Château d'Hougoumont is a walled manorial compound, situated at the bottom of an escarpment near the Nivelles road in the Braine-l'Alleud municipality, near Waterloo, Belgium. The site served as one of the advanced defensible positions of the Anglo-allied army under the Duke of Wellington, that faced Napoleon's Army at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815.
View of the Hougoumont farm from the south, showing the restored Game Keeper's Cottage and the gate on that side
The domain some 16 years before the Battle of Waterloo
Fighting at the Hougoumont farm during the Battle of Waterloo
Nassau troops at the Hougoumont farm. These were mainly 2nd rgt. 1st battalion
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815, near Waterloo, marking the end of the Napoleonic Wars. A French army under the command of Napoleon was defeated by two armies of the Seventh Coalition. One of these was a British-led force with units from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Hanover, Brunswick, and Nassau, under the command of the Duke of Wellington. The other comprised three corps of the Prussian army under Field Marshal Blücher, a fourth corps of this army fought at the Battle of Wavre on the same day. The battle was known contemporarily as the Battle of Mont Saint-Jean in France or La Belle Alliance in Prussia.
The strategic situation in Western Europe in 1815: 250,000 Frenchmen faced about 850,000 allied soldiers on four fronts. In addition, Napoleon was forced to leave 20,000 men in Western France to reduce a royalist insurrection.
The resurgent Napoleon's strategy was to isolate the Anglo-allied and Prussian armies and annihilate each one separately.
Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher commanded the Prussian army, one of the Coalition armies that defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig
Marshal Michel Ney, who exercised tactical control of the greater part of the French forces for most of the battle
