St Joseph's Church, Waterloo

While Napoleon slept only one night at Le Caillou, Wellington spent two nights at his headquarters, an inn in the village of Waterloo - the night before Waterloo, and the night after.  Wellington's headquarters is called the Bodenghien Inn, situated at Chausse de Bruxelles 147,1410. 

It stands in a row of buildings that are largely unchanged since 1815. 

On the second night, he wrote his famous Waterloo despatch while Sir Alexander Gordon lay dying in Wellington's bed.  Gordon died at 0330 on the morning of the 19th.  

While both Le Caillou and Waterloo are too distant to be attached to the main diorama, both locations are intrinsic to the story of Waterloo and are therefore being constructed as standalone dioramas.

In popular mythology, Napoleon is seen as the warm hearted, charismatic leader, while Wellington is considered cold and calculating.  I think the behaviour of Wellington at the Bodenghien inn shows this to be untrue.  By the time Gordon died Wellington must have been physically and mentally exhausted.  The combination of sleep deprivation, deafening noise, and the shock caused by the death or wounding of most of his staff must have left him partially traumatised.  And yet he found the time to be with his friend while he lay dying. 

Opposite the inn, is the church of St Joseph. The original church burnt down and in 1687, the new governor-general of the Spanish Netherlands, Don Francisco Antonio de Agurto, marquis de Gastañaga, decided to build a new chapel on the site, dedicated to Saint Joseph.

 Like all buildings of this era, the edifice's architecture (attributed to the Walloon architect Philippe Delsaux) borrows from the language of French Baroque classicism - a rotonda, a dome and above all a colonnaded portico refer to classical antiquity. 

 

This is reinforced by the presence of two lions on the portico's pediment. It is an imposing monument, in contrast to the modest size of the town of Waterloo, which it serves. 

 

Shortly after the French Revolution and France's annexation of the southern Netherlands, the royal chapel was sold as state property of the French Republic. A Parisian businessman Thomas Gillet bought it at a knock-down price, having already acquired the neighbouring abbeys of Aywiers and Wauthier-Braine. 

 

From then on mass was celebrated secretly in a barn at the farm of Philippe Pastur's widow by the brave abbot Bierlaire, an opponent of the French occupation.

 

To cash in on his investments, the speculator dismantled the buildings and sold the materials, stripping the lead off the chapel's roof to sell to army suppliers to make rifle bullets, but local opposition was so strong that he hesitated to continue. 

 

In the meantime, Napoleon signed the Concordat of 1801 and Waterloo became an autonomous parish. The town called upon the generosity of its fellow countrymen to buy back the chapel and put it back in religious use. Its first Mass was held on 10 June 1806.

 

After Waterloo, the chapel was extended and turned into a church sufficient for a much larger congregation.  But on the 18^th June 1815, the building’s grand eastern façade looked curiously out of proportion to its stubby west end.

 

Modelling the building has been by some margin the most challenging task of the diorama so far.  There are numerous contemporary pictures from 1815, and most distort the rear of the building so that the viewer gets an overall impression.  

 

Various examples are below:

The building in its modern form was extended to become a church after Waterloo and the slate roof was replaced with copper in the early 20th Century.  Nevertheless, modern images of the church are helpful:

Showing the pendentive form of the dome

To God the Best and Greatest, and to Saint Joseph and Saint Anne: Francisco Antonio Agurto, Marquis of Gastañaga and Governor of the Netherlands, dedicated this chapel—for the sake of the desired lineage of the Catholic sovereigns, Charles II (King of Spain and the Indies, and Prince of the Netherlands)—and laid the foundation stone, with prayers for an enduring legacy.

 

The lions are going to be interesting to model

My father has kindly taken on the modelling of the buildings.  He has not yet started on the Inn and has instead begun with the Chapel.  I think it's fair to say that it promises to be his finest model building yet.  Here are some images of it in the process of construction:

The basic structure of the chapel has been achieved through the simple expedient of four half cardboard cylinders

The front and steps

The roof takes shape

And after sand papering

Brick work

First attempt at slates

And now with rounded slates

Once the church is done, the next stage will be the row of houses opposite, amongst which will be the inn.

Once the buildings are complete, the intention is to show Wellington and his staff preparing to leave for the battlefield.

After the battle, the chapel (once out was converted into a church) became a sight of pilgrimage for many British veterans.  The interior of the church today has many plaques commemorating the fallen.