This action put Hewlet on his mettle.  He resolved to do something that might equal it, and an opportunity offered some time after, of performing such a service as no man in the army would have undertaken.  It happened thus:  the engineer who was to set fire to the train of a mine which had been made under a bastion of the enemy’s, happened to have drank very hard over night, and mistaking the hour, laid the match an hour sooner than he ought.  A sentinel immediately came out, called out aloud, What, have you clapped fire to the train?  There’s twenty people in the mine who will be all blown up; it should not have been fired till 12 o’clock.

On hearing this Hewlet ran in with his sword drawn, and therewith cut off the train the moment before it would have given fire to all the barrels of powder that were within, by which he saved the lives of all the pioneers who were carrying the mines still forward at the time the wild fire was unseasonably lighted by the engineer.

At the battle of Landau he had his skull broken open by a blow from the butt end of a musket.  This occasioned his going through the operation called trepanning, which is performed by an engine like a coffee-mill, which being fixed on the bruised part of the bone, is turned round, and cuts out all the black till the edges appear white and sound.  After this cure had been performed upon him, he never had his senses in the same manner as he had before, but upon the least drinking fell into a passion which was but very little removed from madness.

He returned into England after the Peace of Ryswick, and being taken into a gentleman’s service, he there married a wife, by whom he had nine children.  Happy was it for them that they were all dead before his disastrous end.

How Hewlet came to be employed as a watchman a little before his death, the papers I have give me no account of, only that he was in that station at the time of the death of Joseph Candy, for whose murder he was indicted for giving him a mortal bruise on the head with his staff.

On the 26th of December, 1724, upon full evidences of eye-witnesses, the jury found him guilty, he making no other defence than great asservations of his innocence, and an obstinate denial of the fact.  After his conviction, being visited in the condemned hold, instead of showing any marks of penitence or contrition, he raved against the witnesses who had been produced to destroy him, called them all perjured, and prayed God to inflict some dreadful judgment on them.  Nay, he went so far as to desire that he ought himself have the executing thereof, wishing that after his death his apparition might come and terrify them to their graves.  When it was represented to him how odd this behaviour was, and how far distant from that calmness and tranquillity of mind with which it became him to clothe himself before he went into the presence of his Maker, these representations had no effect; he still continued to rave against his accusers, and against the witnesses who had sworn at his trial.  As death grew nearer he appeared not a bit terrified, nor seemed uneasy at all at leaving this life, only at leaving his wife, and as he phrased it, some old acquaintance in Warwickshire.  However, he desired to receive the Sacrament, and said he would prepare himself for it as well as he could.