‘The outcome of the battle of Waterloo rested upon the closing of the gates at Hougoumont.’
So declared the Duke of Wellington after his victory over Napoleon 210 years ago, on 18th June 1815.
If you stand today on the ridge where Wellington stood, looking over the battlefield sloping down to Napoleon’s front line, you can still make out the Château d’Hougoumont.
From a distance, across the neatly bordered, flowering potato fields, Hougoumont – more grand farmhouse than château – looks spick and span, flanked by the long walls of its kitchen garden. Move closer, though, and you soon make out the deep scars of that momentous day.
The Battle of Waterloo started at Hougoumont at around 11.30am and raged until 8.30 that summer evening. Some 14,000 French soldiers attacked the château and 12,000 Allied troops fought them off. At Hougoumont 5,000 soldiers were killed or wounded.
Wellington called the Waterloo victory ‘the nearest-run thing you ever saw’. And Hougoumont’s gates were the hinge on which that victory turned.
Again and again, the French tried to batter down the gates – recently rebuilt, using timber from the current Duke of Wellington’s Stratfield Saye estate. Forty French soldiers squeezed in. All were killed, apart from an 11-year-old drummer boy.
The Coldstream Guards and the Scots Guards held the day, even if the château was burnt to the ground, its chapel left as a surviving fragment.
Victor Hugo wrote of the chapel, in Les Misérables (1862),
‘The door was burned; the floor was burned; the wooden Christ was not burned. The fire preyed upon his feet, of which only the blackened stumps are now to be seen. Then it stopped – a miracle, according to the assertion of the people of the neighbourhood.’
Still today, you can see Christ with his fire-amputated feet, standing guard over the tiny chapel and its altar, piled high with wreaths of poppies.
Hougoumont has become one of the great war memorials of Europe. Everywhere you look around the château and the farm, the battle lives on.
There’s a monument to the Scots Guards outside the hallowed gates (pictured). Inside the gates, on the 200th anniversary, in 2015, the then Prince Charles unveiled another monument, showing two Allied soldiers holding back the gates. The memorial was part of a £3m restoration.
On the 210th anniversary this June, a lone Scots Guards piper, Lance Sergeant Douglas Warren, played ‘Highland Laddie’ at the gates, to salute his lost comrades – and Prince Edward.
The prince came to Hougoumont to pay respect to the Allied and French dead – and make a symbolic start to the garden project by planting a seed of a ‘tree of peace’, a descendant of a sapling salvaged from the ruins of Hiroshima in 1945.
A splendid obelisk to the French dead at Hougoumont stands in the middle of the château garden. Look closely at the garden walls and you’ll see the loopholes hacked into the brick, to fire grapeshot and cannonballs at the oncoming French.
After the battle, Victor Hugo said of Hougoumont, ‘It was a château; it is no longer anything but a farm.’
For nearly 200 years, Hougoumont remained a farm, frozen in time, its ruined manor and agricultural buildings left in their shattered state. It was in private ownership until 2003, when it became the property of the Intercommunale, a consortium of local authorities.
The charity Project Hougoumont has preserved the chapel and the farm buildings, adding a museum and a gripping son et lumière – fair to both sides – about the battle.
Now Hougoumont’s formal garden, vegetable garden and three orchards, obliterated by the battle, will be restored.
Victor Hugo wrote, ‘It was a seignorial garden in the first French style which preceded André Le Nôtre [1613-1700; Louis XIV’s main architect and landscape designer]; today it is ruins and briars.’
The new garden will echo that formal French look. Today’s lawn will become an elevated ornamental parterre, bordered by a balustrade.
The old kitchen vegetable garden will be revived with 18th-century planting techniques. The big orchard, where the worst of the fighting took place, will be replanted in its original symmetrical layout. And a new biosphere garden, for schools and families, will rise on wetland, just beyond the famous north gates.
The Friends of the Hougoumont Gardens and the Waterloo Committee are running the project, designed by François Goffinet, a distinguished Belgian garden designer. Some £950,000 of the £1.3m total cost has been raised.
Baron Alexander de Vos van Steenwijk, Chairman of the Friends of the Hougoumont Gardens, said, ‘We know how the gardens looked before the battle because there were many depictions of Hougoumont from the time.
‘We’ve also worked with archaeologists who have carried out research which shows how and where the trees were planted in the orchard.’
Backed by the local Walloon Region and the Kléber Rossillon Group, which looks after the battlefield, the gardens will open in 2027. They will be an extra lure for visitors to Waterloo.
Getting there is easy. The battlefield is only 20 miles from the Brussels Eurostar station – a 40-minute drive.
Waterloo is easy to navigate. The ridge where Wellington surveyed the battlefield is prominent, marked by the Lion’s Mound, the huge pyramid of earth piled up in honour of King William II of the Netherlands, wounded by a musket ball. Waterloo was still part of the Netherlands in 1815.
So little has changed that the navigation points today are Wellington’s and Napoleon’s navigation points – the few buildings scattered across the plain. The tourist shops and restaurants are discreetly hidden from the battlefield.
It was crucial that Wellington was up on the ridge, his troops concealed by the tall rye grass.
Napoleon had to struggle up the hill, through the mud, after a rainy night. He joined battle late in the morning, in the vain hope that the summer warmth would dry the ground.
Down to the right is Hougoumont. Straight ahead is La Haye Sainte, the walled farmhouse on the Brussels-Charleoi road. Here 400 King’s German Legion troops kept Napoleon at bay till the late afternoon.
Beyond La Haye Sainte is La Belle Alliance – then an inn; now a nightclub.
Here, at 9pm on the evening of the battle, Wellington met Prince Blücher, the 74-year-old Prussian general who swept into Waterloo in the late afternoon, guaranteeing Wellington his victory. By this time, Napoleon had fled the battlefield for Paris, where on 24th June he announced his abdication.
Lt-Col Basil Jackson watched the meeting between Wellington and Blücher:
‘The two great chiefs cordially shook hands, and were together about ten minutes; it was then so dark that I could not distinguish Blücher’s features. On leaving Blücher, the Duke rode at a walk towards Waterloo.’
You can visit the Wellington Museum in the pretty little town of Waterloo – here Wellington spent the night before and the night after the battle. Here, too, he wrote the Wellington Dispatch to Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for War, early in the morning after the battle.
In the dispatch, he wrote:
‘I am happy to add that [Hougoumont] 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.’
Stroll down from Wellington’s ridge down to Hougoumont – and the whole story of the battle clicks into sharp focus.
As Victor Hugo said, ‘Hougoumont was a funereal spot; the beginning of the obstacle; the first resistance, which that great wood-cutter of Europe, called Napoleon, encountered at Waterloo; the first knot under the blows of his axe.’
Eurostar, London to Brussels return, from £88 (www.eurostar.com) Harry Mount stayed in Martin’s Hotel, Louvain-la-Neuve, doubles from £95 (www.martinshotels.com)
For more information and to donate, go to www.gardensofhougoumont.com
