Captain John Henry Montagu Manners, 9th Duke of Rutland (21 August 1886 – 22 April 1940),[1] styled as Marquess of Granby from 1906 to 1925, was an English peer and medieval art expert.

His mother, Violet Manners, the 8th Duchess of Rutland, used her considerable persuasive powers and position to conspire with Lord Kitchener and Sir John French, the Commander in Chief of the Western Front, to keep her son from the fighting.

Eventually, she rigged a series of medical examinations and dashed any hopes John had of battling in the trenches in Ypres with his regiment – the 4th Battalion Leicestershire (the Tigers).

Author Catherine Bailey, who wrote the book The Secret Rooms[9] about the Duke, stated that Rutland "to begin with, did all he could to fight with the men of the 4th Leicesters.

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.

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.