The abbot of Croxton then asked the king where he wished to be buried. “I commend my body and my soul to God and to S. Wulfstan” was John’s reply.[1311] His last act seems to have been the dictation of the fragmentary document which has come down to us as his will. “Being overtaken,” he says, “by grievous sickness, and thus incapable of making a detailed disposition of all my goods, I commit the ordering and disposing of my will to the fidelity and discretion of my faithful men whose names are written below, without whose counsel, were they at hand, I would not, even if in health, ordain anything; and I ratify and confirm whatsoever they shall faithfully ordain and determine concerning my goods, for the purposes of making satisfaction to God and Holy Church for the wrongs I have done them, sending help to the realm of Jerusalem, furnishing support to my sons for the recovery and defence of their heritage, rewarding those who have served us faithfully, and distributing alms to the poor and to religious houses for the salvation of my soul. And I pray that whosoever shall give them counsel and assistance herein may receive God’s grace and favour; and may he who shall violate the settlement made by them incur the curse and wrath of God Almighty and the Blessed Mary and all the saints. First, then, I desire that my body be buried in the church of the Blessed Mary and S. Wulfstan of Worcester. Now I appoint as ordainers and disposers of my will the following persons:—the lord Gualo, by God’s grace cardinal priest of the title of S. Martin, legate of the Apostolic See; Peter, lord bishop of Winchester; Richard, lord bishop of Chichester; Silvester, lord bishop of Worcester; Brother Aimeric of Ste. Maure; William the Marshal, earl of Pembroke; Ranulf, earl of Chester; William, earl of Ferrars; William Brewer; Walter de Lacy; John of Monmouth; Savaric de Mauléon; Falkes de Bréauté.”[1312] Here, without date, signature or seal, the so-called will breaks off abruptly; evidently the testator had not time to complete it. At midnight {Oct. 18–19} a whirlwind swept over Newark with such violence that the townsfolk thought their houses would fall, and in that hour of elemental disturbance and human terror the king passed away.[1313] A monk named John of Savigny, entering the town at daybreak {Oct. 19}, met the servants of the royal household hurrying out laden with everything of their master’s that they could carry. The corpse—for which they had not left even a decent covering[1314]—had meanwhile been hastily embalmed by the abbot of Croxton; John having, it is said, made a grant of his heart, with ten pounds’ worth of land, to Croxton abbey.[1315] The abbot, too, fled as soon as his work was done and his strange relic secured; it was John of Savigny who, at the request of the constable of Newark, kept the last watch beside the body and offered his mass that morning for the soul of the dead king.[1316] The body was then dressed in such semblance of royal attire as could be procured, and the remnant of John’s soldiers—nearly all foreign mercenaries—formed themselves into a guard for its protection on the journey from Newark to Worcester. The grim funeral train, every man in full armour, passed unhindered across England, and John was buried by Bishop Silvester in Worcester cathedral according to his desire.[1317]

Within this tomb lies buried a monarch’s outward form,

Whose inner man’s departure hath stilled war’s raging storm.

Thus may be roughly rendered the opening lines of an epitaph on King John preserved by Roger of Wendover.[1318] The poet’s words are true; John’s death virtually ended the war. From his burial the Marshal, the Legate, and the bishops passed to the crowning of his heir and the publication, in the boy-king’s name, of the Great Charter in a revised form to which Gualo had no hesitation in giving the papal sanction, and which, thus safeguarded, left the revolutionary party no excuse for continuing the struggle. Thenceforth it was idle for Louis and his adherents to pretend that they were fighting for England’s deliverance from bondage; all men could see that they were fighting for her enslavement to a foreign conqueror. The majority of the barons had already become conscious of the blunder, or worse than blunder, which they had committed in calling the stranger to their aid, and were ready now to join in a national movement for his expulsion. His enterprise was doomed to fail when the kingdom ceased to be divided against itself; and the one insuperable obstacle to the healing of its divisions was removed in the person of John. It was John whose very existence had made peace impossible. “Forasmuch as when he came to die he possessed none of his land in peace,” says Matthew Paris, “he is called Lackland.”[1319] John had indeed earned for himself in a new sense the name which his father had given him at his birth; and he had earned it not by blunders in statecraft or errors in strategy, not by weakness or cowardice or sloth, but by the almost superhuman wickedness of a life which, twenty years before its end, a historian of deeper insight than Matthew had characterized in one memorable phrase—“Nature’s enemy, John.”

FOOTNOTES: [Skip footnotes]

[Note I]
John and the De Braoses