HIS family were once among the wealthiest landowners in Britain with 30,000 prime East Anglian acres to their name.

He once boasted a personal fortune of £35 million and all the trappings of wealth: cars and yachts, holidays in the Bahamas and a stately home in Suffolk.

But it all slipped through his fingers — every last penny. When John Hervey, the 7th Marquess of Bristol, died in January 1999 at the age of 44 from an addiction to heroin and cocaine, his entire assets amounted to no more than loose change, probate records showed yesterday.

Since then the £5,000 that he did leave has been swallowed by his liabililties, including his funeral expenses. The estate of the Old Harrovian is now worth precisely nothing and it is unlikely that beneficiaries whom he named in his will will see a brass farthing.

In his younger days the half-brother of the socialites Lady Victoria and Lady Isabella Hervey boasted lucrative business interests around the world, lived the high life in Paris and New York and presided in splendour over the family stately home, Ickworth House, near Bury St Edmunds.

But by the time of his death, he had served two prison sentences for drugs offences and sold all his possessions to feed his addiction.

Now the details of his will, which he made two months before his death, have come to light. He did have a trust fund in Jersey that he left to his half-brother, Lord Frederick Hervey, 25, who is the current Marquess of Bristol and the brother of Lady Victoria and Lady Isabella.

It is not known if the trust had any money left when he died because it did not have to be declared as part of his estate.

Lord Bristol’s family was always known to be eccentric, and his father became the first English marquess to be sent to prison when he served a sentence for stealing jewellery.

Lord Bristol was jailed for a year when he was caught with cocaine valued at £1,000 on a flight to Jersey, and was jailed for another ten months in 1993 after police found cocaine and heroin at his home.

When his fortune began to dwindle in 1996, he made £2.3 million by selling most of the contents of his ancestral home at Sotheby’s. He also sold off his remaining farmland, worth £4 million, and lord of the manor titles that had been in his family for hundreds of years.

Ickworth House had been left to the National Trust in lieu of death duties after the death of Lord Bristol’s father — but he was allowed to continue living in the east wing on a long lease.

The National Trust started trying to evict him in 1994 because of his wild driving on estate roads, his failure to control his wolfhounds, which attacked walkers, and a row over game shooting.

His family’s 200-year association with the 4,000-acre estate finally ended shortly before his death when he sold the lease back to the trust for £100,000.

Lord Bristol was reduced to renting Little Horringer Hall in seven acres of grounds on the estate.

In the months before his death he was seen looking gaunt and propped up by a walking stick. He often went days without getting dressed.

An inquest was told that he died of multiple organ failure.

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