Now at low water this estuary is passable, but it is exposed to sudden rises of the tide, as John found to his bitter experience. At first everything looked secure, and the royal forces had nearly reached the opposite bank, called Fossdyke, when the returning tide began to roar. It seemed that the king and his army were doomed. By making haste, however, they escaped; but the baggage and sumpter-mules were swallowed up in a whirlpool, caused by the impetuosity of the tide and the descending currents of the river Welland; and John beheld with dismay and despair bordering on distraction the loss of men, horses, sumpter-mules, and baggage, without which he felt it would be almost impossible to pursue his expedition. It was felt by the unhappy monarch as the severest blow that fortune could have struck at him in his perplexity; and brooding sullenly over his misfortune, he made for Swinehead, a Cistercian abbey in Lincolnshire.
It was night when John reached Swinehead, and the abbot and the monks bent their hooded heads, and, perhaps wishing him elsewhere, welcomed him to their religious house, and had supper served to him in the refectory. Already the king was feverish from the excitement he had undergone while escaping from the tide and witnessing the loss of his men and baggage, and he greatly heightened the fever by eating immoderately of peaches, and drinking new cider, and by violent denunciations of the personages to whom he attributed the evils that had befallen him. No sleep nor rest did he take that night, but walked muttering about the chamber in which he was lodged, the fever gaining on him. Early next morning, however, he caused his trumpets to sound, and mounted his steed; but the effort to pursue his journey on horseback proved vain, and he was forced to dismount and submit to be conveyed in a litter to the castle of Sleaford. But still he was impatient to proceed, and from Sleaford he was carried to Newark, where he was destined to end all his journeyings on earth. Already it had become quite evident that he was about to make a journey to another world, and that he would soon be beyond the reach of the enemies who had vowed his destruction.
Nor did John deceive himself at that dread hour, when his soul and body were about to part. Feeling that his end was rapidly approaching, he sent for the Abbot of Croxton, dictated a letter to the Holy See, in which he implored the papal protection for his helpless children, and then confessed his sins.