advanced for his interposition to prevail in the face of the determination of the states of Holland to conclude a peace so advantageous to their trade interests. William, however, speedily opened secret negotiations with France in the hope of securing the armed assistance of that power for the carrying out of his ambitious projects of a war of aggrandisement against the Spanish Netherlands and of a restoration of his brother-in-law, Charles II., to the throne of England. The states of Holland, on the other hand, were determined to thwart any attempts for a renewal of war, and insisted, in defiance of the authority of the captain-general supported by the states-general, in virtue of their claim to be a sovereign province, in disbanding a large part of the regiments in their pay. A prolonged controversy arose, which ended in the states-general in June 1650 commissioning the prince of Orange to visit the towns of Holland and secure a recognition of their authority. The mission was unsuccessful. Amsterdam refused any hearing, at all. William resolved therefore to use force and crush resistance. On the 30th of July six leading members of the states of Holland were seized and imprisoned in the castle of Loevestein. On the same day an attempt was made to occupy Amsterdam with troops. The citizens were, however, warned in time, and the gates closed. William's triumph was nevertheless complete. Cowed by the bold seizure of their leaders, the states of Holland submitted. The prince had now obtained that position of supremacy in the republic at which he had been aiming, and could count on the support alike of the states-general and of the provincial states for his policy. He lost no time in entering into fresh negotiations with the French government, and a draft treaty was already early in October drawn up in Paris and the Count d'Estrades was commissioned to deliver it in person to the prince of Orange. It was, however, never to reach his hands. William had, on the 8th of October, after his victory was assured, gone to his hunting seat at Dieren. Here on the 27th he became ill and returned to The Hague. The complaint proved to be small-pox, and on the 6th of November he died. William was one of the ablest of a race rich in great men, and had he lived he would probably have left his mark upon history. A week after his death his widow gave birth to a son, who was one day to become William III., king of England. (G. E.)
WILLIAM THE BRETON (c. 1160–c. 1225), French chronicler and poet, was as his name indicates born in Brittany. He was educated at Mantes and at the university of Paris, afterwards becoming chaplain to the French king Philip Augustus, who employed him on diplomatic errands, and entrusted him with the education of his natural son, Pierre Charlot. William is supposed to have been present at the battle of Bouvines. His works are the Philippide and the Gesta Philippi II. regis Francorum. The former, a poem three versions of which were written by the author, gives some very interesting details about Philip Augustus and his time, including some information about military matters and shows that William was an excellent Latin scholar. In its final form the Gesta is an abbreviation of the work of Rigord (q.v.), who wrote a life of Philip Augustus from 1179 to 1206, and a continuation by William himself from 1207 to 1220. In both works William speaks in very laudatory terms of the king; but his writings are valuable because he had personal knowledge of many of the facts which he relates. He also wrote a poem Karlotis, dedicated to Pierre Charlot, which is lost.
William’s works have been edited with introduction by H. F. Delaborde as Œuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton (Paris, 1882–1885), and have been translated into French by Guizot in Collection des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de France, tomes xi. and xii. (Paris, 1823–1835). See Delaborde's introduction, and A. Molinier, Les Sources de l’histoire de France, tome iii. (Paris, 1903).
WILLIAM THE CLITO (1101–1128) was the son of Robert, duke of Normandy, by his marriage with Sibylla of Conversano. After his father's defeat and capture by Henry I. of England at the battle of Tinchebrai (1106) the young William fell into the hands of the conqueror. Henry magnanimously placed his nephew in the custody of Helias of Saint Saens, who had married a natural daughter of Duke Robert. Fearing for the safety of the boy, Helias carried him, in 1111, to the court of Louis VI. of France. That sovereign joined with the discontented Norman barons and others of Henry's enemies in recognizing William as the rightful claimant to the duchy; Robert, a prisoner whom there was no hope of releasing, they appear to have regarded as dead in the eye of the law. William's claims furnished the pretext for two Norman rebellions. The first which lasted from 1112 to 1120 was abetted by Louis, by Fulk V. of Anjou and by Baldwin VII. of Flanders. In the second, which broke out during 1123, Henry I. had merely to encounter the forces of his own Norman subjects; his diplomatic skill had been successfully employed to paralyse the ill-will of other enemies. In 1122 or 1123 William married Sibylle, daughter of Fulk of Anjou, and with her received the county of Maine; but Henry I. prevailed upon the Curia to annul this union, as being within the forbidden degrees. In 1127, however, the pretender obtained from Louis the hand of Johanna of Montferrat, half-sister of the French queen, and the vacant fief of Flanders. His own rigorous government or the intrigues of Henry I. raised up against William a host of rebels; a rival claimant to Flanders appeared in the person of Thierry or Dirk of Alsace. In besieging Alost, one of the strongholds of the rival party, William received a wound which mortified and proved fatal (July 28, 1128). He left no issue; although Duke Robert survived him and only died in 1134, the power of Henry I. was thenceforth undisputed by the Normans.
See Ordericus Vitalis, Hist. ecclesiastica, and Sir James Ramsay's Foundations of England, vol. ii. (1898).
WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY (c. 1080–c. 1143), English historian of the 12th century, was born about the year 1080, in the south country. He had French as well as English blood in his veins, but he appears to have spent his whole life in England, and the best years of it as a monk at Malmesbury. His tastes were literary, and the earliest fact which he records of his career is that he assisted Abbot Godfrey (1081–1105) in collecting a library for the use of the community. The education which he received at Malmesbury included a smattering of logic and physics; but moral philosophy and history, especially the latter, were the subjects to which he devoted most attention. Later he made for himself a collection of the histories of foreign countries, from reading which he conceived an ambition to produce a popular account of English history, modelled on the great work of Bede. In fulfilment of this idea, William produced about 1120 the first edition of his Gesta regum, which at once gave him a reputation. It was followed by the first edition of the Gesta pontificum (1125). Subsequently the author turned aside to write on theological subjects. A second edition of the Gesta regum (1127) was dedicated to Earl Robert of Gloucester, whose literary tastes made him an appreciative patron. William also formed an acquaintance with Bishop Roger of Salisbury, who had a castle at Malmesbury. It may have been due to these friends that he was offered the abbacy of Malmesbury in 1140. But he preferred to remain a simple bibliothecarius. His one public appearance was made at the council of Winchester (1141), in which the clergy declared for the empress Matilda. About this date he undertook to write the Historia novella, giving an account of events since 1125. This work breaks off abruptly at the end of 1142, with an unfulfilled promise that it will be continued. Presumably William died before he could redeem his pledge.
He is the best English historian of his time. The master of a good Latin style, he shows literary instincts which are, for his time, remarkably sound. But his contempt for the annalistic form makes him at times careless in his chronology and arbitrary in his method of arranging his material; he not infrequently flies off at a tangent to relate stories which have little or no connexion with the main narrative; his critical faculty is too often allowed to lie dormant. His researches were by no means profound; he gives us less of the history of his own time than we have a right to expect—far less, for example, than Orderic. He is, however, an authority of considerable value from 1066 onwards; many telling anecdotes, many shrewd judgments on persons and events, can be gleaned from his pages.
