Henry Scott, 3rd Duke of Buccleuch, died aged sixty-four, at Dalkeith House on 11 January 1812. It was less than a year since the death of his old friend Henry Dundas, and only twelve months after he had finally inherited the Dukedom of Queensberry and the majority of the Douglas estates. At Langholm, the members of the Eskdale Farmers Club gathered in full mourning at their next meeting to pay their respect to their fellow member, while at Langholm church, its pulpit and gallery draped in black cloth, the minister delivered ‘an eloquent and faithful delineation of his Grace's amiable and virtuous character’. A few weeks later, and in order to ‘consecrate to benevolence’ his father's memory, the 4th Duke ordered that on the anniversary of his birthday each year, two guineas were to be awarded to each head of ten ‘poor labouring families’ in Langholm who had been recommended as ‘being most exemplary for good conduct, and bringing up their children in habits of peace, order, and industry, and by instilling into them moral and religious principles’.

Although he had never been a self-publicist in the manner of Coke or Sinclair, the Duke's reputation as an improver, already well established during his lifetime, if anything grew after his death. A notable feature of this reputation was the extent to which his role as an improver was invariably couched in terms of paternalism and benevolence. Obituaries praised his affable nature and accessibility while highlighting his role as ‘benefactor and friend’ to his tenantry; the Farmer's Magazine argued that his ‘character and conduct’ as a landowner ‘ought to be known in every quarter, and imitated … by every great landlord of the United Kingdom’; more than fifty years after his death the Journal of Agriculture described how his devotion to improving his great estate had introduced ‘a golden age to himself and his tenantry’, claiming that his improvements had not only enhanced the value of his estates more than ‘any other property in Britain’ but had transformed the landscape from ‘a dreary desert’ into ‘a land of beauty’. Despite never achieving the popularity of his father amongst his tenantry, it was an approach that Charles William, the 4th Duke, consciously continued during his short tenure as Duke.