On the very day when he was busy hanging poor Isaac of Reninghe[17] whom, in spite of a monk’s cowl, a long face and a book of psalms, his blood-hounds had smelt out the day before in the Abbey of Terouane, Louis the Fat disowned him.
‘Have nothing to do with William of Ypres,’ ran the French King’s letter to the barons and burghers of Bruges; ‘have nothing to do with William of Ypres, because he is a bastard, born of a noble father and a mother of vile birth, who all her life was a weaver of thread’ (it was the same charge that had stung the Erembalds to revolt; William’s mother was a Karline), ‘but come forthwith to Arras, and there choose in my presence a prince worthy of Flanders.’
II.—Genealogical Table of the Counts of Flanders from Baldwin V. to Baldwin VII.
Louis had already determined who should be the new count, but he was wise enough to gild the bitter pill, and when the barons reached Arras he adroitly persuaded them to elect William Cliton, and to secure also the acquiescence of the burghers. William was only fourth in the order of succession, but he and Louis had married two sisters, and the French Queen naturally enough desired to befriend a kinsman on whom fortune had never yet smiled. Besides, the arrangement fitted in exactly with Louis’s own views. The friendship of Flanders was to him a matter of far greater moment than the law of primogeniture, he had known William all his life, and he felt that he could trust him. His young favourite would doubtless, too, prove a dangerous rival to Henry Beauclerc, the one man whom Louis feared; with the aid of his Flemish vassals he would be able to wrest his Norman inheritance from the English King, and perhaps also the crown of England itself.