Hervey Elwes

Later life and legacy

Elwes spent the next forty years of his life restoring his fortune by exercising severe economy. Much of the time he spent alone at Stoke, and was described as 'perhaps the most perfect picture of human penury that ever existed'. He died unmarried on 22 October 1763, aged about 80. He left at least a quarter of a million to his nephew, John Meggott, who took the name Elwes, and modelling his way of life on his uncle's, became as famous a miser. The baronetcy passed to a cousin.