On 1 April 1750, after a brief illness, Francis, Earl of Dalkeith, the son and heir to the 2nd Duke of Buccleuch, died of smallpox at Adderbury House, Oxfordshire. In a hastily dictated will he appointed his pregnant wife, Lady Caroline, the eldest daughter of the 2nd Duke of Argyll, as ‘tutrix and guardian’ to his four young children: Caroline, Henry, Campbell, and James. As the eldest son, Henry inherited the courtesy title of Earl of Dalkeith along with those parts of the Buccleuch estates settled on his father in his marriage contract. Barely a year later his grandfather, Francis, 2nd Duke of Buccleuch, died, and Henry, at the age of four, inherited the ducal title and the remainder of the family's estates. According to the Duke's cousin and family biographer Lady Louisa Stuart, the Buccleuch family had by this point been in decline for some time, ‘resting in comparative obscurity for two or three generations past’. Apart from a short period at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the family had not resided in Scotland since the 1660s, and the 2nd Duke had shown little interest in his Scottish estates other than as a source of income for his increasingly dissolute life. Characterised by Lady Louisa as ‘a man of mean understanding and meaner habits’, after the death of his first wife, Lady Jane Douglas, Duke Francis had ‘plunged into such low amours, and lived so entirely with the lowest company’, that although he ‘resided constantly in the neighbourhood of London, his person was scarcely known to his equals, and his character fell into utter contempt’. In addition to fathering a number of illegitimate children and secretly marrying a Windsor washerwoman, the Duke had racked up substantial debts. The year before his death, the Earl of Dalkeith had agreed to sell off the family's Lincolnshire estates to raise £80,000 to go towards paying these off. Less than a fortnight after the 2nd Duke's death, the remaining lease of his house in Grosvenor Square together with its entire contents were auctioned off, and litigation over his remaining debt continued for years. Despite the loss of the family's English estates, Duke Henry's Scottish inheritance remained vast by any standard.