Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Hewit, John
HEWIT or HEWETT, JOHN (1614–1658), royalist divine, fourth son of Thomas Hewett or Huet, a clothworker, was born at Eccles, Lancashire, in September 1614, and baptised there on the 4th of that month. He is said to have been educated first at Bolton-le-Moors and afterwards at Merchant Taylors' School. The last statement is very doubtful. According to the ‘Register of Merchant Taylors' School’ (ed. Rev. C. J. Robinson, i. 98), the only boy of the name at the school during this period was ‘John Hewet,’ born in September 1609 and admitted in 1619. But this entry cannot refer to the subject of this article, for the latter was admitted as a sizar at Pembroke College, Cambridge, 13 May 1633, at the age of eighteen, and matriculated 4 July. Of Hewit's Cambridge life it is only known that he never took a degree. He was at Oxford as one of Charles I's chaplains, and received the degree of D.D. by royal mandate on 17 Oct. 1643. Thence he is said to have been sent into Lancashire and Cheshire to advocate the royal cause. A few verses, found in some editions of ‘Εἰκὼν Βασιλικὴ,’ subscribed ‘J. H.,’ are attributed to him. He subsequently became chaplain to Montague Bertie [q. v.], second earl of Lindsey, at Havering in Essex, but removed to London on being chosen (in what year is not known) minister of St. Gregory's by St. Paul's. Here he was noted for his effective preaching, both by words and gesture, and for his devout and distinct reading of prayers (D. Lloyd, Memoirs, 1668, p. 553), apparently continuing the use of the proscribed church service. Cromwell's daughter Mary was privately married by him to Lord Falconbridge in November 1657 (Clarendon, xv. 101). His loyalty was so openly manifested that he occasionally made collections in his church for the exiled king under the transparent disguise of urging the congregation to ‘remember a distressed friend.’ When the Marquis of Ormonde came to England in February 1657–8 to ascertain the state of the royalist preparations, Hewit is said to have harboured him in London; but in his speech on the scaffold he declared that he could not remember ever having seen him. He was at the time actively engaged in correspondence with those who were attempting to organise a rising. Upon Cromwell's arresting John Stapley in April 1658, the latter confessed the plot in which he was engaged, related conferences he had held with Hewit, and declared he had received from Hewit's hands a commission from the king. Upon this, Hewit was arrested, and brought for trial before Cromwell's high court of justice on 1 June. Before this court he refused to plead, claiming the right to be tried by a jury, and putting in an able plea which had been drawn up for him by Prynne, and which was printed anonymously in the following year under the title of ‘Beheaded Dr. John Hewytt's Ghost pleading.’ He was sentenced on 2 June 1658 to be beheaded, and the sentence was carried out, in spite of Mrs. Claypoole's earnest intercession with Cromwell, on 8 June. On the scaffold he was attended by Dr. Wilde and Dr. Warmstry, and also by Dr. John Barwick, to whom shortly before he had entrusted some hundreds of pounds for transmission to the king, and who wore to the end of his life a ring which Hewit then gave him. He was buried on the day following in St. Gregory's Church, and on the next Sunday Nathaniel Hardy [q. v.] preached a funeral sermon on Isaiah lvii. 1, ‘The righteous perisheth,’ &c., with an outspokenness which implied assurance of general sympathy. The sermon was printed surreptitiously and anonymously (often wrongly ascribed to Dr. G. Wilde), and Dr. Hardy thereupon boldly published a correct copy under his own name at the shop of a bookseller named Joseph Crawford, who had for his sign ‘The King's Head.’ Hewit's speech and prayer upon the scaffold were immediately printed in more than one edition, and mourning-rings were distributed to his friends, which were inscribed with the words ‘Herodes necuit Johannem.’ The publication of ‘Nine Select Sermons’ preached at St. Gregory's speedily followed. This volume was disavowed, as unauthorised by Dr. Wilde and Dr. Barwick on behalf of Hewit's widow, in a notice reprinted in a second volume of sermons entitled ‘Repentance and Conversion the Fabrick of Salvation; being the last Sermons preached by Dr. Hewytt.’ But Hardy, in the preface to the funeral sermon, speaks of ‘two books of sermons’ as having been surreptitiously issued, and implies that the second volume bore Barwick's and Wilde's names without their knowledge or consent.
Hewit married, first, a daughter of Robert Skinner, merchant-tailor, of London; and secondly, Mary, daughter of Robert Bertie, first earl of Lindsey [q. v.], who was slain at Edgehill. By his first wife he had three children, and by his second wife (who survived him) two daughters. When Dr. Barwick went to meet Charles II at Breda in 1660, among several petitions which he preferred to the king was one that Hewit's widow and his eldest son, John, might receive some recompense. In consequence an annuity of 100l. was granted to the son 19 Feb. 1661 (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1660–1, p. 523). On 21 June in that year Lady Mary Hewit (who shortly afterwards was re-married to the well-known royalist, Sir Abraham Shipman) petitioned the House of Lords to except from the Act of Oblivion all those who had passed sentence on her husband.
Other publications under Hewit's name are: 1. ‘Certain Considerations against the Vanities of this World and the Terrors of Death, delivered to a friend a little before his death,’ in verse, on a single sheet. 2. ‘Letter to Dr. Wilde the day before he suffered death, read by Dr. Wilde at his funerall,’ a single sheet, London, 9 June 1658. 3. ‘Prayers of Intercession for their Use who mourn in Secret for the Publick Calamities of the Nation,’ 1659. A prayer is included in a collection of prayers used before and after sermons called ‘Pulpit Sparks,’ 1659. Portraits are prefixed to his sermons on repentance and to Prynne's plea. In a note in Ashmole MS., Bodleian Library, 826, f. 115, he is styled ‘doctor mellifluus, doctor altivolans, et doctor inexhaustibilis,’ and it is said that these three epithets can never be separated from him.
[Wood's Fasti Oxon. 1820, ii. 69; Clarendon's Hist. Reb. book xv. §§ 95, 101; Thurloe's State Papers, vii. 65, 74, 89; Peter Barwick's Vita Jo. Barwici, 1721, pp. 116–17, 192; State Trials, 1730, i. 277–88, 296–8; Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. xii. 409–10; J. P. Earwaker's Notes of the Life of Dr. John Hewytt, Manchester, 1877; Hist. MSS. Comm. 7th Rep. 1879, App. pp. 102–103; information from the Master of Pembroke College and from the Registrary of the Univ. of Cambridge.]