From that moment William’s cause was lost. On the 11th of March, Dierick of Alsace entered Flanders. The great imperial vassals, Daniel of Termonde and Ivan of Alost, at once rallied to his standard, Ghent received him with open arms; a little later (March 27), when he reached Bruges, Gervais of Praet declared in his favour, and three days afterwards the nobles and burghers assembled in the Champ de Sablon solemnly deposed William Cliton, and declared Dierick his successor, and he in his turn solemnly confirmed and increased the rights and privileges of the city, and made proclamation that henceforth no man should be condemned on suspicion and without trial for complicity in Charles’s murder.
By this just and politic proceeding he gained the goodwill of the Karls, and thus supported alike by the nobles, the burghers, and what we should call the yeomen farmers of the sea coast, nothing could arrest his progress. Neither the threats of the French King, nor the spiritual thunder of Archbishop Simon of Tournai, not even the victory which William and his Normans gained at Axpoel Heath, where so great was the slaughter that on Dierick’s return to Bruges the whole city was filled with lamentation.
Nothing shows more clearly the unpopularity of William than the barren results of this victory. Not a single city opened its doors to him. Presently, when he was laying siege to Alost, he received a mortal wound, and his death on August 4, 1128, left Dierick master of Flanders. The night that William died, says Ordericus Vitalis, Duke Robert (his father), who was in prison at Devizes, and had been there twenty-two years, felt in a dream his own right arm pierced with a lance, whereupon he seemed to lose the use of it, and when he awoke in the morning, he said to those about him, ‘Alas! my son is dead.’
Walbert, though he enlarges at considerable length on the iniquity of ‘our burghers’ in rebelling against their lawful sovereign, gives William but a poor character. In my opinion, he says, the Almighty removed this man by death from the county, because he had laid waste all the land, provoked the inhabitants thereof to civil war, and set at naught alike the laws of God and of man. Nor did God suffer him to go the way of all flesh until he had first endured the chastisement due to his misdeeds. For in sooth Count William will confess amongst the shades whom he sent before him to the Infernal Regions that, of all those things he possessed in life, this alone now remains to him—his military reputation.
Ordericus Vitalis, who represents the Cliton in much more favourable light, bears witness also to his prowess in battle. ‘Ad militare facinus,’ he says, ‘damnabiliter promptus.’
