Salem Witch Judge (35 page)

The next day her weakness and “distemper” increased. That night, though, she told Samuel to go to bed rather than stay by her side. He needed sleep.

October 17 was Thursday, lecture day. “Shall I go to lecture to pray?” he asked her tenderly. He wished discreetly to know if she expected still to be alive when he returned.

“I can’t tell,” she replied.

Samuel stayed home. He sent out a note requesting prayers to be posted at the Third Church. Everyone at church noticed his absence,
he learned later. After the gathering his old friend Justice Wait Still Winthrop and his wife, who was known as Madame Winthrop, called at the house to see Hannah. Taking leave of them at the door, Samuel said, “Thank you for visiting my poor wife.”

The next day Hannah was “worse and exceeding restless.” Samuel prayed to God “to look upon her.” He and John Cutler, a doctor, stayed at her bedside through the night.

Samuel sent a note to Cotton Mather, who came to pray with Hannah the next morning. The Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth arrived. He prayed with Samuel in his chamber “when ’twas supposed my wife took little notice.” Then, at “about a quarter of an hour past four,” on Saturday, October 19, 1717, “my dear wife expired.” Hannah was fifty-nine years old.

“The chamber filled with a flood of tears,” Samuel noted. Immediately reaching out to the divine, he added, “God is teaching me a new lesson—to live a widower’s life. Lord, help me to learn, and be a sun and shield to me, now [that] so much of my comfort and defense are taken away.” In a letter announcing the awful news to his cousin Jeremiah Dummer, Samuel wrote a couplet:

What signify these locks, and bolts, and bars?

My treasure’s gone, and with it all my fears.

The next day was the Sabbath, so Samuel went out to public worship. He had earlier sent yet another note requesting prayers. Before the congregation of the Third Church, where their son Joseph now preached, “my son has much ado to read the note…being overwhelmed with tears.”

Hannah was disemboweled due to the hot weather. Her body, wrapped in cerecloth, was placed in a coffin. Her funeral was to be Wednesday, October 23. Cotton Mather gave the sermon, which he later published under the title The Valley of Baca. The Divine Sovereignty, Displayed and Adored; More Particularly in Bereaving Dispensations, of the Divine Providence. A Sermon Preached on the Death of Mrs. Hannah Sewall, the Religious and Honorable Consort of Samuel Sewall Esq.

At her funeral the other absence that Samuel felt most acutely was that of his son-in-law Grove Hirst, Betty’s forty-two-year-old wid
ower. Grove Hirst too was now seriously ill. A day or two later Samuel visited Hirst and found him “very sick.” He told his son-in-law, “You are in a great degree the stay and comfort of my life.”

The following day, from his bed Hirst said to Samuel, “Please take my son Samuel,” who was twelve, “home to your house.” Samuel did so. Two days later Hirst requested that Samuel take eleven-year-old Elizabeth Hirst to the home of a paternal uncle “until the controversy should be ended.” Samuel wrote in his diary, “I did it late at night.” Then he added, “Mr. Hirst expired between 3 and 4 past midnight.”

At his son-in-law’s funeral two days later, Samuel led the five orphans—his grandchildren Samuel; Elizabeth; Mary, who was thirteen; nine-year-old Hannah; and Jane, who was eight. The task of raising several of them would fall to Samuel, a sixty-five-year-old widower.

A few months later, against the wishes of his late mother, Sam Jr. returned to Brookline to live with his wife.

Meanwhile, Samuel Sewall began to consider courting again. He spent hours in prayer on whether to live single or marry. On the morning of February 6, 1718, not quite four months after Hannah’s death, he had “a sweet and very affection meditation concerning the Lord Jesus,” the spouse of the church of which Samuel was a member. “Nothing was to be objected against [Jesus’s] person, parentage, relations, estate, house, home! Why did [I] not resolutely, presently close with Him! And I cried mightily to God that He would help me so to do!” Now and then he prayed with his son Joseph for divine guidance in the matter.

Late that winter he wrote to Governor Shute requesting the top post on the Superior Court of Judicature, which Wait Still Winthrop had recently vacated. “It comes to pass by the disposal of divine sovereignty that I am the last of the councilors left standing in the [1692] Charter, and the last of the justices left standing in the Superior Court, of those that were of it from the beginning [of the province] which was in the year 1692. And by reason of the inability of the late Honorable Chief Justice Winthrop to ride the remoter circuits, I have frequently presided” over the court. “As to my real estate in New England it is considerable.” Governor Shute made Samuel the court’s chief justice that April.

A year later in the summer Samuel, who was now sixty-seven, began to “visit Mrs. Tilley, and speak with her in her chamber,” and
“ask her to come and dwell at my house.” Abigail Melyen Woodmansey Tilley, a widow just past fifty whom he had known for years, was of Dutch and English descent and born in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Samuel had known her father and officiated at her 1686 wedding to her first husband, James Woodmansey, who died in 1694. The Reverend Willard performed her second wedding, in 1703, to William Tilley, who died the same year as Samuel’s wife. Both couples attended the Third Church. Samuel and Abigail speedily arranged a marriage settlement. His son Joseph married them before a large crowd “in the best room below stairs” at her house on October 29, 1719.

A strange scene ensued that evening. Samuel reported that his new wife’s sister “introduced me into my bride’s chamber after [Abigail] was abed.” He thanked his sister-in-law, who left. Samuel undressed, presumably to his hair shirt, and joined his bride in her bed. “Quickly after our being abed my bride grew so very bad” and “under great consternation” that “she was fain to sit up in her bed.”

Samuel was alarmed. He rose “to get her petticoats about her. I was exceedingly amazed, fearing lest she should have died. Through the favor of God she recovered in some considerable time of this fit of the tissick,” or coughing.

Madame Abigail Sewall never returned to health. Seven months later, in May 1720, she was dead, “to our great astonishment, especially mine.” This sharp loss reminded him again that “I had cause to be ashamed of my sin, and to loath[e] myself for it.” He prayed, “May the sovereign Lord pardon my sin, and sanctify to me this very extraordinary, awful dispensation.”

A few months later, feeling even “more lonesome” than before, Samuel began the courtship for which he is best known. Not a few readers of Samuel Sewall’s diary, including my late Aunt Charlotte, have considered his new love object, Madame Winthrop, to be that book’s second most important character. In late-nineteenth-century Boston several interested parties, including Winthrop descendants, the minister of the Old South (formerly Third) Church, and the vice president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, engaged in public debate over which party in this courtship was more at fault.

Katharine Winthrop, the widow of Samuel’s friend and colleague Wait Still, was a daughter of Thomas Brattle Sr. and Elizabeth Tyng
and a younger sibling of the mathematician Thomas Brattle. Born in Boston in 1664, she married John Eyre in 1680 and was widowed a decade later. Her second husband, Winthrop, by then the chief justice of the Superior Court of Judicature, died in November 1717, just weeks after Hannah Sewall. Samuel, a pallbearer for Wait Still, noted that the “streets were crowded with people” for the funeral. The “regiment attended in arms” as Winthrop’s coffin was carried from the Town House to the old burying place” beside King’s Chapel and “laid in Governor Winthrop’s tomb.”

Not long after his second wife’s death, Samuel eyed the widows’ seats at the Third Church. He “fixed on” Madame Winthrop, who was fifty-six. Their courtship began at the end of September and was over by early November, a period of six weeks that has received undue attention because of its emotional intensity, at least on Samuel’s part, the detail and volume of his writings on it, and the couple’s harsh negotiations for a marriage settlement.

That September Samuel was riding the court circuit, an impressive feat for a man nearing seventy. On September 13 he presided over a civil action in Bristol, Rhode Island, where he remained until the 17
^th
, when he rode to Rehoboth. Dining and lodging along the way, as was his custom while serving on the Superior Court of Judicature, he reached Boston on the 21
^st
. On September 30, at the Third Church after the Thursday lecture service, his “Daughter Sewall,” Joseph’s wife, “acquaints Madam Winthrop that if she pleased to be within at 3 p.m. I would wait on her. She answered she would be at home.”

On his first visit he told her, “My loving wife died so soon and suddenly, ’twas hardly convenient for me to think of marrying again. However, I came to this resolution, that I not make my court to any person without first consulting with you.”

Madame Winthrop “propounded one and another” of the other widows of the Third Church “for me, but none would do.”

Two days later he came again to her house, on the Boston Common side of what is now Beacon Hill. “I pray that you, Katharine, might be the person assigned for me.” She “instantly took it up in way of denial.” Aware that he would wish to remain in his mansion, she said, “I believe I should not, cannot leave my children.”

Samuel tried to convince her to change her mind. Every few days he visited, bearing gifts of fruit, published sermons, and Canary wine. He chatted with her children and their spouses and children, some of whom lived with her, and gave coins to her many servants. He wrote her love letters, and sometimes she seemed to encourage him. On the evening of October 10 “she treated me with a great deal of courtesy, serving wine and marmalade,” and they likely kissed. Two days later, though, she let him into her parlor looking “dark and lowering” and worked on needlepoint the entire time they conversed. He asked permission to remove her glove. She enquired why. He said, “’Tis great odds between handling a dead goat and a living lady.”

Eventually he removed the glove and took her hand. “I have one petition to ask of you, that you would take off the negative you laid on me the 3
^rd
of October.”

“I cannot leave my house, children, neighbors, business,” she said.

He told her, as he had before, that “she might do her children” who lived in her house “as much or more good by bestowing what she laid out in housekeeping on them.”

A few days later, frustrated with the courtship, he turned on himself. Praying alone at home on the Sabbath, October 16, he “upbraided myself that [I] could be so solicitous about earthly things; and so cold and indifferent as to the love of Christ, who is altogether lovely.”

At his next visit Madame Winthrop began to bargain with him. She “was courteous to me, but took occasion to speak pretty earnestly about my keeping a coach” rather than renting one when needed, which was his practice. “I said ’twould cost a hundred pounds per annum. She said ’twould cost but forty pounds.”

A few days later she told him, “You need a wig.” Unlike many of his peers, who covered their bald spots with fashionable English periwigs, Samuel gratefully accepted whatever hair God gave. As he’d explained in a letter remonstrating the Roxbury minister, Nehemiah Walter, for his “head dress,” “A Great Person has furnished me with perukes, gratis, these two and fifty years….”

To Madame Winthrop he said, “My best and greatest Friend—I could not possibly have a greater—began to find me with hair before I was born, and continued to do so ever since, and I can not find in my heart to go to another.”

The court was sitting in Salem, so Samuel had to depart Boston again. On November 2 he returned to Madame Winthrop with an offering of half a pound of expensive sugared almonds. “She seemed pleased with them,” he observed, and “asked what they cost.”

In negotiations over glasses of Canary wine, he offered her “a hundred pounds per annum” if he died first. Teasingly, he inquired, “What sum would you give me, if you should die first?” She did not reply. He offered, “I will give you time to consider of it.” She told him that someone said he had already given his entire estate to his children “by deeds and gift.”

“That is a mistake,” he said, noting that he still held land, including Point Judith in Rhode Island.

On the evening of November 7, after praying at home with his son Joseph in regard to this emotionally exhausting courtship and then reading two psalms, Samuel walked once more to Madame Winthrop’s house. A servant let him into the parlor. Madame Winthrop was rocking her little granddaughter Katie in a cradle.

“Excuse me for coming so late,” he said. It was already eight. She showed him to a cushioned armchair positioned so the cradle separated them. He could not reach to touch her. He gave her more sweet almonds. She did not eat them as she had before, to his regret, but put them away.

“I came to inquire whether you have altered your mind since Friday, or remain of the same mind still,” he said. “I love you, and am so fond to think that you love me.”

“I have a great respect for you.”

“I made you an offer without asking any advice. You have so many to advise with that it is a hindrance.” He reminded her that she had “already entered the fourth year of your widowhood.” The flames in the fireplace were dying down, he noticed. The room grew chilly. Madame Winthrop did not call a servant to add more firewood. He stared at the hearth. Silently, he observed that “at last the one short brand…fell to pieces, and no recruit was made.” Yet she gave him a glass of wine.

“I will go home and bewail my rashness in making more haste than good speed,” he said. “I will endeavor to contain myself, and not go on to solicit you to do that which you cannot consent to.”

Then he left. “As [I] came down the steps she bid me have a care.” She “treated me courteously…. I did not bid her to draw off her glove as sometime I had done. Her dress was not so clean as sometime it had been. Jehovah jireh!” That is the Hebrew for “The Lord will provide.”