiles, and historical records, but also by his intimate knowledge of birds and every kind of animal life within these islands... We who knew him on such terms loved him and he had the great art of making us at our best when in his company: his like we shall not see again, and the country is the poorer for his death, even though so few were privileged to know him as we did."

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