Tobias Rustat

[2] After an apprenticeship to a barber-surgeon in London, Rustat entered the service of Basil Feilding, 2nd Earl of Denbigh and attended him in his embassy to Venice, before becoming a servant to his nephew George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham.

During the Second English Civil War, Rustat joined Buckingham in a 1648 uprising in Kent, where he saved the Duke's life.

This bears an inscription to Rustat's belief that giving away as much as one is able in life can bring one closer to God in death, and records that he died at the age of 87 on 15 March 1693 (Old Style).

The last was commissioned for the Palace of Whitehall, apparently at the same time as the standing Charles II, and the two works might have been intended as pendant pieces.

[17] Jesus College, Cambridge owns a 1682 portrait of Rustat painted by Godfrey Kneller (previously attributed to Lely).

[20] A white marble memorial monument to Rustat in the chapel of Jesus College is attributed to the studio of Grinling Gibbons, with parts carved by Arnold Quellin and others less certainly by John Nost.

[10] The college proposed that this memorial should be removed from the chapel,[21] and a faculty application to permit this was made to the Diocese of Ely in December 2020.

[24][25] Evidence had been filed with the University of Cambridge Advisory Group on Legacies of Enslavement which attempted to exonerate Rustat from any significant links to the 17th-century slave trade, as his RAC holdings constituted only 1.7 per cent of his total worth measured by his lifetime giving and his estate at death.

[24] English Heritage opposed the proposed relocation while the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby criticised the delay in removing what he described as "a memorial to slavery" on 8 February 2022.

[27][28] David Hodge QC, Deputy Chancellor of the Diocese of Ely, ruled that removing the memorial would case significant harm to the chapel as a building of special historical and architectural interest.