London: The Prince of Wales led tributes to the “wonderfully original” Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, last of the Mitford sisters and chatelaine of Chatsworth, who died on Wednesday, aged 94.

“We shall miss her so very much,” the Prince said, describing her as a character who “will not easily be forgotten”.

The Dowager Duchess, known to friends as Debo, was the youngest of the Mitford sisters and moved to Chatsworth in the Peak District after marrying Lord Andrew Cavendish, who became the 11th Duke. The couple became great friends of the Prince of Wales, who issued an unusually personal and lengthy tribute to the Dowager Duchess, saying he and the Duchess of Cornwall were “deeply saddened” to learn of the death of a woman “whom both of us adored and admired greatly”.

He continued: “She was a unique personality with a wonderfully original approach to life, and a memorable turn of phrase to match that originality. “The joy, pleasure and amusement she gave to so many, particularly through her books, as well as the contribution she made to Derbyshire throughout her time at Chatsworth, will not easily be forgotten and we shall miss her so very much.”

The Dowager Duchess, born Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford, had a shrewd business mind. She transformed Chatsworth from a crumbling pile to one of Britain’s leading tourist attractions, providing a blueprint for running historic homes that has been widely copied. Faced with astronomical bills for the house’s upkeep, the Dowager Duchess, who had no formal education, turned it into a business. She was wildly successful.

Last year the house attracted more than 600,000 visitors.

At first, her ideas appeared eccentric, but owners of other stately homes soon followed her lead. Richard Compton, president of the Historic Houses Association, said her legacy was not only the long-term health of Chatsworth, but of other stately homes that followed suit. “She and Andrew were very much the forerunners in operating these houses as a business,” she said.

“They led the field on a very large scale. They were the first to champion commercialisation and to say: ‘We have to live in this place too so that everyone can see we are real people and not fossils.’

“Deborah really threw herself at it. It was a phenomenal undertaking and she was so successful.”

The Dowager Duchess is expected to be buried alongside her husband, who died in 2004, at St Peter’s Church on the Chatsworth Estate, despite the fact that her sisters, with the exception of Decca, are buried in Swinbrook, Oxfordshire, where they grew up. Archie Orr-Ewing, landlord of the Swan Inn in Swinbrook, owned by the Chatsworth Trust, said: “I think she will be buried at Chatsworth, because that’s where her life was, but she never lost her ties to Swinbrook. “We kept a room for her here. She was classy but classless, she was accessible to anyone and an example of how people should behave when they have a bit of money and power.

“When we refurbished the pub 10 years ago she was very much involved and gave us photos from the family archive to put on the walls. She wanted to put a bit of energy into the Mitford memory, which was running out.” After her husband’s death, the Chatsworth Estate passed to their son, the 12th Duke of Devonshire.

The Dowager Duchess moved to a cottage where she was attended by her old butler. In her autobiography, the Dowager Duchess wrote of her fondness for Chatsworth. “Waking the first morning in the bed I was to come home to for the next 46 years and one month was a joy and I never tired of the incomparable view west across the park.”

The Dowager Duchess had been in ailing health for some time. News of her death was announced by her son, who said she “passed away peacefully” Wednesday morning. She was one of the six Mitford sisters, who scandalised and enthralled high society in the first half of the 20th century. The two most notorious sisters were Diana, wife of the fascist Oswald Mosley, and Unity, who became so infatuated with Adolf Hitler that she shot herself in the head on the eve of the war. Deborah and her mother visited Unity in 1937, where they took tea with Hitler in his Munich flat. She later recalled that he had a distinct lack of charisma, unlike Churchill and John F Kennedy, both of whom she also knew. Another sister, Nancy, became a celebrated author. Decca joined the Communist Party and ran away to the Spanish Civil War, and Pamela lived a quiet life by Mitford standards. Deborah was known, with typical family humour, as the “housewife Mitford”.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2014