The Duke of Buccleuch |

The 9th Duke of Buccleuch and 11th Duke of Queensberry, who has died aged 83, inherited a great fortune and incurred a great personal disaster. He was the richest and grandest descendant of all Charles II's illegitimate offspring, the largest private landowner in Europe, and probably the richest duke after those of Westminster, Sutherland and

Obituary

The Duke of Buccleuch

The richest and grandest descendant of Charles II's illegitimate offspring

The 9th Duke of Buccleuch and 11th Duke of Queensberry, who has died aged 83, inherited a great fortune and incurred a great personal disaster. He was the richest and grandest descendant of all Charles II's illegitimate offspring, the largest private landowner in Europe, and probably the richest duke after those of Westminster, Sutherland and Roxburghe. He also inherited three earldoms and many other titles. But a hunting accident in 1971 left him confined to a wheelchair. In it, he commuted between his stately homes - Drumlanrig Castle, Dumfriesshire; Bowhill, in the Scottish borders outside Selkirk; and Boughton House, Northamptonshire - with their artworks by Rembrandt, Da Vinci, Gainsborough and Van Dyck set in more than a quarter of a million acres. Until 1999, he also continued to attend the House of Lords. He was the Conservative MP for Edinburgh North from 1960 to 1973, when he succeeded to the dukedom.

His title has a curious history. Charles II's son by his mistress, Lucy Walters, was made the Duke of Monmouth. But he lost that title, and his life, after the Monmouth rebellion failed in 1685. But Monmouth had married Anne Scott, Countess of Buccleuch, who was made Duchess of Buccleuch. The family's landholdings mostly dated back to the 13th century.

In 2001, the Sunday Times Rich List valued the duke's assets at £45m, making him the UK's 669th richest man and Scotland's 53rd. The list estimated that he owned 270,000 acres in Scotland and Northamptonshire, but when I once asked him for his acreage, he brushed the question aside, saying that his agents were always buying and selling land, much of it hillside or moorland and of little value. "Even the space taken by a wastepaper basket in a London office is more valuable than a whole acre in the northern hillsides," he insisted. Indeed, falling values for hillside and moorland had eroded his wealth. In 1987 he had been ranked the 20th richest Briton.

The duke took his job managing his huge estates seriously, writing in Country Living: "I run an enterprise involving more than 1,000 people, producing each year 127,000 sheep, 13,500 cattle, 18 million litres of milk, 20,000 tons of cereals and 50,000 tons of timber. At the same time I am responsible for 430 square miles of beautiful countryside and the people and wildlife it supports." He was once referred to as "a one-man National Trust", an accolade he loved. His Boughton estate was judged by the conservationist David Bellamy "one of the best managed in the world".

Although always a Conservative, the duke was more broadminded than most on some topics. He heartily supported the admission of Hong Kong Chinese in 1988, claiming their contribution to British life would be as salutary as that of the Huguenots. In 1993 he opposed the Major government's feared privatisation of the Forestry Commission, which he thought would be a national disaster. In November 1999 he voted with Labour rebels against cuts in disability benefits, saying: "If the government's supporters had half as much feeling for disabled people as they claim to have for foxes, then the offending clauses of this bill would have been strangled at birth."

His paternalist attitude towards the countryside was developed young. His mother, who was descended from the 10th Duke of Somerset, restored and made habitable the freezing and decrepit stately homes she and her husband, the 8th Duke of Buccleuch, inherited in 1935. Young Walter (or "Johnny" as his friends called him) was sent to Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. But during vacations he rode around his father's estates. "I used to know every farmer and pretty well every shepherd in the Borders area where I grew up." His mother cultivated the famous, and he also met Chamberlain, Churchill, Eden and Duff Cooper as well as artistic celebrities.

Although his father supported appeasement of the Nazis, Walter served in the Royal Navy as an ordinary seaman from 1942 to 1946 on a destroyer. Emerging from the navy as a lieutenant, he became a brigadier in the exclusive Queen's Bodyguard for Scotland. He dallied with Princess Margaret's set but married, in 1953, Jane McNeill, a model and the daughter of a Scots QC, with the Queen and Margaret attending the wedding.

Both his grandfather and father were Tory MPs, and he narrowly missed being elected for Edinburgh East in 1959. He reached parliament the following year in a byelection.

Although he gave up his four-times-a-week commitment to his local hunt, Buccleuch's political attainment was not rapid, perhaps because he backed an anti-poacher bill giving the police sweeping powers to investigate any mail package containing game. He became PPS to the Scottish secretary, Michael Noble, for the two years before Labour returned to power in 1964. At the beginning of Labour's reign, he was one of the few Tory MPs who backed Sydney Silverman's bill to abolish capital punishment. But in 1966 he opposed David Steel's abortion bill as "abortion on demand".

His climb stalled during the Heath administration, not helped by his attack on council house tenants for weakening their moral fibre by accepting subsidies, a speech for which he apologised.

In 1973 Buccleuch took his father's vacated seat in the Lords. One of his great embarrassments came in 1988 when Liberal MP Simon Hughes disclosed that under the poll tax, which Buccleuch supported, the duke's contribution would be reduced by £1,757 to £470 for his two houses at 44 and 46 Bedford Gardens, London. In contrast, a porter living nearby would have his poll tax set £433 higher than he had once paid in rates.

Always an ardent letter-writer, he wrote that mad cow disease was mainly "mad media disease". He sought to get British beef back onto French dining tables by persuading them that "an old French cow is better on a shoe than on a plate".

Before the 1997 election, the duke was attacked by Jack Straw as typical of unrepresentative hereditary peers, owing his vast acreage and place in the Lords to being the descendant of a "bastard son of Charles II". Retorting, he claimed to know about the lives of ordinary people, but admitted that he would prefer to have the Lords manned by representative peers elected by fellow aristocrats.

He left the Lords in November 1999, protesting furiously against his "enforced retirement". In parallel with this, he fought Donald Dewar's attempted land reforms in Scotland, arguing that traditional estates such as his had "proved their worth".

He enjoined his family that if fire threatened one of their stately homes, they should save the art, rather than him, because he had had a full life and could "fall off my perch" at any time. He is survived by his wife, Jane, a daughter and three sons.

· Walter Francis John Montagu Douglas Scott (9th Duke of Buccleuch and 11th Duke of Queensberry), landowner and politician, born September 28 1923; died September 4 2007

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