The duchess, an heiress on a huge scale had the largest natural history collection in the country, complete with its own curator, the parson-naturalist John Lightfoot, and the Swedish botanist Daniel Solander.

[1] Lady Margaret grew up at Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire, surrounded by books, paintings, sculpture and in the company of writers such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and Matthew Prior as well as aristocrats and politicians.

Her home in Buckinghamshire, Bulstrode Hall, provided space to house the results, and her independent fortune meant that cost was no object (on her mother's death in 1755 she also inherited the estates of Welbeck in Nottinghamshire).

In 1766, the Genevan Romantic and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau met Bentinck, admired her knowledge of botany, despite his opinion that women could not be scientific, and offered his services as her "herborist" (plant collector).

Her natural collection was the largest and most famous of its time, with few geographical bounds; it included objects from both Lapland and the South Seas (she patronised James Cook and bought shells from his second voyage through dealers).

She drew and recorded its specimens, sorting them innovatively in type species and displaying them alongside ancient remains such as the Portland Vase, which she bought from Sir William Hamilton.

Lightfoot later wrote in the introduction to the 1786 auction catalogue that it was her "intention to have had every unknown species in the three kingdoms of nature described and published to the world", but this was thwarted by Solander's death in 1783 and her own two years later.

Hundreds of people attended, although some fine and decorative arts were bought back by her family at the auction, including the Portland Vase and pieces from a silver-gilt dessert service the Duchess had designed herself, crawling with exquisitely modelled insects.