Without being austere in his private life, he was regular in his habits, and patronized order and respectability in his household as well as in his dominions.
He resolved to marry to his own honor, and to the promotion of his greatness.

Baldwin the Debonnair, count of Flanders, one of the most powerful lords of the day, had a daughter, "Matilda, beautiful, well-informed, firm in the faith, a model of virtue and modesty." William asked her hand in marriage.

Matilda refused, saying, "I would rather be veiled nun than given in marriage to a bastard." Hurt as he was, William did not give up.

He was even more persevering than susceptible; but he knew that he must get still greater, and make an impression upon a young girl's imagination by the splendor of his fame and power.

Some years later, being firmly established in Normandy, dreaded by all his neighbors, and already showing some foreshadowings of his design upon England, he renewed his matrimonial quest in Flanders, but after so strange a fashion that, in spite of contemporary testimony, several of the modern historians, in their zeal, even at so distant a period, for observance of the proprieties, reject as fabulous the story which is here related on the authority of the most detailed account amongst all the chronicles which contain it.