“Cousin” Jeremiah Dummer, a distant maternal relative of Samuel’s who had apprenticed to John Hull as a silversmith, came next, leading Ann Quincy, whose husband, Daniel, Judith Quincy Hull’s nephew, another silversmith, was ill. The term Cousin, which Samuel used frequently, was broader in meaning than it is now.
Although not himself of Boston’s elite, Samuel was intimate with the grandchildren of the wealthy, powerful first Bostonians, mostly because of his wife, a granddaughter of early settlers Edmund Quincy and Robert Hull. Beyond that marital connection, Samuel was close with grandsons of such founding figures as Governor John Winthrop, Governor Thomas Dudley, First Church minister John Cotton, and Anne Hutchinson. In this insular culture, the progeny of the founders, who had battled over control of the nascent country, took each other’s hands in friendship or marriage. It was also a tribal aristocracy or, perhaps more accurately, a self-perpetuating oligarchy: prominent men whose wives died looked for new wives among the widows of their deceased friends. Similarly, it was not uncommon for someone to marry his own stepsibling, as the Reverend Increase Mather did when he wed Mary Cotton, the daughter of his stepmother, Sarah Cotton Mather. Hannah Hull Sewall’s parents were also stepsiblings who lived in the same house before they married. One benefit of familial intermarriage of this sort was keeping wealth within a family.
More than a hundred mourners attended little Henry Sewall’s funeral that day, but the child’s mother and paternal grandparents were absent. Henry and Jane Dummer Sewall could not travel easily from Newbury in winter weather. Hannah was still lying in at home. A woman of a considerable estate could lie in indefinitely. Hannah’s mood, which her husband did not record, could not have been good.
At the cemetery the gravedigger had already dug the hole inside the Hull family tomb, a mausoleum enclosing a burial chamber that was now half-full of water despite the general freeze. As the coffin was placed in the ground, the Reverend Willard prayed for the souls of those left behind. Someone threw lime on the baby’s coffin. Samuel and Sam Jr. covered it with dirt and tears. At around five o’clock most of the mourners proceeded two by two along the dark and icy roads to the Hull-Sewall house, where they feasted on bread, meat, and cheese and drank beer, hard cider, and wine.
Another foot of snow fell that night. While Samuel’s neighbors slept, the grieving father stayed up with Little Hull, who had “a sore convulsion fit” that continued “wave upon wave” into the morning. On Friday Samuel Phillips, a Harvard-educated minister from Rowley, the North Shore town where Sewall’s paternal grandfather had spent thefew years before his death in 1657, visited the family and went to “pray with Hullie.”
Friday was Christmas Day, which the Sewalls were careful not to observe. Puritans had left feast days behind in England, along with many other features of the state church they still reproached for its “popish injunctions,” in the words of Samuel’s father-in-law. Puritans, who were known in England as nonconformists, viewed the Bible with a strict and frequently literal eye. The Sabbath was the most important day. To honor other days, as Anglicans and Catholics did, profaned the Sabbath and violated God’s Fourth Commandment, to “remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” In 1659, in keeping with its goal of creating a Bible Commonwealth, the Massachusetts General Court banned all Christmas celebrations. The statute reads, “For preventing disorders…by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other countries to the great dishonor of God and offence of others…whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas and the like, either by forbearing labor, feasting, or any other way…shall pay for every such offence, five