John Hewson (regicide) John Hewson (regicide) Colonel John Hewson (Hughson) (died 1662) was a soldier in the New Model Army and signed the death warrant of King Charles I, making him a regicide. Before the English Civil War Hewson was a cobbler and then a shoemaker. When John Lilburne was his apprentice in the 1630s, he introduced Lilburne to the Puritan physician John Bastwick, an active pamphleteer who was persecuted by Archbishop William Laud. He was second in command of John Pickering's Regiment of Foot, one of the original twelve foot regiments of the New Model Army. When John Pickering died on 24
Regicide killed in battle by their subjects (for example Richard III), but none of these deaths are usually referred to as regicide. The word regicide seems to have come into popular use among foreign Catholics when Pope Sixtus V renewed the papal bull of excommunication against the "crowned regicide" Queen Elizabeth I, for—among other things—executing Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587. Elizabeth had originally been excommunicated by Pope Pius V, in "Regnans in Excelsis", for converting England to Protestantism after the reign of Mary I of England. The defeat of the Spanish Armada and the "Protestant Wind" convinced most English people