by Colin Brown
Clay later noted in his pay book, which he used for his journal:
On entering the court-yard, I saw the doors or rather gates were riddled with shot-holes, and it was also very wet and dirty; in its entrance lay many dead bodies of the enemy; one I particularly noticed which appeared to have been a French officer, but they were scarcely distinguishable, being to all appearance as though they had been very much trodden upon, and covered with mud.
On gaining the interior, I saw Lieutenant Colonel Macdonell carrying a large piece of wood or trunk of a tree in his arms (one of his cheeks marked with blood, his charger lay bleeding within a short distance) with which he was hastening to secure the gates against the renewed attack of the enemy which was most vigorously repulsed.
‘Occupy the ruined walls’ was Wellington’s order, as Hougoumont chateau was engulfed in flames. Corporal Graham only deserted them to rescue his brother from the flames, which made him a national hero.
Macdonell and his party threw their weight against heavy doors forcing them shut. Immediately they piled stone slabs, broken beams and the remains of broken wagons and farm implements against the gates.
Outside, a French Grenadier was lifted to the top of the wall on the shoulders of the French attackers with a musket. He aimed it at Captain Wyndham, who shouted to Graham: ‘Do you see that fellow?’ Graham snatched up his musket, took aim and shot the Frenchman dead. No others dared to follow. The French attackers were driven from the gates along the hollow way by four companies of Coldstream Guards under Colonel Alexander Woodford.
Inside the farm, Clay, black-faced from biting the ends off countless musket cartridges, was ordered with others into an upper room of the chateau by Ensign Gooch to prepare for the next attack. They did not have long to wait. They began firing down on the skirmishers through the windows but the French brought up some guns and fired howitzer shells at the building. Suddenly, flames leapt across the roof of the barn. ‘Our officer placed himself at the entrance of the room and would not allow anyone to leave his post until our position became hopeless and too perilous to remain,’ said Clay.
Burning beams and rafters crashed down, sending red-hot embers flying among the men, as roundshot and flaming missiles smashed into the buildings. Flames burst through the roof and a pall of black smoke filled the air over Hougoumont.
Up on the ridge, the flames and smoke over Hougoumont were immediately spotted by the hawk-eyed Wellington through his telescope. He scribbled a note to Macdonell:
I see that the fire has communicated from the Hay Stack to the Roof of the Chateau. You must however still keep your men in those parts to which the fire does not reach. Take care that no men are lost by the falling-in of the Roof or floors. After they have both fallen in, occupy the ruined walls inside of the Garden; particularly if it should be possible for the enemy to pass through the Embers in the inside of the house.*
Major Macready, of Halkett’s brigade, saw the fire:
Hougoumont and its wood sent up a broad flame through the dark masses of smoke that overhung the field; beneath this cloud the French were indistinctly visible. Here a waving mass of long red feathers could be seen; there, gleams as from a sheet of steel showed that the cuirassiers were moving; 400 cannon were belching forth fire and death on every side; the roaring and shouting were indistinguishably commixed – together they gave me an idea of a labouring volcano.
Manning the garden wall facing the wood at Hougoumont, Corporal Graham asked Macdonell for permission to fall out. Graham had been in the Coldstream Guards for three years and Macdonell knew he did not lack courage; he expressed surprise at his request. Graham said he wanted to save his brother, Joe, who had been injured and was in the blazing barn. James immediately won Macdonell’s approval and ran to his brother, dragged him clear and left him in a ditch, to protect him from the shelling, but returned to the walls of the besieged farm. Others who were injured sought refuge in the small chapel, which after the battle was all that remained of the chateau. Many injured men who had been dragged into the barn were not so lucky. Woodford said: ‘The heat and smoke of the conflagration were very difficult to bear. Several men were burnt as neither Colonel Macdonell nor myself could penetrate the stables where the wounded had been carried.’5 Ensign Standen said: ‘During the confusion, three or four officers’ horses rushed out into the yard from the barn and in a minute or two rushed back into the flames and were burnt.’
The siege was only lifted after 7 p.m., when the allied infantry charged past Hougoumont in pursuit of the retreating Imperial Guard. Captain H.W. Powell of the 1st Foot Guards noted in his journal:
Lord Saltoun … holloaed out, ‘Now’s the time, my boys.’ Immediately the brigade sprang forward. La Garde turned and gave us little opportunity of trying the steel. We charged down the hill till we had passed the end of the orchard of Hougoumont …
It was only then that the defenders of Hougoumont knew, after over eight hours under siege, they had won.
Ensign Short of the Coldstream Guards, who had survived rain, gin and the siege, wrote a boyish summary of the battle to his mother from Nivelles that Monday:
Dear Mother … I never saw such luck as we had. The Brigade Major was wounded by a cannon ball, which killed his horse and broke his arm; and General Byng was wounded slightly while standing opposite me about five paces. General Byng did not leave the field. Lord Wellington with his Ball dress was very active indeed, as well as Lord Uxbridge and the Prince of Orange, both severely wounded, the former having lost his leg and the latter being hit in the body. General Cooke, commanding our Division, lost his arm. The battle kept up all day in this wood where our Brigade was stationed. The farm-house was set on fire by shells, however we kept possession of it. The Cavalry came on about five o’clock, and attacked the rest of the line, when the Horse Guards and the other regiments behaved most gallantly. The French charged our hollow squares and were repulsed several times – the Imperial Guards with Napoleon at their head charged the 1st Guards, and the number of killed and wounded is extraordinary – they lie as thick as possible, one on top of the other. They were repulsed in every attack, and about seven o’clock the whole French army made a general attack for their last effort, and we should have had very hard work to repulse them – when 25,000 Prussians came on, and we drove them like chaff before the wind, 20,000 getting into the midst of them played the Devil with them, and they took to flight in the greatest possible hurry. The baggage of Bonaparte was taken by the Prussians, and the last report that has been heard of the French says, that they have re-passed the frontier and gone by Charleroi hard pressed by the Prussians. The French say that this battle beats Leipsic [sic] hollow in the number of killed and wounded. Our Division suffered exceedingly. We are to follow on Thursday. Today we bivouac at Nivelles. Lord Wellington has thanked our Division through General Byng, and says, ‘that he never saw such gallant conduct in his life’.
Bull’s howitzer troop stayed close to the battlefield until 3 p.m. on Monday, when they were ordered to move. John Lees whipped his horses in the direction of Paris, but the young wagon driver’s role in the turbulent history of his times was not over. He and Byng would be involved in one of the worst atrocities that Britain (see Chapter Ten) has witnessed.
The story of the closing of the gates at Hougoumont captured the imagination of Georgian Britain. It was told as a tale of uniquely British heroism (though German troops were there) and Wellington helped to consolidate that legend, saying over one of his suppers at Deal Castle in 1840: ‘You may depend on it – no troops could have held Hougoumont but British, and only the best of them.’ Walter Scott was inspired to some bad verse:
Yes – Agincourt may be forgot
And Cressy be an unknown spot
And Blenheim’s name be new;
But still in story and in song
For many an aged remember’d long,
Shall live the towers of Hugomont
And field of Waterloo.
Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle drew on the heroic wagon driver Brewer, who delivered ammunition to Hougoumont under fire, for a short story, A Straggler of ’15, although his name was changed to Brewster.
I discovered that the true story of Hougoumont is surrounded by myths. The most persistent myth is that the walls were breached only once. Mackinnon said the French smashed their way through the north gate twice in his official history of the Coldstream Guards in 1833:
The gate was then forced. At this critical moment, Macdonell rushed to the spot with the officers and men nearest at hand and not only expelled the assailants, but reclosed the gate. The enemy from their overwhelming numbers again entered the yard, when the Guards retired to the house and kept up from the windows such a destructive fire, that the French were driven out and the gate once more was closed …6
Gareth Glover, one of the outstanding British experts on Waterloo, told me he believed Mackinnon was confused because he was not in the farmyard at the crucial moment: ‘I checked a number of eyewitness accounts, but no one seems to agree with his confused version. The closing of the gate was so famous for its success – this does not make sense if it failed and they broke in again just after!’ He believes Mackinnon confused his account with a second break-in through a small gate by the side of the great barn on the west side of the farm. This was described by Lieutenant General Woodford of the 2nd Battalion Coldstream Guards. He said: ‘Some few of the enemy penetrated into the yard from the lane on the West, but were speedily driven out, or dispatched.’ This is supported by the French versions, which say as many as seventy men tried to get in through this small gate but were repulsed.
Private Clay says the French broke in a third time, through the doors of the great gate house on the south side (which he called the upper gates):
The enemy’s artillery having forced the upper gates, a party of them rushed in who were as quickly driven back, no one being left inside but a drummer boy without his drum, whom I lodged in a stable or outhouse …
A round shot burst them open; stumps intended for firewood laying within were speedily scattered in all directions, the enemy not having succeeded in gaining an entry.
The gates were again secured although much shattered.
Clay’s account led to the most famous myth that when the north gate was breached, the only one of the French attackers left alive was the little drummer boy. Clay makes it clear the boy was stranded in the subsequent attack.
A patriotic cleric, the Reverend John Norcross, the curate of Framlingham in Suffolk, was so moved by the stories of heroism at Waterloo that on 19 July 1815, one month after the battle, he wrote to Wellington, who was then in Paris, offering a pension to the man of the Duke’s choice who he believed had showed the greatest bravery. Inevitably, the man chosen became known as the ‘Bravest Man in England’.
Framlington was one of the richest livings in the country and Norcross, aged 53, offered an annuity to be called the ‘Wellington Pension’ and paid on Waterloo Day, 18 June, every year for the rest of the curate’s life. The current incumbent of the Framlington curacy and his wife showed me a copy of the letter. Reverend Norcross wrote:
If your Grace will do me the honour to nominate any one of my brave countrymen who have fought under your Grace’s banners in the late tremendous but glorious conflict – I shall have great pleasure in settling upon him for the continuance of my life an annuity of £10 which I humbly request your Grace will permit to be entitled the Wellington Pension.
Norcross said on receipt of the Duke’s recommendation, the first payment would be immediately advanced and in future, with his Grace’s approbation, paid on each anniversary of the ‘memorable’ 18 June:
I will not add more than that, with the exalted sentiments which I entertain of your Grace’s transcendent merits and appreciating as I do your splendid and unparalleled achievements, were means commensurate to my inclinations, I would cheerfully centuple the sum I mentioned.
As Norcross hinted, £10 a year – 3s a week – was hardly a prince’s ransom even in 1815, but it was a handy sum for a soldier reduced to charity after the war.
Wellington replied in a letter dated Paris, 31 July, promising at the earliest opportunity to make the Reverend Norcross ‘acquainted with the name of the soldier, whom, upon enquiry, I shall find most deserving of your bounty’. Wellington added that it was the same ‘patriotic spirit’ which had induced Norcross to make his financial sacrifice and which so generally prevailed in England that had given so much encouragement to the ‘discipline and courage’ of his men. It was ‘to this spirit that we owe the advantages we have acquired in the field and I beg leave to return you the best thanks in the name of the brave officers and soldiers whom I have had the happiness of commanding.’
On 24 August 1815, Wellington again wrote to Reverend Norcross at Framlingham Rectory from Paris:
Sir, having made enquiries respecting the soldier to be recommended to you in consequence of your letter of 19th July, to which I wrote an answer on 31st July, I now have leave to recommend to you Lance Sergeant Graham of the Coldstream Regiment of Guards. I have leave to return to you my thanks for your patriotism and your benevolence towards those which have so well deserved the approbation of their country.
Wellington passed Norcross’s letter on to Sir John Byng with a request to choose a man from the 2nd Brigade of Guards, which had so highly distinguished itself in the defence of Hougoumont. According to Captain William Siborne, who interviewed Sergeant Graham, it was Byng who picked him, because of the way he rescued his brother from the flames. It was the kind of selfless heroism and human interest story that was certain to capture the hearts of the public in Regency Britain.
John Booth, in his history of Waterloo written only the year after the battle, claimed Norcross had asked for a non-commissioned officer to receive his pension, but Norcross’s letter makes no mention of that. There is another myth that Norcross left £500 in his will to Macdonell and the officer split the money with Graham. I have obtained a copy of Norcross’s will from 1837 and while he left money to his wife and a number of others, there is no mention in his will of Macdonell, Graham or any others connected with Waterloo.
The Irishman with the curly black hair was given a special bravery medal by his fellow sergeants in addition to his Waterloo Medal. In his Waterloo Despatch, Wellington singled out the saving of Hougoumont for special praise:
At about ten o’clock he [Napoleon] commenced a furious attack upon our post at Hougoumont. I had occupied that post with a detachment from General Byng’s brigade of Guards, which was in position in its rear; and it was for some time under the command of Lieut. Colonel Macdonell, and afterwards of Colonel Home; and I am happy to add that it was maintained throughout the day with the utmost gallantry by these brave troops, notwithstanding the repeated efforts of large bodies of the enemy to obtain possession of it.7
Macdonell, who was injured and had to hand over to Home late in the day, was awarded a knighthood by the Prince Regent and made a Knight of Maria Theresa, an Austrian gallantry award that carried a pension. He rose to become a major general and retired to his estates in 1830, where he died in 1859. Sergeant Fraser, who unhorsed Cubières, was discharged two years after Waterloo ‘in consequence of long service and being worn out’; he was lucky – he found a post as a Bedesman at Westminster Abbey and died in 1862, aged 80.
Matthew Clay endured terrible poverty in old age. He married his wife Johanna at Stoke Dameral in Devon in 1823; they moved to Bedfordshire and had twelve children, though – in common with mortality rates at the time – only three survived. He spent eleven years after Waterloo as a drill sergeant and after being discharged from the Guards with a pension of 1s 8d, he supplemented his income by serving for another twenty years as a sergeant in the Bedfordshire militia. He moved to his birthplace, Blidworth in the Sherwood Forest, in old age. His wife Johanna took in laundry, but she was struck by paralysis and Clay was so poor that he had to sell furniture and other possessions to k
eep them alive and pay the rent.
A family member, Christine Dabbs Clay, who researched her ancestor, said:
Matthew struggled to make ends meet a few years before he died. The old veteran had denied himself necessities to keep his ailing wife, Johanna, alive without asking for charity. He had to sell his possessions so that he could pay the rent.
Before the welfare state, there were few options for old soldiers like Clay – poor relief from the parish, begging or the workhouse. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 established ‘workhouses’, and to cut the cost of poor law provision they had brutal conditions like prisons to deter the poor from turning to them. The regime would have meant the separation of married couples like the Clays. A few of the lucky ones got pensions from the Chelsea Board but few, like Tom Plunkett, who was wounded in the head at Waterloo, passed the interview; he was discharged with just 6d a day.
Sergeant Clay’s plight was eventually discovered after his wife had died by a General Codrington, who wrote letters to The Times that led to a charitable fund for Clay, which soon grew to £100. ‘Unfortunately,’ said Christine Dabbs Clay:
the last enemy was too strong and Matthew died on 5 June 1873 aged 78, before he could benefit from the General’s kindness.