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: [1097] R. Wendover, vol. iii. p. 331; W. Coventry, vol. ii. p. 226. [1098] _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. p. 156 b. [1099] _Itin._ a. 17. [1100] W. Coventry, vol. ii. p. 226. [1101] _Hist. des Ducs_, p. 157. The date seems to be either September 20 to 22 or October 5 to 6; see _Itin._ a. 17. [1102] _Rot. Pat._ vol. i. p. 181 b.