The Scum of the Earth

by Colin Brown

  Bruxelles, 19th June 1815. Half-past 8 in the morning.

  My dear Lady Frances,

  Lord Mount-Norris [her father] may remain in Bruxelles in perfect security. I yesterday, after a most severe and bloody contest, gained a complete victory, and pursued the French till after dark. They are in complete confusion; and I have, I believe, 150 pieces of cannon; and Blücher, who continued the pursuit all night, my soldiers being tired to death, sent me word this morning that he had got 60 more. My loss is immense. Lord Uxbridge, Lord FitzRoy Somerset, General Cooke, General Barnes, and Colonel Berkeley are wounded: Colonel De Lancey, Canning, Gordon, General Picton killed. The finger of Providence was upon me, and I escaped unhurt.—Believe me, etc., Wellington.

  He put it more bluntly to Frances, Lady Shelley, another of the society ladies in Wellington’s ‘court’, when he told her about his narrow escape at the moment Uxbridge was hit: ‘The finger of God was upon me.’9 He told her:

  I hope to God that I have fought my last battle. It is a bad thing to be always fighting. While in the thick of it, I am too much occupied to feel anything, but it is wretched just after. It is quite impossible to think of glory. Both mind and feelings are exhausted. I am wretched even at the moment of victory and I always say that next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained.10

  It was an aphorism that he reworked a number of times.

  The Duke also penned from Brussels a grief-stricken note to Gordon’s, brother Lord Aberdeen:

  He received the wound which occasioned his death when rallying one of the Brunswick battalions which was shaking a little; and he lived long enough to be informed by myself of the glorious result of our actions, to which he had so much contributed by his active and zealous assistance.

  Wellington told him:

  I cannot express to you the regret and sorrow with which I look round me, and contemplate the loss which I have sustained, particularly in your brother. The glory resulting from such actions, so dearly bought, is no consolation to me, and I cannot suggest it as any to you and his friends; but I hope that it may be expected that this last one has been so decisive, as that no doubt remains that our exertions and our individual losses will be rewarded by the early attainment of our just object. It is then that the glory of the actions in which our friends and relations have fallen will be some consolation for their loss.

  It is almost certain that if he had survived, Gordon would have carried Wellington’s Waterloo Despatch back to London, but he entrusted the honour to the Honourable Henry Percy, because he was one of his few ADCs to emerge unscathed.

  A crowd gathered outside Wellington’s rented house to watch the extraordinary historic sight of the Napoleon’s nemesis writing his official report. The curious onlookers included Thomas Creevey, the radical MP who had struck up an unlikely friendship with the Duke, although they had been political enemies at Westminster. Wellington saw Creevey and told him to come up. Creevey noted in his journal Wellington said: ‘It has been a damned serious business. Blücher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.’ Wellington added: ‘By God, I don’t think it would have done if I had not been there.’11

  The full casualty lists from Waterloo shocked the nation. They included hundreds of aristocratic fathers and sons, the upper-crust of well-to-do Georgian society. The foul-mouthed Welshman, Sir Thomas Picton, was the most senior British officer to be killed at Waterloo and had towns named after him across the globe.

  Wellington also listed De Lancey among the dead, unaware he was still clinging to life in a hovel in Mont St Jean, as Magdalene, his 22-year-old wife, agonised about his fate in the safety of Antwerp. First she was told he was dead, then that he had survived. She eventually found him in a cottage a few days later. She went by coach with some friends but in Brussels the chaos on the roads after the battle forced them to abandon it for saddled horses. She described in her journal how, as they rode near Mont St Jean, the ‘horses screamed at the smell of corruption’.

  She had only been married on 4 April 1815 and wrote that she had expected to live a life of carefree privilege in Regency Britain. Like many officers’ wives, she had gone with her husband to Brussels, little thinking that their blissful life together would end so suddenly: ‘I saw my husband loved and respected by everyone, my life gliding on, like a gay dream, in his care...’

  One of De Lancey’s friends, Captain William Hay, paid a visit to De Lancey and his wife. They were in ‘a little wretched cottage at the end of the village which was pointed out to me as the place where De Lancey was lying mortally wounded,’ recalled Captain Hay:

  How wholly shocked I was on entering, to find Lady De Lancey seated on the only chair the hovel contained, by the side of her dying husband. I made myself known. She grasped me by the hand, and pointed to poor De Lancey covered with his coat, and with just a spark of life left.

  He was strong at first but gradually weakened after several days, until he finally died of his internal injuries. Dr Hume performed a post mortem and found eight ribs had been forced from the spine, one puncturing a lung.

  Magdalene wrote an account of his death for her family and it was later published. The painful honesty of her tragic story – A Week at Waterloo in 1815 – moved Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. She wrote:

  When I went into the room where he lay, he held out his hand and said, ‘Come, Magdalene, this is a sad business, is it not?’ I could not speak, but sat down by him and took his hand. This was my occupation for six days.

  Dickens described in a letter reading Lady De Lancey’s account:

  After working at Barnaby [Barnaby Rudge] all day and wandering about the most wretched and distressful streets for a couple of hours in the evening – searching for some pictures I wanted to build upon – I went at it at about 10 o’clock. To say that reading that most astonishing and tremendous account has constituted an epoch in my life – that I shall never forget the lightest word of it … I never saw anything so real, so touching and so actually present before my eyes is nothing. I am husband and wife, dead man and living woman …

  The woman who moved Dickens so much in 1819 married another officer, Captain Henry Hervey of the Madras Infantry, but she died young in 1822. Creevey records meeting Wellington on the way to Waterloo in a curicle two days after the battle to see Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby and De Lancey. There were also tens of thousands of common soldiers who were terribly injured – Wellington’s ‘scum of the earth’, who would return to Britain and pass out of history without fanfares.

  Officers were given cash rewards from a fund, called His Majesty’s Royal Bounty, for serving at Waterloo – £1,274 for generals, £90 for captains, £19 for sergeants and £2 for corporals, drummers and privates. Many had to rely on charity from a public fund called the Waterloo Subscription. For the men in the ranks who lost a leg or arm at Waterloo they had the prospect of a life of poverty and begging, or parish relief when the charity ran out.

  The Duke personally interceded on Dr Hume’s behalf to make sure he was comfortable in retirement. He persuaded the army in 1819 to give Dr Hume a retirement pension of 30 shillings a day – a large sum when the pay for a soldier in the ranks was a single shilling a day. ‘As a mark of special respect to Wellington’s recommendation it is resolved that Dr Hume be allowed to retire upon an allowance of 30/- [30s] per diem [per day] …’ This was increased to £2 a day in 1821 as a retired inspector of hospitals.

  Dr Hume, born in Renfrewshire, remained close to the Duke and his family as a personal physician and trusted friend for the rest of their lives. He was the surgeon at the embassy in Paris while Wellington was there and continued his career as an eminent army surgeon, remaining in the service for a total of thirty-four years. He also became deputy inspector of hospitals and was knighted in 1850. He died of ‘cardiac dropsy’ in 1857 aged 76 at his home, 9 Curzon Street, Mayfair. He outlived the Duke by five years but after Waterloo, Welling
ton’s surgeon had one more historic service to perform for the Duke. Dr Hume acted as Wellington’s second when the Duke felt honour-bound to fight a duel. It was at Battersea Fields at dawn on 21 March 1829 against an obscure peer, Lord Winchelsea. Unbelievably, the Duke was prime minister at the time.

  Winchelsea, a fanatical Protestant Loyalist, had accused the Dublin-born* Duke of underhand tactics in pursuit of popery after he was forced to cave in to the demands for Catholic Emancipation in his native Ireland. The Duke’s second, Sir Henry Hardinge, Secretary of State for War in Wellington’s Cabinet who lost his left hand at Ligny, asked Hume to attend a duel but did not say who for. Hume’s detailed account of the duel is kept with his medical notes in Edinburgh. He was astonished to see that the rider approaching through the morning light at Battersea Fields was the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington. Hume loaded the two pistols for Hardinge, because he only had one hand. The Duke irritably told Hardinge: ‘Look sharp and step out the ground. I have no time to waste.’ Hardinge paced out twelve steps, leaving Winchelsea standing with his back to a ditch. The Duke called to Hardinge: ‘Damn it! Don’t stick him up so near a ditch. If I hit him, he will tumble in.’ Wellington planned to shoot Winchelsea in the leg, but not to kill him by drowning in the ditch. Wellington and Winchelsea faced each other. Then Hardinge said: ‘Gentlemen, are you ready? Fire!’ Wellington clearly trusted his own skill with a pistol, but as a pragmatist he may have felt it wise to have his eminent personal surgeon with him, should the ‘finger of providence’ have deserted him at last. In the event, Winchelsea wisely kept his pistol clamped to his side and the Duke deliberately missed.

  Notes

  * This exchange is famously reported as Uxbridge: ‘By God! I’ve lost my leg.’ Wellington: ‘Have you by God?’ But Croker claims the true exchange is quoted above and it was given to him by Lord Anglesey himself in 1816.

  * The saw is on display in the National Army Museum, Chelsea, with a glove belonging to his ADC, Captain Thomas Wildman and a sabretache, both soaked in Uxbridge’s blood.

  * The carriage was presented to the Prince Regent, but was eventually destroyed in a fire at Madame Tussaud’s in 1925.

  * Frances, Lady Shelley noted in her diary that the door was still marked quartier general when she visited Waterloo three months later.

  * Wellington complained he had been given the fattest soldier in the Prussian army as a liaison officer and he took thirty hours to go 30 miles with a message.

  * Wellington was reputedly born at Mornington House, Upper Merrion Street, Dublin, now the Merrion Hotel.

  1. Captain W. Siborne, Waterloo Letters, p. 257.

  2. Medical notes by Dr Hume on the treatment of Sir Alex Gordon, Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, GD1/6.

  3. Elizabeth Longford, Wellington the Years of the Sword (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), p. 481.

  4. Medical notes by Dr Hume, GD1/5.

  5. Elizabeth Longford, Wellington, p. 482.

  6. Jardine Aine, With Napoleon At Waterloo, edited by Macenzie Macbride, Francis Griffiths, London, 1911.

  7. Basil Jackson, Notes and Reminiscences of a Staff Officer (London: John Murray), p. 42.

  8. 5th Earl Stanhope, Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington, (London: John Murray, 1888), p. 172.

  9. Richard Edgcumbe (ed.), The Diary of Frances Lady Shelley (London: John Murray, 1912), p. 103.

  10. Ibid., p. 102.

  11. Rt Hon. Sir Herbert Maxwell, The Creevey Papers (London: John Murray, 1904), p. 142.

  7

  THE BRAVEST MAN IN ENGLAND

  The first tourists arrived on the morning after the battle, Monday, 19 June 1815, as Captain Alexander Cavalié Mercer was sitting on a discarded French breastplate, having breakfast on the slope above Hougoumont with the gunners of G Troop. They stepped down from a carriage, holding perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses. ‘As they passed near us, it was amusing to see the horror with which they eyed our frightful figures,’ said Mercer.

  Their breakfast was a hunk of veal found in a muddy ditch, cooked on the upturned lid of a camp kettle after having the mud scraped off with a sword but the stench came from the bodies. Mercer’s troop had killed so many French cuirassiers on the slope above Hougoumont with canister shot from their guns at point-blank range that their position was still marked some days later by the piles of bodies. Mercer and his troop were using their discarded cuirasses for camp chairs. There is a tourist plaque at the spot today.

  It is just as well the visitors had not arrived an hour earlier or they would have seen the corpse of one of Mercer’s drivers called Crammond lying there too. ‘A more hideous sight cannot be imagined,’ said Mercer. ‘A cannon-shot had carried away the whole head except barely the visage, which still remained attached to the torn and bloody neck.’ He made sure he was buried before they had breakfast.

  Mercer, who was from a military family in Hull and took the horrors of war in his stride, went for a stroll down to the old chateau but even he was appalled by what he found. Bodies were piled into the ditches:

  The trees all about were most woefully cut and splintered both by cannon-shot and musketry. The courts of the Chateau presented a spectacle more terrible even than any I had yet seen. A large barn had been set on fire and the conflagration had spread to the offices and even to the main building. Here numbers both of French and English had perished in the flames and their blackened swollen remains lay scattered about in all directions. Amongst this heap of ruins and misery many poor devils yet remained alive and were sitting up endeavouring to bandage their wounds. Such a scene of horror, and one so sickening, was surely never witnessed.

  The Lion Mound – Wellington was furious it ruined the Mont St Jean ridge. (Author)

  There is probably no other British war site so charged with poignancy or such powerful legends as the chateau and farm at Hougoumont. Wellington said, ‘The success of the battle turned upon the closing of the gates at Hougoumont.’ If so, the future of Europe was also decided at this farm.

  I was shocked by its dilapidated state when I first visited Hougoumont. There were holes in the roof, where the rain came in, there were great cracks in the walls and there was no trace of the famous north gates. They had been replaced by chain-link fencing with a big sign saying ‘Keep Out’. I discovered later the reason for the security was that thieves had stolen the six-foot-high crucifix from the chateau’s chapel. The cross with the agony of Christ had survived on the altar wall for 200 years still bearing the scorch marks of the fire on Christ’s feet that destroyed the house. It was viewed as a miracle that the fire that consumed the barns and the chateau had stopped at the feet of Christ. The theft was despicable, but it has since been recovered.

  The farm’s condition was even worse when I visited Hougoumont again with Barry Sheerman, the Labour MP who took up the campaign to rescue Hougoumont in the House of Commons.*

  Despite the modern fencing, there was still a heavy sadness that hung about the farmyard like a dark cloud, and as he walked through the north gate, Sheerman said: ‘I can feel the hairs standing up on the back of my neck.’ I knew what he meant. I had also had the ‘hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck’ moment the first time I walked into the cobbled yard, where men had died in bitter no-quarter fighting at the gateway. I also felt the tingling sensation down my neck when I looked through a fireloop that had been hacked out of the brick garden walls by the defenders with their bayonets. Looking through the slit, I had the same view as Corporal James Graham when the French infantry attacked the walls. It was easy to imagine the din of battle, the smell of the powder, the yelling of the men and the screams of the dying and the fear that you would die too.

  The defence of Hougoumont was one of the most heroic actions in British military history, as valiant as that more famous action at Rorke’s Drift in Africa in 1879 where 150 men held out against 4,000 Zulu warriors. Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded for their action that day, and if VCs had existed in 1815 they would al
most certainly have been awarded for the defence of Hougoumont.

  The story of Hougoumont has been distilled into one heroic act of bravery – the closing of the north gate. Corporal Graham (later promoted to Lance Sergeant for his heroism) of the Coldstream Guards, an Irish farmer’s boy from County Monaghan, became known as the ‘Bravest Man in England’ for his deeds. However, I discovered when I began to dig deeper into the story of the siege that the truth is far more complicated than that. Hougoumont’s walls were breached not once but at least three times, and possibly more, and there were many heroes.

  Around 10 o’clock on the morning of the battle, the Duke of Wellington rode with his staff down the slope to the chateau by a dense beech wood to inspect the defences of Hougoumont, because he knew it was of crucial importance to holding his line. He had put Lieutenant Colonel James Macdonell of the Coldstream Guards, the six-foot-tall son of a Scottish highland clan chief, in charge of the defence of Hougoumont.

  There had already been one skirmish for the farm before Wellington arrived for a tour of inspection with his staff officers – a party of French cavalry tried to seize it the night before but had been beaten off. Overnight, Macdonell had ordered his men to turn the old farm into a fortress. They had spent the night barricading three of the entrances, hacking out the fireloops in the walls, smashing out roof tiles from the roofs of the barns and the farm buildings so they could fire through them at the French they could see massing across the rolling fields of corn to the south.