By the 1840s, the combined extravagances and follies of the first and second Duke had brought the family to the brink of ruin. At the bidding of their creditors, properties and possessions were sold. The greatest and most public of the sales was at Stowe. 

The sale lasted 40 days. The house was opened for private view on Thursday, 3 August 1848. Admission required purchase of a catalogue for 15 shillings (about £50 in the year 2000); one catalogue gave admission for four people. 

Notwithstanding this restriction, the Mansion was visited during the succeeding ten days by many thousand persons, including a great number of the Nobility and Gentry of the country. (Sale Catalogue)

One of the visitors was the diarist Greville:

August 16, 1848. Went of Saturday with Lord Landsdowne and Granville to Stowe: it was worth seeing, but a very sorry sight; a dull, undesirable place, not without magnificence. The garden front is very stately and palatial; the house full of trash mixed with some fine things; altogether a painful monument of human vanity, folly, and, it might be added, wickedness, for wickedness it is to thus recklessly to ruin a great house and wife and children. (Greville Diaries, II, 176)

The sale drew fierce criticism of the second Duke's conduct, not least from The Times:

[…] the destroyer of this house, the man whose reckless course has thrown on the ground a pillar of the state, and struck a heavy blow at the whole order to which he unfortunately belongs. The Duke of Buckingham has filled all minds with a painful presage of wider ruin […] In the midst of fertile lands and an industrious people, in the heart of a country where it is thought virtuous to work, to save, and to thrive, a man of the highest rank, and of a property not unequal to his title, has flung all away by extravagance and folly, and reduced his honours to the tinsel of a pauper and the bauble of a fool. [14 August 1848]

The sale commenced at noon on Tuesday, 15 August. The auctioneers were Christie and Manson. It raised £75,562 4s 6d (approximately £5m in year 2000 prices). The outcome of the sale was recorded in a subscription volume by Henry Rumsey Forster (Forster, Henry Rumsey 1848. The Stowe Catalogue Priced and Annotated. London: David Bogue.)

Some inexperienced purchasers fell victim to unscrupulous agents. On 1 September, the fourteenth day of the sale the activities of con men were recorded:

[Lot] 1493. A Dresden two-handle cup and cover, with handles beautifully painted with Venus and Bacchus, and trophies. [Sold to] Agent [for] £19 19s 0d. This vase was bought by a commission agent for a gentleman who was present in the room. As will be seen, it was knocked down for nineteen guineas. After the hammer fell, Mr Emanuel publicly stated that he sold the very vase to the Duke of Buckingham for five pounds. This was one of the very many instances in which the parties attending the sale suffered by making their purchases through brokers. During the sale, scarcely any respectable persons could enter the mansion without being importuned to entrust their commission to persons of this class: you were told that the applicant belonged to the “London Society of Brokers”—(one of the clique was stated to have been a very recently retired policeman, and another was said to have been employed in a much less honourable mode of obtaining a livelihood); that it was no use to offer personal biddings, as the brokers attended for the purpose of buying, and would outbid any private individual. By these tales, speciously told, many persons were imposed upon, and instances of very much more than the value of articles being given were of common occurrence. The villany [sic] of the system will be judged when we add that four or five of these men generally work together; and in cases where one has obtained a commission to purchase an article at a certain price, it is a common thing for the party so employed to forewarn his colleague not to be let down for a lower sum than his commission mounts to, in order to increase the per centage. [sic] The only safeguard the public have against such a state of things, in cases where they cannot personally attend, is to entrust their commissions to men of known and respectable character, of whom there are always many attending almost every important sale.

The Catalogue

• Extracts from the Catalogue
• Images of Stowe from the Catalogue
• Principal Purchasers

There were a number of notable lots, including:

• Family Portraits
• The Chandos Testimonial
• One pair of agate candlesticks sold as antique to Sir Anthony Rothschild was apparently a forgery. 
• The Chandos Portrait of Shakespeare
• The St Mawes Mace
• The Bevil Grenville Plate
• Jewels & Benitoire 
• Tankard & Cistern
• The Marine Venus
• Vase, Chalices and Lamp
• Toilet Glass
• The Pope's Inkstand; also Cup, Tankard and Vase
• Pedestal & Tankard
• Candlestick, Cup and Salt-Cellar