The Scum of the Earth

by Colin Brown

  There had been a chateau at Goumont for five centuries, before Macdonell and his men arrived in the night. The owner of the chateau, Chevalier de Louville, was 86 and living in Nivelles but the tenant farmer, Antoine Dumoncea, had fled. So had the gardener’s wife, but the gardener, Guillaume van Cutsem, had delayed and was found nervously sheltering in the farm when the Coldstream Guards arrived at nightfall.

  The farm buildings and the chateau formed three sides of a square with high walls facing the French. A great barn ran down the west side and a towering gatehouse to the south, with two windows above the huge dark-blue gates to provide elevated shooting positions, and a window in a garret above that. The gatehouse was flanked on the south side by a shed with a steep pantiled roof and on the other side by the gardener’s house, with another stable and office building. They were enclosed by an impressive garden wall of red brick, about 8ft high, running along the whole south side of the farm, which shielded the farm from a direct French attack. Behind this wall was a small cottage garden and a formal garden laid out in the Dutch parterre style with an orchard on the north side. Macdonell’s men had laid timbers along the base of the wall to provide fire steps so they could fire muskets over the wall at the attackers.

  Inside the south gatehouse was an inner courtyard and a door leading into the main cobbled farmyard, with the stables, a circular dovecot and a well for fresh water. The two-storey chateau had a picturesque tower containing a staircase topped by a weather vane. The small family chapel with a spire was attached to the chateau on the south side and a farmer’s house attached at the east side with a gate into the formal garden. Three of the gateways had been barricaded with heavy timbers, old carts, slabs of stone – anything the men could lay their hands on. Only the north gate had been left open, to enable the farm’s defenders to be resupplied with ammunition and reinforcements during the long hard day ahead. The gate opened into a lane that had been cut down by centuries of cart traffic between two high banks with trees on either side. It was called the ‘hollow way’ and ran up to the ridge where Wellington’s main forces were lined up. It was to prove a vital lifeline.

  Hougoumont’s defences looked formidable. Macdonell was given four light companies of Maitland’s 1st Brigade and Byng’s 2nd Brigade of the 1st British Guards Division. The two companies of the 1st Brigade under the command of 30-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Lord Saltoun occupied the front edge of the orchard. The farm and chateau were occupied by the light company of the 2nd Battalion Coldstream Guards commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Wyndham. The garden and ground around the farm was defended by the light company of the 2nd under Lieutenant Colonel Charles Dashwood. They reinforced some crack German troops armed with rifles, including elite Hanoverian Jägers (hunters). Macdonell had deployed them through the orchard, the buildings, the lofts and the wood. But Baron Friedrich von Müffling, the Duke’s Prussian liaison officer, was still sceptical. Müffling asked Wellington whether he really expected to hold Hougoumont with 1,500 men. ‘Ah,’ said the Duke. ‘You don’t know Macdonell.’

  That was disingenuous. Macdonell was undoubtedly a formidable commander. He was the third son of the Scottish clan chief, Duncan Macdonell, and was born at the clan seat at Glengarry in Inverness. The MacDonell clan – a branch of the Donalds – are proud Highlanders who can trace their roots back to the ancient Picts. But the truth is Wellington committed more than 2,600 men to the defence of Hougoumont and some estimates put the total deployment at over 7,500 men, if you include Byng’s men alongside Maitland’s guards on the slopes behind Hougoumont.

  James Macdonell joined the 78th Highlanders Regiment as a lieutenant in 1794 at the age of 13, when it was routine for young boys to become soldiers. He joined the Coldstream Guards in 1811 and fought in the Peninsular War. He was 34 when he arrived at Hougoumont. There is a portrait of Macdonell in the National Portrait Gallery, which shows him in late middle age wearing the scarlet uniform of a general (which he later became), with a dress sword; he has reddish side-whiskers and he stares out of the portrait with a steady gaze that looks as though he would brook no dissent.

  Wellington ordered Macdonell to defend Hougoumont to the ‘greatest extremity’, by which he meant ‘to the death’. If it fell, Napoleon could turn Wellington’s right flank. However, it remains unclear whether Napoleon saw its strategic significance. In his general order for the battle issued at 11 a.m., Napoleon gave only a passing reference to Hougoumont, saying the 2nd Corps ‘was to support the movement of the 1 Corps covering the left of the Hougoumont wood’. The main attack was to be directed at Wellington’s centre on Mont St Jean. This has given the impression that the attack on Hougoumont was a diversion aimed at drawing men away from Wellington’s centre. If so, it backfired badly, as more of Napoleon’s forces were drawn into the attack on Hougoumont, while Wellington saw that it held with a minimum force. More than 12,000 French troops were committed to the siege and over 6,000 French and allied men were killed or injured around its walls.

  Marshal Honoré Reille, commander of the 2nd Corps, entrusted Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jérôme Bonaparte, head of the Sixth Division, with leading the siege of Hougoumont, reinforced by Foy’s 9th, the 5th under Guilleminot and Joseph Bachelu, and Kellerman’s cavalry. Late in the day – far too late – Napoleon pushed forward artillery to pound the walls and buildings with howitzers, which set the barns on fire.

  There is still a dispute about when the Battle of Waterloo started – Wellington said ‘about ten o’clock’; Lieutenant Colonel G. Gawler said an officer near him pulled out a watch and noted,‘twenty past 11 o’clock’ – but there is no dispute that the first shots were fired over Hougoumont and that they came from allied guns.

  Wellington, vigilant on the ridge, saw Jérôme’s troops advancing towards the wood, and asked Uxbridge to bring Major Robert Bull’s troop of howitzers to bear on them. The Royal Horse Artillery troops were intended to be mobile and fast. John Lees, the young wagon driver from Oldham, and his comrades in Major Bull’s I Troop had been ordered from their bivouac at 8 a.m. on the morning of the battle and were posted to the left of the road from Waterloo to Charleroi, alongside Lieutenant Colonel William Ponsonby’s Heavy Brigade. They had been there for an hour when Bull received the fresh orders from the Earl of Uxbridge to move. Lees and the other drivers urged their horses across the ridge to the right of Wellington’s lines and the slopes above Hougoumont. Wellington rode across the slope to Bull and pointed out Jérôme’s men as they were advancing through the wood about 1,000yds away. The Duke said he wanted Bull to dislodge them. It was a tricky operation. Bull’s six howitzers had to fire shells over the heads of his own troops to explode directly over the French. If they fell short, or were off target, it could be a disaster and sow mayhem among the defenders. The shells, spherical cases carrying metal balls with lit fuses, had been designed by a lieutenant in the British Army artillery called Henry Shrapnel and were still regarded as novel – the French did not use them. The first Shrapnel shell looped over Hougoumont and exploded among the French infantry, killing seventeen men in one blast of red-hot metal. The devastating impact on Jérôme’s men was witnessed by Major William Norman Ramsay, who had been given command of H Troop despite incurring Wellington’s anger for insubordination at Vitoria. His troop was posted to the left of I Troop and he told Bull that ‘the shells opened a perfect lane through them …’ Ramsay was later killed by a musket ball, and buried on the field in a lull in the fighting by his friend Sir Augustus Frazer, the commander of the Royal Horse Artillery.*

  Bull’s battery of howitzers was repeatedly overrun by French cavalry in the afternoon and had to retreat inside the nearest hollow squares of infantry. It was also fired on by French artillery, killing men and horses, including the second captain Robert Cairnes.1 Bull was injured and lost a lot of blood, but after having ‘my arm tied up’ returned to carry on the battle.

  Some of the drivers took their horses and carts into the hollow way on the ridge to escape t
he worst of the French artillery bombardments, and it is likely Lees would have joined them. But for the rest of the battle Lees was in the thick of the fighting, seeing men and horses killed all around him. However, after 5 p.m., through loss of men, horses and ‘the disabled condition of the guns (through incessant firing) …’ Bull’s I Troop was forced to retire.

  The Duke later praised Bull’s dexterity with the Shrapnel shells but Jérôme’s men pressed on their attacks. The crackle of muskets became a cacophony of fire as wave after wave of Jérôme’s infantry burst through the woods, to be cut down under a hail of rifle and musket balls. ‘Soon we had our feet bathed in blood,’ said Lerreguy de Civrieux, aged 19, a sergeant major. ‘In less than half an hour our ranks were reduced by more than half. Each stoically awaited death or horrible wounds. We were covered in splashes of blood …’ The dead included Brigadier General Bauduin but Jérôme pressed on with the attacks, even though his men were being cut down.

  Prince Jérôme may have felt he had something to prove to his older brother. Ten years earlier, when he was only 19 and in America, Jérôme enraged Napoleon by falling in love and marrying an American heiress on Christmas Eve 1803. Eighteen-year-old Betsy Patterson was the beautiful, dark-haired daughter of a Baltimore businessman, but she was regarded as unsuitable by Napoleon. He had wanted a European power-match for his brother and ordered the pope to annul the marriage; when the pontiff failed to do so, the emperor did so himself by Imperial decree in March 1805. Jérôme and Betsy sailed to Europe to make an appeal to the emperor; they landed in Portugal and Jérôme went overland to plead with his brother, while his wife went by ship to Amsterdam to travel to Paris, but Napoleon refused to allow her entry to France. Betsy, however, was pregnant, and was forced to sail to England; she gave birth to Jérôme Bonaparte II at 95 Camberwell Grove in leafy South London. The Georgian house is still there in a tree-lined street, but the area, near the Elephant and Castle, is now part of the urban inner city. After the birth of Jérôme II, Prince Jérôme’s son and heir, Betsy returned to her family in America with the baby and founded an unlikely American Bonaparte dynasty. The infant Jérôme II – known as ‘Bo’ – was brought up by his rich mother in Baltimore and married Susan May Williams, daughter of a fabulously wealthy Baltimore rail magnate. They were given the landmark Montrose Mansion in Maryland as a wedding present and had two sons, firmly establishing the Bonaparte line in the US. Meanwhile, Jérôme meekly bowed to the emperor’s wishes. Napoleon married his youngest brother off to a German princess, Catherina of Wurttemberg, and made Jérôme King of Westphalia, a made-up title for a made-up country that only lasted until 1813.

  Now at 30, Jérôme (no longer a king, but a mere prince) was clearly determined to show his brother he could take Hougoumont. Jérôme threw more men forward without much of a plan.

  Lieutenant Puvis from the 93rd de ligne was told, ‘We are going to attack the English lines ‘a la baionnette’.’ Bayonets were useless against the walls, but still they went forward and quickly found themselves pinned down behind a hedge that Ensign George Standen of the Light Company of the 3rd Foot Guards described as a ‘real bullfincher’. It ran parallel to the garden wall, and gave some protection to the attackers hiding behind it but when they charged round it, they were caught in the deadly crossfire from the fireloops in the garden walls. The strip of open land between the hedge and the wall became a killing zone, piled high with the French dead: ‘We tried to get through this hedge in vain. We suffered enormous casualties; the lieutenant of my company was killed closed to me. A ball struck the visor of my shako and knocked me onto my backside …’

  A cloud of skirmishers pushed through the cornfield and the wood, forcing a Nassau battalion and the Jägers through the wood to the rear of the chateau until a counter-charge by Macdonell forced the French back once more. General Guilleminot, chef de l’Etat to Jérôme, told the Coldstream Guards officer Sir Alex Woodford, when they met in Corfu years later, that he advised Jérôme on the first attack but was against Jérôme’s other attacks: ‘It always struck me the subsequent attacks were feeble,’ said Woodford.2

  After nearly two hours of largely futile slaughter, the charismatic French Colonel Amédée-Louis Despans, the Marquis de Cubières, who already had one arm in a sling from an injury at Quatre Bras, tried a different approach, and nearly succeeded.

  After 1 p.m., as the battle for the farm raged, a cart of ammunition was lashed under heavy fire through the north gate by a young wagon driver, Corporal Joseph Brewer. The men had only time to fill their pouches when cannon fire ‘suddenly burst upon them mingled with the shouts of a column rushing on to a fresh attack’. Captain Seymour, Lord Uxbridge’s ADC was inadvertently responsible for this show of valour by Brewer. He recalled:

  Late in the day I was called by some officers of the 3rd Guards defending Hougoumont to use my best endeavours to send them musket ammunition. Soon afterwards I fell in with a private of the Wagon Train in charge of a tumbril on the crest of the position. I merely pointed out to him where he was wanted when he gallantly started his horses and drove straight down the hill to the farm to the gate of which I saw him arrive. He must have lost his horses as there was a severe fire kept on him. I feel convinced to that man’s service the Guards owe their ammunition.

  However, it may have given Cubières the clue to the chateau’s Achilles heel: the north gate. He realised that the north gate was not barricaded and was kept open to admit the supplies of ammunition; he put together a party to attack it.

  Cubières, who had fought in Spain, picked a burly veteran of the Spanish campaign, Lieutenant Bonnet, to lead it and some axe-wielding pioneers to back him up. British accounts say he was called Legros, which literally translated means ‘the big’. That certainly describes Bonnet. Around 100 men of the Coldstream Guards were outside the high barn walls on the west side of the farm, including Private Clay of the 3rd Foot Guards, who had tested his musket in the damp dawn. He was kneeling behind a hedge, and poked the muzzle through it to fire at the attackers. Clay and his comrades soon had musket balls zipping around their bodies. Ensign Charles Short of the Coldstream Guards said:

  We were ordered to lie down on the road, the musket shots flying over us like peas – an officer next to me was hit in the cap, but not hurt, as it went through; another next to him was hit also, on the plate of the cap, but it went through also without hurting him. Two sergeants that lay near me were hit in the knapsacks, and were not hurt besides other shots passing as near as possible.

  The Guards were forced back into the hollow way by the north corner of the farm. Ensign Standen, a cap in one hand and a sword in the other, ordered some of the men including Clay and Private Robert Gann, a seasoned soldier over 40 years of age, to cover the retreat by attacking the French. Clay and Gann dropped behind the cover of a circular haystack to fire on the attackers but the French set fire to the hay. Clay and Gann were forced back by the heat from the flames, the smoke, and the heavy musket fire to seek whatever cover they could. Cubières spurred his horse towards the gates, and rallied his men with a drummer boy beating out the pas de charge to capture the north gate.

  As Cubières reached the farm track, he was pulled from his horse by Sergeant Ralph Fraser, a veteran who had fought through the Peninsular campaign, wielding a halberd, an axe on a long pole. Cubières fell to the ground, just below the wall of the west barn. He was about to be shot by the defenders inside the barn, but a Guards officer inside the barn knocked down the rifles of his men to stop the injured Cubières being shot, because he had shown such courage. Lieutenant Colonel Sir Alexander Woodford of the 2nd Battalion Coldstream Guards later said Cubières made a fuss of it every time they met.3 But there was to be little quarter given after that.

  Mackinnon, the historian of the Coldstream Guards, who was posted in the farm’s orchard says the ‘enemy compelled the few men who remained outside to withdraw into the chateau by the rear gate.’ Ensign Standen, Sergeant Fraser and the remaining Third Guar
ds took a lull in the firing to run for their lives inside the north gates, which were slammed shut as soon as they were inside. The defenders rammed ladders, posts, barrows, or whatever was nearest to hand, against the gates to barricade them. But Clay and Gann were cut off from their retreating friends and were stranded, keeping their heads down, outside the farm.

  Bonnet grabbed an axe from one of the pioneers and smashed at the lock on the gate* while some powerful sapeurs threw themselves at the gates and began hacking at the panels of the doors. Bonnet ‘struck with mighty blows the side opening at this entry, threw it down, and penetrated into the courtyard …’ The French raiders poured into the cobbled yard, which was puddled with the overnight rain. Bonnet and his men were caught in a hail of musket balls fired into them from the farmer’s house and the barns, and the roofs of the farm buildings. Ensign Standen said: ‘We flew to the parlour, opened the windows and drove them out, leaving an officer and some men dead within the wall.’ A French account said: ‘Bonnet and his men were shot down at point-blank range from an elevated platform. All found death there …’4 The firing died with the last French attacker. Bonnet was left lying dead on the cobbles, still holding his axe. Outside, there were more attackers but they hesitated, waiting for reinforcements.

  Macdonell, who was across the yard by the gate into the north garden, realised the farm would fall unless the north gates were slammed shut and barricaded again. Macdonell dashed across the yard, shouting at three Coldstream Guards officers to join him in closing the gates. Captain Harry Wyndham, Ensign James Hervey and Ensign Henry Gooch raced across the yard to shut the gates with Macdonnel, and were joined by Corporal James Graham and his brother Joe with four more guardsmen – Sergeants Fraser, McGregor, Joseph Aston and Private Joseph Lester. At that moment, Clay, 20, and Gann, 41, made a run for it. Clay grabbed a discarded musket as he ran – it was still warm from firing – because his own had failed, and scrambled inside the gates with Gann just as they were heaved shut again.