Thomas Manners - 1st Duke of Rutland

Sophie's profile of Thomas Manners is especially poignant and personal, as she counts the Tudor-era nobleman and courtier of Henry VIII among her ancestors.  Her comparison with a long-serving statesman and diplomat from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean is appropriate and compelling.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Music by Gregor Quendel from Pixabay 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

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Thomas Manners and the Art of Surviving a King, a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies of people who navigated the most dangerous court in English history, and came out the other side with their heads attached, which is, in the Tudor period, considerably more impressive than it sounds. Wearer of a scarf that a colleague described this morning as very aristocratic, to which I responded, You have absolutely no idea. And today today I am doing something I have never done in any previous episode of this series. Today I am going home. Not home to Kingston upon Thames, though I retain my affection for the town and its scones, I mean home in a different, an older, and considerably more complicated sense. Today I am going to Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire, which sits on a hill in the Vale of Belvoir. The name is Norman French, and it means beautiful view, and it is, I can tell you from personal and repeated experience entirely accurate, and which has been the ancestral seat of the Manners family since the Tudor era, the family whose name I carry, the family to which, in the winding and extensively diluted way of five centuries of English genealogy, I belong. I want to pause here because this requires some explanation, and because intellectual honesty is a quality I attempt to maintain even when it is personally inconvenient. I am a manners. I am not a manners of Belvoir. I want to be clear about that before the current Duke of Rutland hears this episode and feels compelled to write to Cambridge with a correction. I am a manners in the way that any family name disperses through time, a branch of a branch of a branch separated from the main line by centuries, and by the specific mechanism of younger sons and their younger sons, and the relentless social gravity that moves lesser members of great families steadily downward through the generations until they arrive, several centuries later, in Kingston upon Thames, writing biographies and wearing colourful scarves. This is the nature of English genealogy. It is available to a great many people, and it tells you less about your personal merit than your primary school might have implied. But the name is real, the connection is real, however attenuated, and the first time I visited Belvoir Castle, I was eleven on a school trip from Kingston, wearing a thoroughly undistinguished anarch and carrying a packed lunch that my mother had prepared with rather more enthusiasm than the occasion strictly warranted. I stood in the great entrance hall, looked up at the portraits lining the walls, and felt something that I have spent the subsequent decades as a professional historian, trying to calibrate properly. It was not pride exactly, it was not quite belonging. It was something more precise and more peculiar, the specific feeling of standing in a place where your name has been longer than you have, and where the weight of that duration is visible in stone and paint, and the particular quality of English cold, that very old buildings seem to generate independently of the weather outside. I have been back many times since as a student, as a researcher, as a professional historian, with a very good reason to study the Mannors Family Archives. The castle that stands today is not the castle of Thomas Manners. The original Tudor structure was dismantled after the English Civil War, and what you see from the Vale of Belvoir now is the magnificent Gothic Revival confection commissioned by the fifth Duke and Duchess in the early nineteenth century, designed by James Wyatt, who also worked on Windsor Castle, and who produced at Belvoir something that looks rather wonderfully, like what a Regency romantic novelist would have imagined a medieval castle to look like, which is not the same thing as what a medieval castle actually looked like, but is considerably more visually compelling. The portrait gallery at Belvoir is where I have spent some of my most instructive hours as a historian and some of my most personally peculiar ones. There is a portrait in the gallery, and I am almost certain it is a copy of an original, rather than the original itself, since the original was likely lost in the fire of eighteen sixteen that destroyed much of the interior of Thomas Manners, the first Earl of Rutland. I have stood in front of that portrait more times than I can accurately count. He looks in it, like a man who has seen a great deal of Tudor Court life, and has concluded that the correct response to all of it is a very slight expression of cautious assessment. This I have come to believe, is the most accurate possible expression for a man who survived what he survived, and I will explain what he survived in due course, and you will understand why the cautious assessment was entirely appropriate. He is, in the most direct and traceable genealogical sense, the founder of the family I carry my name from. He is the Thomas Manners, and he deserves his own episode. Let us begin with the world he entered. Thomas Manners was born around fourteen ninety-two, probably in Etal, Northumberland. The dates are slightly uncertain, as they always are with minor nobility of the period, the son of Sir George Manners, eleventh Baron de Ross, and Anne Saint Leger. The Saint Leger connection is the one that matters most immediately, because Anne Saint Leger's mother was Anne of York, daughter of Richard, Duke of York, and sister I want you to hold this for a moment, sister of King Edward IV and of Richard III. This means that Thomas Manners was a second cousin to Henry VIII, royal blood, not enough to constitute a claim to the throne, but enough to constitute a significant social advantage in the specific world of Tudor Court politics, where proximity to the royal line was simultaneously a gift and a potential liability depending on the king's current mood and the political weather of the moment. His father died at the siege of Tournay in fifteen fourteen, a military campaign on the continent, the kind of adventure that Tudor Kings conducted with the enthusiastic support of the nobility and the considerably less enthusiastic support of the nobility's families, who provided the men and bore the losses. Thomas, at around twenty two, became Baron de Ross on his father's death. He was summoned to Parliament the following year. He had entered the world of English power at the precise moment when that world was being remade with a speed and a violence, and a theological audacity that almost no one who lived through it entirely anticipated. The Court of Henry VIII I need to say something about this before we proceed, because the Tudor Court of the fifteen twenties and fifteen thirties is a place that subsequent centuries have romanticized so thoroughly. In films, in novels, in television series, in the collective imagination of anyone who has ever heard the words six wives, that the actual texture of living in it has become almost inaccessible beneath the entertainment. It was not romantic, it was not glamorous in the modern sense. It was a place of extraordinary beauty and extraordinary danger in roughly equal proportion. And the skill of surviving it was the skill of reading constantly and accurately the currents of royal favour and royal displeasure, and positioning yourself with sufficient care that when the currents shifted, as they always shifted, as they shifted with Henry, at a pace that left entire careers and entire lives destroyed in the undertow, you had not committed yourself irretrievably to the wrong side. Thomas Manners was very good at this skill. He was, for reasons I will explain, one of the best. He was at the field of the cloth of gold in 1520. I want to dwell on this for a moment, because the field of the cloth of gold is one of those historical events whose name is so evocative, and whose actual character is so precisely described by the name that the temptation to mention it briefly and move on must be resisted. It was a diplomatic summit between Henry VIII and Francis I of France, conducted in a purpose built temporary city of extraordinary luxury on the border between English Calais and French territory, tents and pavilions of cloth of gold, hence the name, stretching across the Val d'Or, near Guine, erected at a cost that made even Tudor accountants briefly lose their composure. The purpose was alliance. The subtext was competitive display between two kings who both believed themselves to be the most magnificent monarch in Europe, and who were each prepared to bankrupt their respective treasury to make the point. Henry apparently challenged Francis to a wrestling match, and was thrown, which Francis had the diplomatic grace not to find as funny as everyone else present found it. Thomas Manners was there. He was present at one of the most spectacular single events of the Tudor Age, standing in the golden light of an English summer on the French border, watching his king attempt to outshine Francis I with a thoroughness that the French court found simultaneously impressive and mildly exhausting. This is the sort of thing that happens when you are a trusted courtier of Henry VIII in 1520, and Thomas Manners was by this point thoroughly that. He had become, in December 1521, cupbearer to the king. This sounds like a modest office, and was not. The cupbearer attended the king at meals, handled the royal cup, stood in immediate personal proximity to the king on a daily basis. It was a position of intimate access, of personal trust, of the specific kind of closeness to power that Tudor politics ran on, and that Thomas Manners had evidently cultivated with success. He was made Steward of Pickering in January 1522, Lord Warden of the East Marches from April to October of the same year, Warden of Sherwood Forest in 1524. He accumulated offices the way Tudor courtiers accumulated offices, as evidence of royal favour, as income, as the practical architecture of a political career. On April twenty fourth, fifteen twenty five, he was appointed a Knight of the Garter. His garter stall plate, a brass inlaid with coloured enamel, survives in St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, and I have seen it, and it is one of those objects that connects the historian to the actual past with a directness that scholarship alone cannot quite replicate. It is brass. It is five hundred years old, it has his name on it. It is Thomas Manners in the chapel where the greatest knights of England are commemorated, permanent in a way that neither he nor the people who made it could entirely have anticipated. On june eighteenth, 1525, Henry VIII created Thomas Manners, Earl of Rutland. He was, as best the uncertain birth dates allow us to calculate, approximately thirty three years old. He was the first Earl of Rutland, and Belvoir Castle, which had come into the Manners family through his grandmother's marriage to Sir Robert Manners, became the seat of the new earldom. The name Rutland, the smallest county in England, the county adjacent to Leicestershire, where Belvoir sits, has been borne by Manners men ever since, through eleven generations of earls and dukes, down to the present Duke of Rutland, who still lives at Belvoir, and who is, in the attenuated genealogical sense, a distant relative of the woman writing this script. History, as I have observed in previous episodes, has a very fine sense of irony when it chooses to deploy it. Now the fifteen thirties and here is where Thomas Manners' story becomes not merely the story of a successful Tudor courtier, but the story of a man navigating the most politically lethal decade in English history with a steadiness that I find the more I study it genuinely extraordinary, because the fifteen thirties in England were not, to put it temperately, a quiet decade. Henry VIII had been trying since the late fifteen twenties to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The Pope, for reasons that involved Catherine's nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, having a significant amount of armed men in and around Rome, and therefore considerable influence over papal decision making, declined to provide the annulment. Henry's response to this ecclesiastical inconvenience was one of the most consequential acts in English history. He separated the Church of England from Rome and made himself its supreme head, dissolved the monasteries, redistributed approximately one third of English land from ecclesiastical to secular ownership, and executed anyone of sufficient prominence who objected loudly enough. Thomas Cromwell, not my ancestor, the other one, was the chief instrument of this process, and while it was proceeding, the English aristocracy was required to decide, continuously and with very little margin for error, which way to stand and how loudly to stand there, Thomas Manners stood with the king, consistently, actively, at personal risk and with material reward. In fifteen thirty one, he was a signatory of the letter to Pope Clement VII, requesting Henry's divorce, an act of public alignment with the king's position, that had the political situation resolved differently, could have been very uncomfortable indeed. He accompanied Henry to France in october fifteen thirty two, when Henry was making his case to Francis I for European diplomatic support for the break with Rome. He was at the coronation of Anne Boleyn in june fifteen thirty three, the coronation that ratified the break with Rome and the entire theological and political transformation that Henry had set in motion, attended by a court that was in various proportions, enthusiastic, cautious, and quietly terrified. His wife, Eleanor Paston, whom he had married before fifteen twenty three, whose mother's family was related through the Haydens to the Boleyns, was lady in waiting to Anne Boleyn herself. The Manners family was positioned in the early fifteen thirties, as close to the Boleyn faction as it was possible to be without being the Boleyns. And then, in may fifteen thirty six, Anne Boleyn was arrested, charged with adultery, incest, and plotting the king's death. She was tried at the Tower of London before a court of peers. Thomas Manners, the Earl of Rutland, was among her judges. I want you to hold this for a moment because the personal and political complexity of it deserves to be held. This was a man who had attended Anne Boleyn's coronation three years earlier. His wife had served as Anne's lady in waiting. He had aligned himself publicly, comprehensively, and at some risk with the faction that had brought Anne Boleyn to the throne of England, and now he sat in judgment of her, in a trial that virtually every historian of the period regards as a legal proceeding designed to reach a predetermined conclusion, and he found her guilty. Was he guilty of a personal betrayal, of judicial murder? Of the kind of political compliance that we judge most harshly in retrospect, from the comfortable distance of not having Henry VIII as our sovereign, and the Tower of London as a visible professional hazard. All of these questions are available, none of them has a clean answer. What is historically clear is that Thomas Manners, in may fifteen thirty six, did what virtually every peer of the realm who sat in that court did. He found the Queen guilty. Anne Boleyn was beheaded on may nineteenth, fifteen thirty six. The verdict was probably inevitable from the moment the charges were framed. Refusing to convict would have been an act of extraordinary personal courage or extraordinary political miscalculation, depending on whether you survived it, and the probability of surviving it was not high. He was at the suppression of the pilgrimage of Grace later that same year, the Northern Catholic Uprising, the largest popular rebellion of Henry's reign, in which approximately thirty thousand people marched in protest against the dissolution of the monasteries and the religious reforms that had overturned a thousand years of English Catholic practice. Thomas Manners marched with the royal forces, commanded a portion of the response, suppressed the rebellion with the thoroughness that Henry required. He was, by this point in his career, a man who had demonstrated that when Henry needed the difficult things done, the Earl of Rutland was available to do them. He was appointed Lord Chamberlain to Anne of Cleves in 1539.

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The third

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The fourth wife, the one whom Holbine had painted so flatteringly that Henry agreed to the marriage, and then met her at Rochester, and found the reality so far below the portrait's suggestion that he described her, in a phrase that I quote as a professional obligation, rather than with personal endorsement, as a Flemish mare. The marriage happened anyway, and was annulled within six months, and Thomas Manners had the particular experience of serving as household chamberlain to a queen who lasted barely half a year before the king found a more interesting arrangement. He died on september twentieth, fifteen forty three. He was somewhere around fifty years old. He had been ill for some months. The letter he wrote from Newark on Trent in november fifteen forty two contains the line in the phonetic spelling of the period As good best knows, I am in Erpour and Ferbel Estat, which is both historically poignant, and I find oddly touching. He had been warden of the marches again on the Scottish border, and had been recalled due to illness. He died at Belvoir, or near it, having survived the entirety of the most dangerous period of Henry VIII's reign. The dissolution, the break with Rome, the Berlin faction's rise and fall, the pilgrimage of Grace, the procession of Queens, and having emerged on the right side of every significant political division, his era presented him. He was buried at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Bottisford, in Leicestershire, which is where the Manners family continued to be buried for generations, and whose chancel contains an extraordinary sequence of manors monuments, alabaster effigies of earls and countesses accumulated across two centuries, a progression of Tudor and Jacobean funeral art. That is one of the finest collections of its kind in England. I have been to Pottersford. I have stood in that chancel and looked at the effigy of Thomas Manners, Alabaster, recumbent, his hands in prayer, wearing the robes of his earldom, and felt again that peculiar dual sensation of historian and descendant, a professional distance and something warmer and more personal, that the professional distance never entirely manages to contain. He looks peaceful in the effigy. He looks honestly like a man who has arrived at an effigy with relief, having managed the journey from the Tudor Court to the churchyard at Bottisford without losing either his head or his estate, which was not something every man of his generation could claim now. What do I make of him? What does the historian who carries his name, who has stood in front of his portrait at Belvoir and his effigy at Bottisford, make of Thomas Manners, first Earl of Rutland? He was not a figure of heroic moral clarity. The Anne Boleyn trial is the clearest instance of this, and I will not soften it. He sat in judgment of a woman who was almost certainly innocent of the charges against her, and he found her guilty and she was executed. Whether he believed the charges, whether he had private doubts that he suppressed, whether the verdict was a political calculation or a genuine, if mistaken, legal judgment, these things we cannot know, because Tudor Courtiers did not, generally speaking, leave diaries recording their private reservations about royal judicial proceedings. He was not a religious radical. He did not drive the Reformation. He was a man who aligned himself with the king's position on every question the Reformation raised, which in the fifteen thirties meant supporting the dissolution of the monasteries from which he personally benefited, receiving grants of monastic property in Leicestershire, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and suppressing the pilgrimage of grace, which was other people's religion being expressed as armed resistance, and which Henry VIII was not inclined to tolerate, and which Thomas Manners was not inclined to protect. He was, however, something that the Tudor court required, and that history tends to undervalue a reliable man. Not reliable in the sense of predictable Tudor politics was too volatile for that, but reliable in the sense of trustworthy to the specific person who mattered, which was the king. Henry gave him offices and titles and forest wardenship and earldoms, because Henry had concluded through years of personal acquaintance that Thomas Manners could be depended upon, that when things became difficult he would not panic, would not shift his allegiance, would not write to the wrong faction or hesitate at the wrong moment. He was a man who understood that in the court of Henry VIII, reliability was the cardinal virtue, and he practised it comprehensively. He also built something. Belvoir Castle, in Thomas Manners' time, was not the Gothic Revival confection of the nineteenth century, but a substantial Tudor fortified manor, the second castle on the site, rebuilt by the Manners family from the decayed remains of the medieval structure. He established the family at Belvoir in a permanence that has proven extraordinarily durable. Five centuries, eleven dukes, and the family is still there, the current Duke and Duchess still in residence, the Vale of Belvoir still carrying the name that Thomas's family made their own. I drive through that Vale whenever I travel to Belvoir from Cambridge, and I look up at the castle on its hill, and I think about the chain of inheritance, of name and of place, and of the particular quality of belonging that a family accumulates across generations when it stays in the same landscape long enough, and I find myself moved by it in a way that I suspect is not entirely professional. Now, the tease and for this episode the tease has a quality it has not had in any previous one, because today I am not reaching across centuries for a structural analogy to someone I have no personal stake in. Today I am thinking about what qualities specifically made Thomas Manners' form of survival possible, and about who in the contemporary world most fully embodies those qualities. Picture someone who occupied a position of significant proximity to extreme power, not the greatest power themselves, but close enough to it to be shaped by it, rewarded by it, and periodically endangered by it, someone whose career required the continuous exhausting exercise of reading the intentions and the moods of a principal who was simultaneously brilliant, erratic, generous, and capable of destroying anyone around them at any moment. Picture someone who was required, repeatedly, to be present at events whose moral character was ambiguous or worse. Events that viewed from outside raised serious questions about complicity, about the price of proximity to power, about what a person of conscience should have done and did not do, someone who navigated those events with sufficient political skill to survive them, and whose survival is available for both admiration and reproach, depending on what you believe the available alternatives were. Picture someone who served multiple masters sequentially without apparent damage to their standing with any of them, someone who had the specific gift of being useful to whoever was currently in possession of the authority that mattered, and of making themselves agreeable to the next holder of that authority before the transition was quite complete. Someone who was present at the coronations, and the trials and the risings and the suppressions, and who was still there, still standing, still in possession of their estates and their titles, when others who had not exercised equivalent care had been removed from the scene by methods ranging from retirement to execution. Picture someone whose name is primarily attached in public memory to the institution they served rather than to their own independent achievement, someone who is remembered to the extent they are remembered at all as part of a larger story rather than as the centre of their own. Someone whose form of greatness was relational and political rather than creative or military or scientific, the greatness of the person who makes the machinery work, who keeps the critical relationships intact, who manages the dangerous transitions without catastrophe. Who is this person? It is James Baker. I hear from here the American listeners nodding with a comprehensiveness that my European listeners may not entirely share, and I want to build the case for both groups. James Addison Baker III was born on april twenty eighth, nineteen thirty, in Houston, Texas. His family was, by Houston standards of the time, established. His grandfather, Captain James Baker, had founded Baker Bots, one of the most prominent law firms in Texas, and the family maintained a position of quiet but substantial influence in Texas legal and business circles that was not quite the royal blood of the manors connection to the House of York, but was, in the American context of inherited social advantage, recognizably analogous. He attended Princeton, he served in the Marines, he went to the University of Texas Law School. He was, for his first forty years, a successful but not nationally prominent Houston lawyer, and then he entered politics through the specific mechanism of friendship. His closest friend was George Herbert Walker Bush, and it was Bush's encouragement and the opportunity presented by Bush's various political campaigns and appointments that drew Baker into national politics in the 1970s. He managed Gerald Ford's 1976 presidential campaign. He managed George H. W. Bush's 1980 presidential primary campaign, which lost to Ronald Reagan. And then, in one of the more remarkable acts of professional reinvention available to the historical record, he became Reagan's chief of staff, the chief political advisor to the man who had defeated his friend and patron, and he did it so effectively that he is widely regarded as one of the most capable White House chiefs of staff in American history. He served as Reagan's chief of staff from nineteen eighty-one to nineteen eighty-five. He served as Reagan's Treasury Secretary from 1985 to 1988. He served as George HW Bush's Secretary of State from 1989 to 1992. He managed Bush's 1992 reelection campaign, which lost. He was a private citizen from 1992 to 2000, and then he managed the Florida recount operation in the 2000 presidential election, in which his advocacy for George W. Bush's position in the disputed Florida vote count was legally and politically decisive in determining who became President of the United States. He was present at and played a significant role in virtually every major political transition of American domestic and foreign policy from the early 1980s to 2000. The end of the Cold War. The reunification of Germany, Baker's role in the diplomacy that secured German reunification and managed the Soviet Union's acceptance of a unified Germany within NATO is regarded by historians of the period as one of the most significant diplomatic achievements of the late twentieth century. The Gulf War Coalition, the Oslo Peace Process, the Florida recount. The parallels with Thomas Manners are structural and precise. First, the survival across transitions. Thomas Manners served Henry VIII through the break with Rome, the dissolution, the Berlin faction's rise and fall, the pilgrimage of Grace, and four queen consorts. James Baker served Ford, Reagan, and Bush without apparent diminution of standing with any of them. A transition from the defeated candidate's manager to the victor's chief of staff that is, in the specific world of Washington politics, almost as demanding as the transition from Anne Boleyn's trial to Anne of Cleves' chamberlainship. Second, the proximity to power rather than power itself. Thomas Manners was never king. He was never Cromwell or Wolsey, never the dominant political figure of the age. He was the trusted, capable man close to the centre of power. Baker was never president. He was the man who made presidents possible, who ran the campaigns, managed the White Houses, conducted the diplomacy, and whose own name is attached to the achievements of the men he served rather than standing independently. Third, the morally ambiguous events. The Anne Boleyn trial is Thomas Manners's most difficult moment. The Florida recount is Baker's, a legal and political operation that secured the presidency for George W. Bush through a campaign of extraordinary tactical sophistication that critics regarded as the managed suppression of democratic process, and that Baker's supporters regarded as legitimate legal advocacy. The historical verdict on whether Baker was right or wrong at Florida 2000 depends with unusual precision on your prior political commitments, which is exactly true of Thomas Manners and the Anne Boleyn trial, and the parallel is not accidental. Fourth, the accumulation of positions and titles. Thomas Manners collected forest warderships, offices, earldoms, Baker collected cabinet positions, diplomatic roles, the chairmanship of significant commissions and initiatives in his post government career. Both men built careers that were less a linear progression toward a single goal than an accumulation of positions reflecting continuous usefulness to a series of powerful principles. Fifth, the institutional builder. Thomas Manners' most durable legacy is Belvoir, the seat of the earldom he established, the family presence in the Leicestershire landscape that has persisted for five centuries. Baker's most durable legacy is arguably the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, which he founded after leaving government and which has become a significant centre for policy research and analysis. Both men, in the later portions of their careers, turned from the immediate exercise of power to the construction of something intended to last. Where do the parallels strain? Thomas Manners died in the service of a king who was, by any modern standard, an autocrat of the most comprehensive kind, and the service he rendered included military suppression of popular religious protest and judicial participation in a probably unjust execution. Baker served democratically elected governments in a constitutional republic, and his Florida 2000 operation, however one assesses it, was conducted within the framework of American law rather than at the point of a sword. The moral stakes are structurally similar, but contextually not equivalent. Baker is alive or was at the time of this recording. He was born in 1930, which makes him one of the older living figures who has been central to this series, and whose arc is therefore available for assessment in ways that Thomas Manners is five centuries dead is not. The living resist complete historical verdict, which is both appropriate and professionally inconvenient. The verdict Thomas Manners and I say this with the full acknowledgement that I am choosing an ancestor over a contemporary American statesman, which creates an obvious question about my objectivity, and I want to address it directly. I am not choosing Thomas Manners because he is my ancestor. I am choosing him because the story of surviving the court of Henry VIII across the full arc of the 1520s and 1530s. The dissolution, the break with Rome, the Berlin faction's rise and judicial execution, the pilgrimage of Grace, the sequence of Queens is a more purely concentrated test of the specific skills that both men possessed than anything the peacetime American political career can offer as a comparison. Baker navigated difficult political transitions, Thomas Manners navigated political transitions where the losing side was beheaded. The stakes were categorically different, and the categorical difference is historically significant. There is also the matter of Belvoir. Baker built a policy institute that does excellent work. Thomas Manners built an earldom that has endured for five hundred years in a castle on a hill in Leicestershire, from which on a clear day you can see three counties, and which is still the home of people who carry his name in the most direct and unbroken possible sense. I carry his name in the most diluted and attenuated possible sense. But I carry it, and that fact, which I am aware is professionally somewhat embarrassing for a historian who takes pride in objective assessment, is not nothing. I have stood in the entrance hall at Belvoir on that first visit at eleven and on every subsequent one, and looked at the portraits on the wall, and understood something about content. continuity that the study of history alone does not quite teach. History is about other people. The entrance hall at Belvoir is about time and survival, and the particular human achievement of building something durable enough to carry your name forward into centuries you will never see. Thomas Manners built that he built it in the dangerous half light of the Tudor court, with Henry VIII's whims as his weather and Thomas Cromwell's machinery as his landscape, and he did it without losing his head or his estate or his family's future, and he died in his own bed at Belvoir, which in the fifteen forties was approximately as good an outcome as the history of his era allowed. I find him, and I am aware this is not a purely professional judgment, rather wonderful. Thomas Manners, born approximately fourteen ninety two, probably in Etal Northumberland, died september twentieth, fifteen forty three, at Belvoir, Baron de Ross, Knight of the Garter, first Earl of Rutland, cupbearer to Henry VIII, present at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Lord Warden of the East Marches, Warden of Sherwood Forest, present at the coronation of Anne Boleyn, one of the judges at Anne Boleyn's trial, suppressor of the pilgrimage of Grace, Lord Chamberlain to Anne of Cleves, founder of the Manor's Earldom at Belvoir, the man from whom my name, in the longest and most attenuated line of which I am aware, ultimately descends his effigy is in Alabaster in the Chancellor at Bottisford. His store plate is in brass and enamel at St. George's Chapel Windsor. His portrait is in the gallery at Belvoir, and his name, somewhat to his probable surprise and entirely to my satisfaction, is now on a series of academic biographies published by a Cambridge professor who was once an eleven year old in an anorak eating a packed lunch in his entrance hall and thinking something about this place is mine. It is in the most distant and most real possible sense. I'm Sophie Manners thank you for being here. Do visit Belvoir Castle if you are ever in Leicestershire. The view from the hill is exactly as good as the Norman French promised. The state rooms are magnificent, and the portrait gallery will tell you more about the continuity of English aristocratic life than most textbooks manage in considerably more pages. The scones in the tea room are, I can report, rather better than the ones in Kingston upon Thames, though I say this in the full knowledge that my grandmother would have found the comparison disloyal. Good night